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the conflict zone.
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Azerbaijan expressed satisfaction with Russia’s apparent new position, but it was short-lived. President Aliyev welcomed Russia’s readiness to “put pressure” on Armenia and between the April confrontation and mid-summer 2016 repeatedly said he anticipated immediate changes in the stalled process. These hopes dissipated as Azerbaijan concluded that Russia was again willing “to play the two sides so as to keep pressure on both”. After meeting with his Armenian counterpart in August 2016, Vladimir Putin said: “We need to find such approaches and mechanisms, whereby … no one would feel that they are the victorious or the defeated party”. Azerbaijan had had higher hopes.
As Yerevan and Baku see it and informally admit, Russia is chiefly interested in expanding its military presence in the region by deploying troops in the conflict zone, an ambition even some Russians privately acknowledged in interviews. They point in particular to a suggestion in the so-called Lavrov Plan that Russia might deploy a peacekeeping contingent to Nagorno-Karabakh with the consent of the parties. Both parties rejected the proposal, fearing such a military presence would make them even more dependent on Moscow’s shifting interests. Further fuelling Armenian and Azerbaijani mistrust, a Russian official has argued that in the event of a large-scale military confrontation, Moscow may have to intervene to prevent ethnic cleansing or serious violations of humanitarian law. This, Armenian and Azerbaijani analysts fear, could be the prelude to a permanent Russian military presence in Nagorno-Karabakh.
V. Conclusion
While violence remains at a relatively low boil, any escalation quickly could spin out of control, and the danger of more deadly fighting involving highly destructive weaponry is real. Failure to contain a future escalation likely would result in heavy casualties coupled with foreign intervention. Troop deployment from any of the regional powers would deeply impact Armenia and Azerbaijan, and their sovereignty, at a time when both have just celebrated 25 years of independence.
Negotiations are the only way out of the impasse, and the best way to avert another war. Sound principles for a realistic, fair settlement of the conflict exist, but distrust, a gap between the mediators’ and the two sides’ perceptions, and the protagonists’ heightened appetite for maximum gains likely render any immediate compromise formula remote. For both sides, either stalemate or war currently appears a better outcome than compromise. Worse, Baku’s frustration with the status quo on the ground, and Armenia’s efforts to cement it, could prompt a vicious cycle of further and more violent confrontation.
Baku’s frustration with the status quo on the ground, and Armenia’s efforts to cement it, could prompt a vicious cycle of further and more violent confrontation.
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Implementation of the CSBMs discussed in Vienna and St. Petersburg – enhancing monitoring of the zone of conflict and setting up an investigative mechanism – is urgently needed and should be accompanied by establishment of a channel of communication between field-based militaries on both sides. But this needs to happen in parallel to substantive discussions of issues central to the settlement. The problem is that both sides see no reason to proceed with the element of the twin approach they disfavour: Yerevan will not agree to substantive discussions until CSBMs are addressed; Baku will balk at implementation of confidence-building measures without at least some dialogue on substantive issues.
This is where high-level coordination and pressure by Moscow, Washington and Paris is both needed and possible – if they put their differences on other issues aside. The best prospect for averting renewed war is for Russia, the U.S. and France to work in unison, with strong buy-ins from their respective leaderships. As they do so, they also should press Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders to tone down hostile rhetoric, soften their negotiating positions and acknowledge – privately, but also publicly – that this conflict ultimately will only be resolved through negotiations, not by force.
Yerevan/Baku/Stepanakert/Brussels/Vienna, 1 June 2017
Appendix A: Map of the Conflict Zone in a Regional Context
Stepanakert is the capital of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and the non-recognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The Azerbaijanis have officially renamed the city Khankendi and refer to it by this name. This report uses the pre-1988 names for all geographical features in the area of conflict.2017 RAM 1500 Update: Just a few weeks ago new Ram 1500 has been spotted, or has it? Testing mule wearing recognizable RAM front grill has been spied, but nothing is certain yet. There are many information regarding this model, but none of them are hundred percent accurate. Some say that this is the 2018 RAM 1500, that is likely being build bigger than previous model. RAM has always had a tradition of building larger truck than it’s competition, and many believe that new 1500 RAM will be bigger than it’s predecessor.
At the same time others sources claim that this is 2017 RAM 1500, but Mega Cab version of the same model, and that regular version will remain the same as previous in terms of dimensions. On the other hand they also claim that, this might not even be RAM 1500, but that they are testing platform for Jeep’s new large SUV that is due to come before 2020.
Looking at the interior the car will mostly remain the same, with only changes happening to steering wheel, and some minor changes to control panel. Spy photos are featuring wheel used by Chrysler Pacifica, and it is a real possibility that new RAM will have something similar.
Only thing certain is that we will not be seeing 2017 RAM 1500 any time soon, further more this model will not even be called this way. Scheduled for release in the late 2017, this truck will come to us as 2018 model. Gear up and stay tuned for more update on 2018 RAM 1500 while we wait for more photos and information.
Photo source: trucktrend.com
Being released back in 2008, the latest Ram truck is not exactly what you would call new and considering that pretty much all of its competitors have already been redesigned, Ram started to lose quite a bit of ground which they will have to get back, especially since the current truck market is more competitive than ever. Even though they haven’t said anything official about the upcoming 2017 Ram 1500, if we take a look at Ram’s road-map from last year then we can see that their truck will receive a major update with the 2017 model.
Review
This major update is very likely going to be an entirely new model considering that the truck has been around for around eight years now and it should give Ram an edge against some of its competitors. While there aren’t many details about the new trucks, it seems that these are going to be based on an improved chassis which should be lighter, thanks to using more high strength steel than before, and also quite a bit stiffer. The body is unlikely going to be made out of steel like on the F-150 but Ram could work on their truck’s beds and make then out of aluminum in order to allow people to use them for longer without having to worry for rust in this rust-prone area.
Price and Release date of 2017 RAM 1500
The earliest we might see the new trucks is the mid of 2017 but the production models are likely going to hit the showrooms some time at the end of the year or even the start of 2018. Its pricing shouldn’t suffer too much so expect to pay on the 2017 Ram 1500 between $30,000 for a basic model and up to $60,000 for the better equipped ones.
2017 Ram 1500 Drivetrain
Not too long ago the FCA group said that they are working quite a bit on improving their current naturally aspirated engines and among these, the 3.6 liter Pentastar and the 5.7 liter Hemi can be found. These two are expected to be upgraded quite a bit over the current model. There is still no word on the actual upgrades but we expect direct injection at least on the smaller V6 engine, upgrade which should allow it to develop over 320 horsepower while bumping the torque figure much closer to 300 lb-ft from the previous 269 lb-ft. The 5.7 liter naturally aspirated Hemi on the other hand is unlikely going to receive direct injection but it might receive a new engine management system, a better cylinder deactivation feature and a few other improvements which should bump the output to around 400 horsepower and little over 430 lb-ft of torque which is essentially enough to allow it to compete with all of its rivals.
The 3 liter EcoDiesel on the other hand hasn’t been announced to receive any real changes but the towing rating for this model will finally go past 10,000 pounds. This will likely be achieved with a better transmission with a new set of gears as well as slightly more torque available from lower down the rev range.
Design Changes
Like with pretty much any other new car, the 2017 Ram 1500 is going to get through a major interior and exterior update and while Ram hasn’t said much about these either.What we expect is; the design from the current Power Wagon to be used on their new generation of trucks.
This means that the old cross-hair grille might be gone in the favor of the new one on the Power Wagon and on top of that we might also see a more streamlined design. Its cabin should also be improved quite a bit not only with better materials but with more space for its passengers and a much more modern design than before.
Video review of 2016 model:IN MAY 2015, Barack Obama barred the federal government from providing some military equipment to American police departments. The extraordinary arsenal maintained by some departments—which includes body armour, powerful weapons and armoured vehicles—had become highly visible over the previous year, as a result of outbreaks of unrest in response to police violence. In August 2014 Darren Wilson, a police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking large local demonstrations. Two days after the shooting, tactical officers—paramilitary police generally referred to as SWAT (for Special Weapons and Tactics) teams—were called in to help clear protestors from in front of Ferguson's police department. They arrived dressed for war, in riot gear and gas masks, bearing long truncheons and automatic weapons. Americans have grown used to seeing police respond to protests with tear gas, carrying automatic weapons and sniper rifles, and riding in vehicles that would not look out of place in Baghdad or Aleppo. The days of the beat cop walking the street with nothing more than a trusty old revolver seem distant indeed. How did America's police forces become so heavily armed?
As with so much else in American governance, the explanation starts with federal cash. Every year Congress passes the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets out the Defense Department's budget and expenditures. The version passed in 1990, in the wake of a sharp rise in drug-related violence, allowed the Defense Department to transfer military gear and weapons to local police departments if they were deemed "suitable for use in counter-drug activities". Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security, established after the attacks of September 11th 2001, disbursed more than $35 billion in grants to state and local police forces. In addition the "1033 program" allows the Defense Department to distribute surplus equipment to local police departments for use in counter-terrorism and counter-drug activities. The American Civil Liberties Union found that the value of military equipment used by American police departments has risen from $1 million in 1990 to nearly $450 million in 2013.
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And that equipment has been used. In 1980 SWAT teams across America were deployed around 3,000 times. Deployments are estimated to have risen nearly seventeen-fold since, to 50,000 a year. Tactical police units are not just common in big cities: though nearly 90% of American cities with populations above 50,000 have SWAT teams, so do more than 90% of police departments serving cities with 25,000 to 50,000 people—more than four times the level from the mid-1980s. This tremendous rise in paramilitary police forces has occurred as violent-crime levels have fallen. And while SWAT teams remain essential for high-risk and dangerous situations, most SWAT teams are deployed to serve routine drug-related warrants on private homes, often with disastrous consequences. Radley Balko, a journalist who wrote the essential book on police militarisation, has found at least 50 cases where innocent people died as a result of botched SWAT raids. Tactical teams have been deployed to break up poker games, raid bars suspected of serving under-age drinkers and arrest dozens of people for the distinctly non-life-threatening crime of "barbering without a licence". Such tactics often draw contempt from members of the armed forces. Veterans criticised police in Ferguson for intimidating the crowd rather than controlling it, for failing to share information with citizens and for escalating the standoff. One veteran noted that “we went through some pretty bad areas in Afghanistan, and we didn't have that much gear”.
Americans, at last, appear to have had enough. A Reason-Rupe poll released in December 2013 found that 58% of Americans believe police militarisation has gone "too far". Politicians are finally paying attention. Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky and a contender for his party's presidential nomination in 2016, has argued that it is time to "demilitarise the police". Yet legislation has not been forthcoming. Money may have something to do with that. In June 2014, Alan Grayson, a liberal Democrat from Florida, sponsored an amendment that would have forbidden the Defense Department from transferring to local police “aircraft (including unmanned aerial vehicles), armored vehicles, grenade launchers, silencers, toxicological agents (including chemical agents, biological agents, and associated equipment), launch vehicles, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, rockets, torpedoes, bombs, mines, or nuclear weapons”. It failed: not a single House leader of either party voted for it. America's defence industry donates millions of dollars to politicians, and spends even more on lobbyists. Those who opposed Mr Grayson's bill received, on average, 73% more in defence-industry donations than those who voted for it. But Mr Obama, with no more campaigns to run, faced no such constraints, and issued an executive order in an effort to stem the flow of military gear to America’s police forces.
Dig deeper:
America's police kill too many people (December 2014)
The militarisation of America's police departments (March 2014)
Update: This blog post has been amended to remove the news peg.Shine Lawyers have launched a class action against Westpac for allegedly selling customers life insurance policies at steep mark ups in a case they speculate could be worth $100 million.
The statement of claim filed on October 12 claims Westpac's financial planners sold term life, total and permanent disablement, trauma and income protection insurance at a 10 per cent premium compared to the same policies sold elsewhere.
The 20 page statement of claim highlights the bank's use of the code "CF 1.045" for policies that were 4.5 per cent higher and sold by its network of financial advisers. The code "CF 0.95" was used for policies that were sold at a 5 per cent discount that were available to independent financial advisers.
Westpac is the latest bank to be targeted in a class action. Carla Gottgens
Lawyers for Shine claim the bank breached its fiduciary duty, unfairly took advantage of its position and improperly used its position to gain a benefit for itself.
It is believed the policies in question were off-the-shelf will little tailoring for individual clients. Some policies were sold at a premium and some at a discount with the resulting pool of premiums the same size as another pool where all the policies were sold at 100 per cent.If the first episode of Taboo wowed, just wait until you hear what’s coming next, says creator and star Tom Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road), who spoke with Rotten Tomatoes before the FX series’ panel for the Television Critics Association.
Viewers have just met James Delaney (Hardy), who returns to London in 1814 to claim his inheritance, only to find that others have legitimate claims to it since he has been off in Africa. Hardy excitedly likened Delaney to Dickensian villain Bill Sikes, and then went into greater detail about the classic literary figure mashup that inspired the character.
Hardy created Taboo with his father Chips Hardy, and Steven Knight wrote the first season for them. Knight, who also spoke to Rotten Tomatoes at TCA, told us to strap in for more surprises as Taboo continues.
“I think it’s a season that gets better as it goes along because to begin with, we establish the world,” Knight said. “Also, I think people notice that this is going to be different. Expect the unexpected is what I would say. If you think you know what’s going to happen next, you’re probably wrong.”
How does the Legion of the Damned sound? Three more tonal shifts? Tom Hardy’s box of chocolates? Here’s what Hardy had to say.
Fred Topel for Rotten Tomatoes: Where did Taboo begin for you? Was it the character of Delaney, the idea of building this family empire or just wanting to do something in the historical period?
Tom Hardy: A bit of everything really. I came home to my dad, and I’d just finished playing Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, and I said, “Do you know what would be really good, Dad? To take Bill Sikes and play him as a hero.” He’s a villain, but if he had a noble cause, what a great hero he could be, because he’s just got loads going wrong with him.
How would you mix Bill Sikes and blend him with a Sherlock Holmes type, or someone Ralph Fiennes might play like [Chekov’s] Ivanov, a character which had more gentlemanly or higher class? The amalgamation of the two and then maybe perhaps Marlow from The Heart of Darkness and a bit of Heathcliff [from Wuthering Heights]. We could throw lots of different classical characters in there, a bit of Odysseus.
My father said, “Tom, that’s too many characters to put in one thing.” Then he went away and he wrote a treatment for it, which he set in 1860. That was when the world came of the drama and the characters and the history.
We used that to reach out to Steve Knight. He changed everything and took it to 1814, so the story changed again, but James Delaney was always constant and the world started to grow and change and grow and change again. By the time we started shooting, it was still growing and changing. New characters were coming in whilst we were shooting. So it was about the story at that point. It was about the development of the story over probably seven years.
RT: Is there still any Bill Sikes or Odysseus in Delaney?
Hardy: No, not really. It’s become something else now. There’s Byron in there, a bit of Paddy Mayne and Sterling. There’s all kinds of bits of Shackleton, bits of Richard Francis Burton, the explorer. There’s all kinds of people in now, which is lovely because it’s a really nice opportunity to play a character in that world who’s an amalgamation of lots of literary characters.
RT: Do things ramp up in episode two? Does every episode escalate dramatically?
Hardy: Yes, because I wanted to create a bit of a chocolate box. You open up in a fairy tale kind of Grimm story, almost like a horror story. It starts like that and the introduction is slow. It’s a slow burn, so we wanted to offer a lot that gets tied up by subsequent episodes. It really starts to take off in four and five. In six it goes off again to another angle and then seven and eight goes off in a completely different angle. We even incorporate the Western into there, sort of Peckinpah meets Barry Lyndon, which makes sort of early English Gangs of New York territory.
It will start to open up in a very different way. So the first three are a little bit tough, but stick with it because it opens up and diversifies once the machinations of the game of chess starts to play, and we’ve introduced all the characters and get to know them. The world gets a lot wider.
This is an introduction season in many ways to a group who are known as the Legion of the Damned, who you’re not really aware of yet. They don’t really start to form until halfway through and how we start to play off America, The East India Company, and the Crown together.
RT: You have access to wonderful projects in film and television. Is Taboo an example of something you just have to create yourself or it wouldn’t exist?
Hardy: I think probably. It was the first thing we got involved with. What was nice was, initially working with the BBC, I’ve done very, very well as an actor. I’ve always wanted to do a piece of my own. To minimize the risk in many ways, the business strategy would be to go home and say to the BBC at home, “Would it be all right to create something and bring it back home as a period drama?”
I wanted to do it with my father, Steve Knight, and [executive producer] Ridley Scott. It would make sense that that would probably be a good opportunity to create something for television at home. Just because if I were to make an independent film, it’s very hard to get financing, and then your script is only two and a half hours long or whatever it is.
I wanted to do something where I could see an achievement which was realistic, where we could tell a story which was compelling but learn how to produce at the same time. To find the right target home for a piece, I thought, “How do I minimize risk so I can get the most from the experience?”
What happened next was when Steve Knight and Ridley came on board, the BBC responded in a way which was mega supportive. Then FX came which was mega supportive. What turned out to be a small piece that Chips, my dad, and Steve Knight and I thought we’d be just a small TV series at home in England has now become something that’s traveled to FX and is everywhere. In many ways, this was my first idea of can we make something of our own? It’s actually quite a lot bigger than I thought it would. It’s sort of a humble concept.
RT: “Taboo” can mean so many things. Do you get to explore them all?
Hardy: To as great an extent as possible within the time we were given. There’s a lot of subject matter and a lot of characters that are going to be introduced to continue the conversations that are raised within Taboo and the context which is social, political, and also human.
But there’s never enough time, with any project, to cover all bases and the work is never finished. I couldn’t say that there’s a nice neat bow, but the conclusion of Taboo is very satisfying for us — but I would love to go back and reshoot it all again knowing what I know now, like any of the films I’ve been in.
Taboo airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FXWe have a low-latency C++ trading framework which allows us to deploy various trading strategies relatively easily.
Most of our traders, however, don’t know C++, which means they are often waiting on IT resource to develop and deploy a new strategy.
A lot of them do know python though, so I wanted to find a way to allow them to write the core logic of their strategies in python, whilst still leveraging our low-latency trading infrastructure
Here is my embedding python in C++ proof-of-concept.
There is nothing new here, but I found existing documentation and tutorials somewhat lacking, hence this blog post.
Step 1: Define the C++ types which represents the trading framework
An enum to represent buying or selling an order
enum Side { BUY, SELL };
Order
A struct with the details of a single order
struct Order { std :: string symbol ; Side side ; int size ; double price ; int order_id ; };
StrategyServer
A class which provides the trading functionality, such as sending an order
class StrategyServer { public : void sendOrder ( StrategyInstance &, const std :: string & symbol, Side, int size, double price ); private : int _next_order_id = 0 ; };
StrategyInstance
A pure virtual base class which represents a single strategy
Subclasses must override eval(), the entry-point into the strategy. This is where the strategy’s logic is evaluated and orders potentially sent to market.
Subclasses must also override onOrder(const Order&) which is the callback for the resulting order sent to market
class StrategyInstance { public : StrategyInstance ( StrategyServer & ); virtual ~ StrategyInstance () = default ; // evaluates the strategy's logic virtual void eval () = 0 ; // callback for an acknowledged order virtual void onOrder ( const Order & ) = 0 ; // asks the StrategyServer to send an order void sendOrder ( const std :: string & symbol, Side, int size, double price ); private : StrategyServer & _server ; };
Step 2: Create a python wrapper for our virtual StrategyInstance
Use boost::python::wrapper to allow a python class to subclass StrategyInstance
The virtual overrides look up the python class’s implementation and call those
class PyStrategyInstance final : public StrategyInstance, public bp :: wrapper < StrategyInstance > { using StrategyInstance :: StrategyInstance ; void eval () override { // call through to the python class's `eval` method get_override ( "eval" )(); } void onOrder ( const Order & order ) override { // call through to the python class's `on_order` method get_override ( "on_order" )( order ); } };
Step 3: Expose these types to python
We use BOOST_PYTHON_MODULE to define a python module containing all these types
BOOST_PYTHON_MODULE ( StrategyFramework ) { bp :: enum_ < Side > ( "Side" ). value ( "BUY", BUY ). value ( "SELL", SELL ) ; bp :: class_ < Order > ( "Order" ). def_readonly ( "symbol", & Order :: symbol ). def_readonly ( "side", & Order :: side ). def_readwrite ( "size", & Order :: size ). def_readwrite ( "price", & Order :: price ). def_readonly ( "order_id", & Order :: order_id ) ; bp :: class_ < StrategyServer > ( "StrategyServer" ) ; bp :: class_ < PyStrategyInstance, boost :: noncopyable > ( "StrategyInstance", bp :: init < StrategyServer &> ()). def ( "send_order", & StrategyInstance :: sendOrder ) ; }
Step 4: define a function which imports a python file as a module
This is taken from the python wiki on boost::python, from the tip on loading a module by path.
What is does is allow us to specify a python file and load it as if we called import module
bp :: object import ( const std :: string & module, const std :: string & path, bp :: object & globals ) { bp :: dict locals ; locals [ "module_name" ] = module ; locals [ "path" ] = path ; bp :: exec ( "import imp
" "new_module = imp.load_module(module_name, open(path), path, ('py', 'U', imp.PY_SOURCE))
", globals, locals ); return locals [ "new_module" ]; }
Step 5: load a python file containing our strategy and execute it
This is where we pull it all together.
We initialise the python runtime, register the python module with our C++ code in it, import the python file which contains our strategy, and then run it
int main () try { Py_Initialize (); // register the python module we created, so our script can import it PyImport_AppendInittab ( "StrategyFramework", & initStrategyFramework ); StrategyServer server ; // import the __main__ module and obtain the globals dict bp :: object main = bp :: import ( "__main__" ); bp :: object globals = main. attr ( "__dict__" ); // import our strategy.py file bp :: object module = import ( "strategy", "strategy.py", globals ); // obtain the strategy class and instantiate one bp :: object Strategy = module. attr ( "Strategy" ); bp :: object strategy = Strategy ( server ); // eval the strategy strategy. attr ( "eval" )(); return 0 ; } catch ( const bp :: error_already_set & ) { std :: cerr << ">>> Error! Uncaught exception:
" ; PyErr_Print (); return 1 ; }
Step 6: define a python strategy
This is the sample strategy written in python.
As a proof of concept, all it does is send an order when the strategy is evaluated.
We print the resulting order we receive in our callback
from StrategyFramework import * class Strategy ( StrategyInstance ) : def __init__ ( self, server ) : StrategyInstance. __init__ ( self, server ) def eval ( self ) : print "strategy.eval" self. send_order ( "GOOG", Side. BUY, 100, 759.11 ) def on_order ( self, o ) : print "order for {} {} {}@{} has order_id={}". format ( o. symbol, "buy" if o. side == Side. BUY else "sell", o. size, o. price, o. order_id )
Step 7: run it!
$./strategy strategy.eval sending order to market order for GOOG buy 100@759.11 has order_id=1
Complete code listing:
Here is the complete code listing which you can use to test out the code yourself
main.cpp :
#include <iostream> #include <boost/python.hpp> enum Side { BUY, SELL }; struct Order { std :: string symbol ; Side side ; int size ; double price ; int order_id ; }; // forward declaration class StrategyInstance ; class StrategyServer { public : void sendOrder ( StrategyInstance &, const std :: string & symbol, Side, int size, double price ); private : int _next_order_id = 0 ; }; class StrategyInstance { public : StrategyInstance ( StrategyServer & ); virtual ~ StrategyInstance () = default ; virtual void eval () = 0 ; virtual void onOrder ( const Order & ) = 0 ; void sendOrder ( const std :: string & symbol, Side, int size, double price ); private : StrategyServer & _server ; }; /////////////////////////////////// // implementation void StrategyServer :: sendOrder ( StrategyInstance & instance, const std :: string & symbol, Side side, int size, double price ) { // simulate sending an order, receiving an acknowledgement and calling back to the strategy instance std :: cout << "sending order to market
" ; Order order { symbol, side, size, price, ++ _next_order_id }; instance. onOrder ( order ); } /////////////////////////////////// StrategyInstance :: StrategyInstance ( StrategyServer & server ) : _server ( server ) {} void StrategyInstance :: sendOrder ( const std :: string & symbol, Side side, int size, double price ) { _server. sendOrder ( * this, symbol, side, size, price ); } //////////////////////////////////// // export to python namespace bp = boost :: python ; class PyStrategyInstance final : public StrategyInstance, public bp :: wrapper < StrategyInstance > { using StrategyInstance :: StrategyInstance ; void eval () override { get_override ( "eval" )(); } void onOrder ( const Order & order ) override { get_override ( "on_order" )( order ); } }; BOOST_PYTHON_MODULE ( StrategyFramework ) { bp :: enum_ < Side > ( "Side" ). value ( "BUY", BUY ). value ( "SELL", SELL ) ; bp :: class_ < Order > ( "Order" ). def_readonly ( "symbol", & Order :: symbol ). def_readonly ( "side", & Order :: side ). def_readwrite ( "size", & Order :: size ). def_readwrite ( "price", & Order :: price ). def_readonly ( "order_id", & Order :: order_id ) ; bp :: class_ < StrategyServer > ( "StrategyServer" ) ; bp :: class_ < PyStrategyInstance, boost :: noncopyable > ( "StrategyInstance", bp :: init < StrategyServer &> ()). def ( "send_order", & StrategyInstance :: sendOrder ) ; } bp :: object import ( const std :: string & module, const std :: string & path, bp :: object & globals ) { bp :: dict locals ; locals [ "module_name" ] = module ; locals [ "path" ] = path ; bp :: exec ( "import imp
" "new_module = imp.load_module(module_name, open(path), path, ('py', 'U', imp.PY_SOURCE))
", globals, locals ); return locals [ "new_module" ]; } ////////////////////////////////// int main () try { Py_Initialize (); PyImport_AppendInittab ( "StrategyFramework", & initStrategyFramework ); StrategyServer server ; bp :: object main = bp :: import ( "__main__" ); bp :: object globals = main. attr ( "__dict__" ); bp :: object module = import ( "strategy", "strategy.py", globals ); bp :: object Strategy = module. attr ( "Strategy" ); bp :: object strategy = Strategy ( server ); strategy. attr ( "eval" )(); return 0 ; } catch ( const bp :: error_already_set & ) { std :: cerr << ">>> Error! Uncaught exception:
" ; PyErr_Print (); return 1 ; }
strategy.py :Are you a browncoat? Ultimate browncoat for browncoats
Brass buckles are replicas custom-created from the actual jacket
Suede exterior; smooth lining
We love TV Tropes. In their description for the object "Badass Longcoat," the caption under the illustration reads, "It's every cow's dying wish to have her hide made into something this awesome."
Get your own Badass Longcoat right here in the form of the officially-licensed replica of Captain Malcolm Reynolds's Browncoat made by AbbyShot. They created a previous version, but spring of 2014 they debuted this version, which features a smooth leather lining on the inside of the coat. The suede outer fabric features custom-created replica brass buckles. And, man, it smells great. Better than a field-worn 6-year-old (at least) uniform jacket, we can tell you that.
Note: Because of how shipping works, your jacket will probably arrive with some wrinkles. Heloise advises, "Next time you take a hot shower, hang the jacket up in the bathroom. The steam should help relax the wrinkles."
Product Specifications
Ultimate browncoat for browncoats
Officially-licensed Firefly merchandise
Recreated by AbbyShot
Brass buckles are replicas custom-created from the actual jacket
Materials: 100% leather
Suede exterior; smooth lining
Dry clean only (use a leather specialist)
Imported
Weight: 4 lbs.
*This size chart refers to the body measurements of the wearer, not the garment itself.Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The rise of electronic games has driven both concerns and hopes regarding their potential to influence young people. Existing research identifies a series of isolated positive and negative effects, yet no research to date has examined the balance of these potential effects in a representative sample of children and adolescents. The objective of this study was to explore how time spent playing electronic games accounts for significant variation in positive and negative psychosocial adjustment using a representative cohort of children aged 10 to 15 years.
METHODS: A large sample of children and adolescents aged 10 to 15 years completed assessments of psychosocial adjustment and reported typical daily hours spent playing electronic games. Relations between different levels of engagement and indicators of positive and negative psychosocial adjustment were examined, controlling for participant age and gender and weighted for population representativeness.
RESULTS: Low levels (<1 hour daily) as well as high levels (>3 hours daily) of game engagement was linked to key indicators of psychosocial adjustment. Low engagement was associated with higher life satisfaction and prosocial behavior and lower externalizing and internalizing problems, whereas the opposite was found for high levels of play. No effects were observed for moderate play levels when compared with non-players."RoSS" redirects here. For other uses, see Ross (disambiguation)
Coordinates:
South Sudan ( ()),[18][19] officially known as the Republic of South Sudan,[20] is a landlocked country in East-Central Africa.[21][22] The country gained its independence from the Republic of the Sudan in 2011, making it the newest country with widespread recognition. Its capital and largest city is Juba.
South Sudan is bordered by Sudan to the north, Ethiopia to the east, Kenya to the southeast, Uganda to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the southwest and the Central African Republic to the west. It includes the vast swamp region of the Sudd, formed by the White Nile and known locally as the Bahr al Jabal, meaning "Mountain Sea". Sudan was occupied by Egypt under the Muhammad Ali dynasty and was governed as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium until Sudanese independence in 1956. Following the First Sudanese Civil War, the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region was formed in 1972 and lasted until 1983. A second Sudanese civil war soon broke out, ending in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Later that year, southern autonomy was restored when an Autonomous Government of Southern Sudan was formed. South Sudan became an independent state on 9 July 2011, following 98.83% support for independence in a January 2011 referendum.[23][24]
South Sudan has a population of 12 million, mostly of the Nilotic peoples. Christianity is the majority religion. In September 2017 the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict said that half of South Sudan's inhabitants are under 18 years old.[25] It is a member of the United Nations,[26][27] the African Union,[28] the East African Community[29] and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development.[30] In July 2012, South Sudan signed the Geneva Conventions.[31] South Sudan has suffered ethnic violence and has been in a civil war since 2013. As of 2018, South Sudan ranks third lowest in the latest UN World Happiness Report,[32] and has the highest score on the American Fund for Peace's Fragile States Index (formerly the Failed States Index).[33]
History
The Nilotic people of South Sudan |
competition version and a street version, but we chose the quieter street system (PN 15591; $886.97) for ours. The system is 100-percent stainless steel; delivers a smooth, deep tone; and includes fully polished mufflers with polished tips.
Once all components were installed, Chris Johnson of SCT Performance tuned the combination and it spun the rollers on Lamotta's in-house Dynojet to 262 rwhp and 246 lb-ft of torque. Though only a slight gain at peak, power and torque production were both up by about 6 from 5,000 to 6,000 rpm-where the gains will help us on track. The power gains combined with a lower gear ratio left us anxious to get some results on track at Gainesville Raceway.
On track, the V-6 did not disappoint. Its first run of the day ended up being the best-13.30 at 102 mph. Though it bogged a little off the line, the 2.07 60-foot time was also the best of the day. With owner Hector Navarro driving and rear tire pressure set at 26 psi, we made a few more attempts to break into the 13.20s, but to no avail. Navarro backed up the best run with a 13.31 at a faster 105, but the higher trap speed can be attributed to some tire spin off the line.
Check back next month as we install a ProCharger P-1SC kit. With that, we hope to be well into the 12s, if not the 11s. ProCharger's own V-6 made over 400 rwhp with a manual transmission, so we're excited to see what our automatic-equipped coupe will do with the same 6 pounds of boost. We might even crank up the boost a bit just for fun.The One Raising the Banner: Geli Korzhev
G. O.
‘Raising the banner’ is the name of the central picture in the triptych ‘Communists’. It has been painted by the prominent Russian artist Geli Mikhailovich Korzhev who died in Moscow at the age of 87 on August 27, 2012. The event once again drew public attention to the amazing artist – one of the creators of the so-called ‘Severe Style’ school within the framework of socialist realism. No makeup, no eyes closed upon any contradiction between what is said and what is real… Close social focus upon history and the real world out there was Korzhev’s most principled position. And the origin of such position probably lies within Hamlet’s words: ‘I must be cruel, only to be kind’.
I was shocked by Geli Korzhev’s paintings that have widely been presented on the occasion of his death in several Russian and foreign websites. It was not that I had been unfamiliar with his work before. But the ‘textbook’ works by Korzhev – ‘Farewell’, ‘Don Quixote and Sancho’, ‘Old wounds’, ‘Anxiety’ and others – that scalded me once in my youth with their unusual and frightening naked honesty, – had been forgotten over the years. And in more recent times, his subsequent paintings have almost never been presented in the so-called ‘thick magazines’ that the provincial folks (myself included) like to read.
Yet, he has a great number of them. And despite formal statements like ‘they belong to socialist realism as the main direction of Soviet art’, it seems to me that Korzhev has tried himself in other genres – e.g. allegoric, modernist, Christian-moralistic. There is one main thing, however, that unites all the stages of his work. And that is loyalty to once chosen style of vigorous, resounding truthfulness.
Even after his death, Geli Korzhev is apparently inconvenient to some liberal periodicals adhering to the format specified by bourgeois standards. No wonder he is! Until his death, he remained a communist, although his mentality underwent certain corrections as he was ageing. In spite of everything, he had never denied any of his ‘vigorously communist’ paintings written in his youth. Like his other works, each one of those had been filled with his soul, his blood and his deep thoughts. And perhaps, despite the ‘utopian’ theme, as one would say now, his paintings are still ‘competitive’ in the sense that they are in demand.
For sure, his name cannot be silenced, given all the grandiosity of this galvanising, thoroughly woven passionate creativity that leaves no spectator indifferent. Even those users who randomly bump into the exhibitions of his paintings while surfing the internet for fun, have been (according to their own accounts) struck by apoplexy from what they have seen.
The best art galleries in the world such as the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, the Museum of Russian Art in the United States, are proud to have a collection of Geli Korzhev’s paintings. It would not be exaggerated to say that his work has earned a worldwide recognition. But that only occurred in the seventh decade of the maestro’s life. For a long time, and for reasons known only to him, Geli Korzhev adhered to his status of being non-public. Multiple offers to organise an exhibition by museum professionals from several countries were rejected. Eminent collectors left him with nothing after many hours of polite conversation: the artist did not want to part with his works. Only when the impending end was about to come, Korzhev was prompted to think about sharing his heritage in some good hands. His ‘Moscow-Berlin’ and ‘Moscow-Warsaw’ exhibitions earned huge success. In 2007, a great-looking retrospective exhibition of his work was hosted in the United States at the Museum of Russian Art.
He was so far from behaviour such as posing or promotion. Korzhev did not impose his clearly defined life values upon others, although he could – given all the leadership positions he was holding in the Soviet cultural hierarchy. In particular, from 1968 to 1975 he was a Chairman on the board of the Union of Artists of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Even in the pictures portraying himself, it looks as though he says: ‘It’s not me in charge. Look more widely, penetrate more deeply into the essence of things. I'm just your guide…’ His artistic images are saying it indirectly.
Geli Korzhev was a master of that very ‘heavy artillery’ of the ‘severe style’ genre that can confidently target key social objectives. Take his latest works, for instance – the ‘Triumphers’, ‘Don Quixote and the Windmill’, ‘Deprived of Paradise’, ‘Adam Alexeevich and Eva Petrovna’, ‘Garbage site’, ‘Get up, Ivan’. Haven’t they much to say about us, about the society in which we live, about the absurdity of what has happened to the descendants of the ones who had been ‘raising the banner’, about the impoverishment of spirit. These great paintings portray a detailed version of a national trouble scenario... Where did the artist get all the strength, during his last years, to portray such hopelessness? And how one could be able to suffer for Russia, for the fate of everyone whom she had taken to under her wing, to throw these sufferings on a canvas by the desperate strokes of a brush!
A humble intellectual, he was not that kind of ‘epic hero’ protecting mankind on the brink of the world. Most likely, he felt himself like that ‘Gardener’ expected by the Russians during their ‘stagnation’ and ‘perestroika’. Remember that? A gardener would come, and cut away all the unnecessary things by his steady hand, cure the things that were aching, clear up the ground left without care... The old soldier portrayed in Geli Korzhev’s ‘Worries’. Placing his hand on a shoulder of a young girl who represents the spring and dawn of a new life, he sensibly protects her peace, casting his wary looks around.
One can spend hours thinking in front of any of his paintings. No need to say once again about what is interesting and what has caused a thunderstorm of emotions. I only want to pay attention to the ones that express his general line most vividly. The line that goes through all Geli Korzhev’s work, and therefore his personal life, because he many times repeated that ‘he writes the way he wants and the way he lives’.
‘Raising the banner’. It was painted in the late 1950s. Not only it stays in the centre of the triptych ‘The Communists’, but also it is central to all of his work. A kind of ‘visiting card’ for the artist. Its context is quite minimal: a cobblestone road crossed by tram rails. A manifestation broken by violence. Dead bodies of workers. One of them has survived and is supposed to run for his life and hide! Because it is clear that the fight has been lost. But no way! Too much hatred has been accumulated against the oppressors. Incredibly great is Desire to brush the Injustice away. They won’t flinch – strong arms will grasp the fallen banners of struggle, and the struggle will go on… An immensely energetic painting that makes one believe unequivocally: these fighters are not the ones to be broken, to be destroyed.
It’s been more than half a century. Heroes of the paintings changed noticeably. Less admiration they cause. More bitterness is there. The language of colours is getting fiercer.
Here is one of his latest works – the ‘Triumphers’. Its meaning may not be immediately clear to the modern audience. Not only it is highly allegorical, but it also highlights the fantastic creature – either a putrescent bird with an underdeveloped human torso, or a degenerated homo sapiens with a vulture's head and a tail that of a fat turkey. But, those spectators who closely follow history, and are familiar with Geli Korzhev’s series of paintings called ‘Mutants’, – can understand its meaning. Especially, if you pay attention to the year when the work began – 1993, the memorable massacre of those who defended the House of Soviets – the last stronghold of the People’s Democracy of Russia. Having satisfied its thirst for blood, the creature tramples a red banner and triumphantly sets up a black flag. Its ‘assistants’ are next to its shoulders: military force (with a face lacking any expression) ready to grasp the same flag, and… the ideological litter, or, officially put, ‘service’. And don’t you say that the media is not pursuing ideological goals these days. In disguise of the ‘freedom of speech’, it corrupts and pacifies those ‘masses’ who are accustomed to swallow information without thinking, skillfully undermining mental health of those able to resist. It is not accidental also, that the artist depicted the vulture’s loyal henchman with a bird's head. Only a birdbrain can accept foul-smelling ‘bucks’ so shamelessly, pretending not to notice blood on its beak.
And what about ‘the community’? On one hand – the figures of the modern ‘leaders’ and ‘thinkers’ (beefy muscles and fat bellies) cowering with fear. On the other – the thoughtless, careless youth, of neither elite nor (yet) proletarian appearance. Eating away the social benefits created by the ancestor’s hand, they do not yet fully understand the degree of wretchedness of their position: walking indifferently away from the place of execution.
The one who lost this battle is deprived of his face as well, barely seen on the backgound. Looking at his neat shoes, we perhaps can guess, who was opposing the ‘Triumphers’: perhaps a young dreamer from ‘Yegorka The Flier’ (one of the earlier paintings by Geli Korzhev), or the young guy lying under the heavy wheel in the picture ‘Overrun’. Little tiny Don Quixotes stunned by hypocrisy and lies, confused by the unjust order of things?
Geli often brings up subjects of Memory, of continuity and succession between generations, of Responsibility, including that of the living ones towards the ancestors. Throughout his long and fruitful work, he constantly refers back to the War. It was indeed a period when the most important human qualities were exposed to their highest extremes. Whether to stay at the forefront and get killed? Or be fainthearted, run and live with a stigma of Judah?
At the dawn of the Third Millennium, various voices were chattering of a ‘New Era’ for the mankind exhausted by its challenges. Geli paints a requiem picture called ‘Human Screen’. The story is as terse as usual: in front of the advancing troops, invaders have placed all the remaining villagers – elderly and children, women with babies in their arms, husbands crippled by the war… They are standing, doomed between the two great armies, as though from Heaven looking in the eyes of all who came to see the picture. None of them is hysterical, all bear their fate with dignity – to remain the ‘living screen’ for their home land. They stay silent, but their iconic faces bear a question: ‘How are you going to live on our land stained by our blood, you the ones who sprout through our ashes? Is all the sacrifice useless?’
Geli Korzhev’s ‘severe style’ can be understood most vividly in this picture. Ephemeral joy and sorrow, cute little faces, sweet landscapes – do not attract him. His heroes are tired-out, long-suffering people. He explores the depth of life, its ever-lasting truth. Everything comes and goes – youth, beauty, career, love… Everything is short-lived! And for what purpose, in this short period, we have to suffer from anger and malice, from meanness and cruelty, from stupefying work beyond human strength? Why do we humans tolerate this?
Geli’s spiritual testament can, in my opinion, be found in the merciless realist painting ‘Rise up, Ivan!’ He repeatedly came back to it, reworked it, strengthened expression of the scene: from civil indignation to social anger to tragedy. Originally a boozer failing to reach home and symbolising the working class misguided by political lies, in the final version he turns into a worn-out and discarded ‘part of the social machine’… Backyard, rusted barrels, minimum snack, maximum drink… A figure lying on snow, that of a wiry hard worker whose hands are still strong and only recently, it seems, were grasping a pick or a pole… Those who are so afraid of your deadly grip and uncompromisingly pressed lips – hard they have worked to make your head dizzy, to switch you off the driving force of history…
‘Rise up, Ivan!’ – encourages the artist. ‘Brush off the spider web that entangles you, come back to the road lost. The road of Reason, Virtue and Justice!’
http://propaganda-journal.net/article.php?id=5964
Translated from the Russian by Vitaly Pershin.The hacktivist group, Anonymous, is known for vigilante justice—or hooliganism, depending on who you ask—but its role in the enormous public backlash to Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons’ tragic death last week is not so black and white. When Amanda Todd took her own life after merciless cyber-bullying last year, Anonymous implicated B.C. resident Kody Maxson — later widely reported to be the wrong man. Maxson says he received over 50 death threats after the hacktivist group spread his name around the web, accusing him of tormenting Todd.
This time around, however, Anonymous appears more strategic, probably because whomever wears the mask in Nova Scotia is not the same person(s) who slandered Maxson in British Columbia. This Anonymous hasn’t used vigilante justice to expose Parsons’ alleged rapists. It’s used the threat of vigilante justice to move the authorities to action. If the RCMP doesn’t act fast, in other words, Anonymous claims it will release the names of Parsons’ alleged rapists. [Editor’s note: RCMP have since announced that they have reopened their investigation.] The group says it has obtained an actual confession from one of the boys involved in the alleged rape. Excerpts from the group’s most recent statement, below:
A 17-year-old girl killed herself because the police failed to do their jobs…
We do not seek vigilante justice. If those who we believe are guilty are exonerated in a court of law, Anonymous will disappear from Nova Scotia.
Is it necessary for Anonymous to be involved in this case? Yes. For a moment lets set aside the theatrics, the masks and the labels. We are group of concerned citizens that have recognized an injustice in the system. We have taken it upon ourselves to point out that injustice to the public and we are asking the police to correct their incompetent handling of this case–a young girl has already died from it.
Robin Hood doesn’t usually work with the Sheriff of Nottingham. This is, in my view, a much more sophisticated, socially conscious, breed of Anonymous. Not everyone would agree, however. This afternoon I heard from a Halifax man in his twenties who is a friend of one of Parsons’ alleged rapists. He wishes to remain anonymous (in the traditional sense of the word). He believes Anonymous is doing “the right thing, the wrong way.” He is concerned that innocent people will be implicated in the group’s search for justice. “This is the problem with people taking it into their own hands,” he says. “Now their [those implicated] lives are at risk.” He says that his friend received threats prior to Anonymous’ public statements, “but nothing in comparison to now.” It hasn’t been easy for him, either: He’s received emails from friends and acquaintances on Facebook suggesting he is “defending rapists.” He even went so far as to compare the actions of Anonymous to cyber-bullying itself.
Whatever your thoughts on cyber vigilantism, there is no question that the actions of the person(s) behind Anonymous in this particular case has jump-started a remarkably stalled justice system. The RCMP is of course propelled to act because of public outrage, but the hacktivists’ blackmailing has given them a firm deadline. When tragedies like these occur, people want answers, and they want them fast. Right or wrong, Anonymous delivers.In last week's column, I wrote that the percentage of comics sold in comics specialty shops grew from 6% in 1979, to approximately 70% by 1987. While this was a remarkable achievement in terms of an industry switching from one form of marketing (newsstand distribution) almost entirely to another (Direct Market comics shops), it also set the stage for the greatest collapse in sales in the entire history of the medium. The reality of the situation is that the overwhelming success of comics shops during the 1980's is one of the main reasons why we're seeing such poor new comics sales today. For those of you who are long-time readers of this column, you probably are already aware that I believe that the main reason why comics shops were able to rapidly supersede newsstands during the 1980's is because Direct Market comics distributors delivered comics to specialty stores approximately one week earlier than local newsstand distributors (ID's) supplied their accounts. Given that most hardcore comics fans are quite impatient to read the next issue of their favorite titles, this one-week shipping advantage quickly caused most avid comics fans to shift their business into the rapidly growing comics specialty stores network around the world. While that sounds like a great development for the Direct Market, it actually ended up destroying the entry point of most new readers. While most comics specialty shops do a great job of servicing their existing clients, the distressing truth is that many shops inadvertently (or sometimes blatantly...) give the appearance of being private clubs, where only the already initiated need apply. Newsstands, on the other hand, are quite egalitarian, offering everyone the same access to new comics and magazines, in a usually very family friendly environment. As a result, the vast majority of the base of comics readers existing in 1980 began their purchasing of comics through a local mass market outlet of some kind, and only later shifted their loyalty to a comics specialty store. Once the exodus of readers into comics shops began, however, the economics of carrying comics were destroyed within the newsstand market. Like most consumer goods, comics have to generate a certain level of sales per square foot in order to justify the space a store allocates to them. With comics this implied required rate of return is even higher than most goods, as younger comics fans are notorious for leaving stacks of comics laying next to the spinner rack in mass market stores, thus costing the store additional labor to keep the comics area tidy. With sales of comics melting away into the much more efficient Direct Market specialty stores, only the most dedicated newsstands chose to keep comics available after 1987. Where this really becomes a problem is that it created a completely false sense of profitability for the publishers. While it was seldom that a newsstand sold more than 30% of the new comics they displayed (they were able to return unsold copies for full credit at the end of the month...), comics specialty stores were a guaranteed 100% sell-through, as they purchased on non-returnable basis. Freed from the enormous printing costs of publishing three comics for every one that sold, and also being able to eliminate the administration costs of issuing credits for returns, the publishers suddenly found themselves awash in profits. That was the good news. The bad news is that all those unsold copies sent out to the newsstands were the #1 method by which the publishers reached out for new readers. Eliminate newsstand sales, and profits boom in the short term, but new readers become quite scarce. Without new readers the only way to keep profits growing is to steadily raise cover prices. Thus begins the vicious cycle of having to raise cover prices because unit sales are declining, and then having sales decline even further because cover prices are rising. This self-reinforcing negative trend is why we presently have comics with a cover price of $3.00, that the publisher is lucky if they sell 20,000 - 30,000 copies (compared with 100,000+ copies on every book published in 1979). Simply put, were it not for the potential additional future revenue from trade paperback sales, new comics as we know them would already be long gone. Having been one of the people who started the decimation of the newsstand business, I often feel more than a bit guilty when I see how few young people are reading comics today. In many regards, those of us who built the Direct Market during the early 1980's at the specific expense of the newsstands should be held in some measure culpable for the destruction of the comics industry. That having been said, however, the flip side of the argument is that the newsstand market for comics was already disintegrating in 1979, so we helped stave off for twenty years the inevitable replacement of printed forms of entertainment by the newly created electronic forms. I can argue the issue both ways. The fact remains, however, that because of the dearth of new readers in the comics world, that we now are now in a crisis from which it is going to be very difficult to extricate ourselves. Difficult, but most certainly not impossible. To be continued... Mile High Comics, Inc.
Attn: Chuck Rozanski
2151 W. 56th Ave.
Denver, CO 80221Initiative - provide JSON and JSONP RSS Feeds
Monday, October 10, 2011 { 6 Comments }
Responses to “Initiative - provide JSON and JSONP RSS Feeds”
JSON has won against XML. Because is lighter and simpler Many web services are giving priority to JSON over XML. But the all the blogs are still stuck with XML RSS.So why give JSON and JSONP RSS support?- JSON is Fat-Free Alternative to XML (save some bandwidth).- JSON has been chosen like primary format in almost all major public web services. JSONP is easiest and fastest way to directly connect the browser with the web service.- Growing need of building native web apps who can connect directly with the data source... and probably many other reasons.This initiative comes from my personal frustration … every time I want to build some web app who needs to talk with RSS and JavaScript I need to use some public proxy like YQL or some other server side XML to JSON solution. JavaScript and the browsers had grown much in the last couple of years, we could start using the browser JavaScript engine speed for some heavy lifting. Implementing JSON and JSONP like an alternative to XML(RSS) is very easy process.I think if some of the major blog players like Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous provide JSON RSS support everyone else will follow.That doesn't mean that we should kill XML RSS it means just providing alternative JSON support.If you agree with me help me spread the word. Thanks!Administration Drops Long-Term Care Provision Of Overhaul
toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
After a 19-month review, the Obama administration has concluded that it can't implement the CLASS Act, the community-based long-term care program that was the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's most heartfelt contribution to the Affordable Care Act.
"What we've determined at this point... is that we do not have a path to move forward," Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Aging Kathy Greenlee told reporters in a Friday afternoon conference call. "And that's what my recommendation has been to the secretary, and her recommendation to Congress."
It's not quite right to say the administration has pulled the plug on the measure, which is supposed to provide a modest cash benefit to the elderly for the purchase of long-term care services at home. It's more like they've put it in a medically induced coma while officials try to figure out if a cure can be found for what ails CLASS, or the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program.
The biggest problem, of course, is the fact that the CLASS program, which is voluntary, could wind up with only people most likely to need the benefit signing on. That would drive the premiums sky high.
But while the inability of officials to devise a program that is "actuarially sound for the next 75 years," which is what the law requires, makes proceeding with implementation impossible at the moment, wrote HHS Secretary in her letter to lawmakers informing them of the administration's decision, she was equally clear that they are not seeking repeal of the measure, either.
"The challenge that CLASS was created to address is not going away," Sebelius wrote. "By 2020 we know that an estimated 15 million Americans will need some kind of long-term care and fewer than three percent have a long-term care policy."
The seniors group AARP urged the administration to keep searching for a way to make CLASS viable. "A path forward is essential because the need for long term care will only continue to grow," said a statement from AARP's Joyce A. Rogers, Senior Vice President for Government Affairs.
Republicans, however, who vehemently opposed CLASS from the start, were quick to crow about its demise.
"This is a victory for the American taxpayer and future generations," said a statement from Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican. Thune has been among the leaders of the GOP efforts to discredit the program.
Added Rep. Phil Gingery (R-Ga.), "during this economic crisis, Congress must focus on eliminating the waste and fraud already present in our Medicare system before implementing unnecessary programs that cannot function without massive taxpayer bailouts."If someone invented the ability to copy food, or copy oil, there would be riots in the streets if everyone couldn’t have all the food and oil they wanted.
And today, with MASSIVE political upside to conservatives:
We can promise the have-nots ALL the movies for FREE.
We can promise them ALL the video games for FREE.
We can promise them a copy of EVERY song for FREE.
We can promise them a copy of EVERY single college course taught at an Ivy League school for FREE.
Conservatives should & ought to do this.
We should do this because the Entertainment and Academic industries are not on our side, and we have no reason to support them.
We ought to do this because property rights do not and cannot extend to the digital. And we look foolish going along with it.
Property rights, since the Magna Carta, have been the foundation of free market economics, and personal liberty.
We put incredible value on a bar of gold, a dirty old shoe, a new 60" TV, a home PRECISELY because it cannot be duplicated freely and shared.
If we could duplicate and share the atomic we wouldn’t have to worry about property rights… they never would have existed.
Even further, we so innately know the difference between the two things, if someone tries to take something atomic from someone else, we view the use of force (even deadly force) as moral.
For now, forget Intellectual Property. We can discuss it at length later.
Even if we fast forward into the world of 3D printing, surely we can imagine the digital designs being unprotected and passed around freely, while the plastic, ceramics and metal - those ARE YOURS, and you must OWN THEM to print the shiny new thing.
The reason this crucial distinction is necessary between the digital (formed by bits) and the atomic (formed by atoms) is that when things go digital, SCARCITY goes out the window.
Scarcity is the backbone of economics historically. People have limited means, and unlimited wants.
But yet, this year more than last, and next year more than this - every year into the foreseeable future: more of humanity’s quality of life, more of human consumption, more of human want is digital vs. the atomic.
A new economics is in order: People have limited means for ATOMIC wants, but they can be fulfilled digitally to their hearts content.
Atomic capitalism does not go away when we embrace digital “socialism.”
In fact, I argue it is just the opposite.
Since we have been conned by Hollywood and Academia that somehow turning their work into free unlimited beer for the people… hurts America, we have caused our citizens to treat our atomic property rights as junk.
The defensive logic of Hollywood and Academia makes no sense to have-nots, so when we let creatives stand next to real property owners and act as if their digital assets are just like atomic ones… we demean the unfortunate zero-sum fact of atoms.
We demean the very foundations of property rights.
But if instead, conservatives approach the masses and say, “We have many free things to give you, and they are your moral right, since no one else has to give up theirs for you to be entertained and informed,” we are re-enforcing the specialness of the atomic.
By being honest, and speaking the capital “T” Truth to the have-nots, respecting what is to them so obvious, we can gain rational credibility, so when we double down on atomic property rights… they trust us.
Perhaps, the creative intelligentsia will come to have greater respect for conservatives’ property. Perhaps not.
But conservatives ought to fully embrace digital socialism, in order to save atomic capitalism.With each day it becomes increasingly likely that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the big government party’s nominees. That understandably has a plurality of Americans extremely disappointed with the corrupt two party system once again. 60% of the population has an unfavorable view of Trump and 52% has an unfavorable view of Clinton. Few people want to have to choose between those two corrupt New York elitists. People are already looking for a third party option even though the election is still months away. That desperate yearning for a third choice is evident in the latest poll that showed Gary Johnson polling at 11% nationally.
Gary Johnson got 11% of the vote in a Trump v.s. Clinton general election poll conducted earlier this month. That’s incredible for several reasons. The first being that this is the highest that Gary Johnson has ever polled. In 2012, Gary Johnson polled at 9% once but only averaged 4.26% in the seventeen polls that included him. Johnson was excluded from the vast majority of the polls which hindered his name recognition, which kept him out of more polls. For him to be included this early on is a good sign he may be able to break that cycle this year.
That leads to the second reason this poll is significant: it’s still six months from the election. The nominees haven’t even been decided yet and 11% of the voting public is already saying they want a third choice. The peoples’ discontent with the two party’s nominees will only grow as the candidates drag each other into the gutter.
Finally, the main reason this poll is a milestone is that only 24% knew enough about Gary Johnson to form an opinion yet 11% support him. In other words, half of the people that know of Gary are already prepared to vote for him. While 24% may seem low it’s light years ahead of where he was four years ago.
This also means that there is enormous untapped potential in informing the public about their third choice. Just imagine if 100% of the public knew enough about Gary Johnson to form an opinion. Getting 5% of the vote would be a piece of cake and getting 33% might even be possible.
Hopefully this will be the first of many such polls that include Gary Johnson. Getting into the polls is the first step towards getting the mainstream name recognition and publicity he needs. If Gary Johnson is already at 11% now, polling at 15% to get into the general election debates will be easy.June 3, 2014
Sikorski Calls for Major US Base in Poland By Peter Baker, New York Times
Anxious about the threat from Moscow, Polish leaders have been pressing for a more robust deployment, and even creation of a permanent base on their territory. NATO reached an agreement with Russia after the Cold War ended, promising to refrain from deploying substantial forces in Eastern Europe, but Polish officials have argued that Russia effectively abrogated that agreement by annexing Crimea."For the first time since the Second World War, one European country has taken a province by force from another European country,", the Polish foreign minister, said in a telephone interview before Mr. Obama's arrival. "America, we hope, has ways of reassuring us that we haven't even thought about. There arein Britain, in Spain, in Portugal, in Greece, in Italy...."of the international system set up by the United States after World War II," Mr. Sikorski said. "She tested it in Georgia, which was an implied ally of the United States. She has now tested it in Ukraine. And I don't think we can discount the possibility that. And therefore, which is to say physically enforceable."Russia objected strongly when the former Warsaw Pact nations of Central and Eastern Europe sought to join the NATO alliance in the 1990s, saying that Western troops on their soil would be a threat to Russia. In the 1997 agreement, NATO said it did not intend "additional permanent stationing ofcombat forces" in Eastern Europe, while Russia agreed to refrain "from the threat or" that wouldthe "sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence" ofLargest Text Size Larger Text Size Regular Text Size
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When their little one comes into the world, new parents might be surprised by their baby's appearance. Instead of the picture-perfect cherub, babies often look bluish, are covered with blood and cream-cheesy glop, and look like they've just been in a fist-fight.
The features that may make a normal newborn look strange are temporary. After all, babies develop while immersed in fluid, folded up in an increasingly cramped space inside the uterus. Then in most deliveries, they're pushed through a narrow, bone-walled birth canal.
When you'll get to first see and touch your newborn may depend on the type of delivery, your condition, and the condition of your baby. Following an uncomplicated vaginal delivery, you should be able to hold your baby within minutes.
What Should We Expect?
In most cases, infants seem to be in a state of quiet alertness during the first hour or so after delivery. It's a great time for you and your newborn to get acquainted and begin the bonding process. And it's OK if circumstances prevent you from meeting your infant right away — you'll have plenty of quality time together soon.
Posture
During the first several weeks, you'll notice that much of the time your baby will tend to keep his or her fists clenched, elbows bent, hips and knees flexed, and arms and legs held close to the front of his or her body. This position is similar to the fetal position during the last months of pregnancy. Infants who are born prematurely may display several differences in their posture, appearance, activity, and behavior compared with full-term newborns.
Primitive Reflexes
Infants are born with a number of instinctual responses to stimuli, such as light or touch, known as primitive reflexes, which gradually disappear as the baby matures. These reflexes include the:
sucking reflex, which triggers an infant to forcibly suck on any object put in the mouth
, which triggers an infant to forcibly suck on any object put in the mouth grasp reflex, which causes a newborn to tightly close the fingers when pressure is applied to the inside of the infant's hand by a finger or other object
, which causes a newborn to tightly close the fingers when pressure is applied to the inside of the infant's hand by a finger or other object Moro reflex, or startle response, which causes an infant to suddenly throw the arms out to the sides and then quickly bring them back toward the middle of the body whenever the baby has been startled by a loud noise, bright light, strong smell, sudden movement, or other stimulus
Also, due to the immaturity of their developing nervous systems, newborns' arms, legs, and chins may tremble or shake, particularly when they're crying or agitated.
Sleeping and Breathing
In the first weeks, infants usually spend most of their time sleeping. Newborns whose mothers received certain types of pain medications or anesthesia during labor or delivery can be especially sleepy during the first day or two of life.
Many new parents become concerned about their newborn's breathing pattern, particularly with the increased attention to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in recent years. But rest assured that it's normal for newborns to breathe somewhat irregularly.
When infants are awake, their breathing rate may vary widely, sometimes exceeding 60 breaths per minute, particularly when they're excited or following a bout of crying. Also common are periods during which they stop breathing for about 5 to 10 seconds and then start up again on their own. Known as periodic breathing, it's more likely during sleep and is normal. However, if your baby turns blue or stops breathing for longer stretches of time, it's considered an emergency and you should contact your child's doctor immediately or go to the emergency room.
Although talking won't come until much later, your newborn will produce a symphony of noises — especially high-pitched squeaks — in addition to the obligatory crying. Sneezing and hiccups are common and are not signs |
a career-high 32 points against the Clippers. Lance Thomas, a training camp addition, played 19 minutes against Los Angeles.A must-read roundup by Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times on the impact of the American Ebola response included a fact that perfectly sums up the wrongness of our approach to global health:
"Only 28 Ebola patients have been treated at the 11 treatment units built by the United States military, American officials now say. Nine centers have never had a single Ebola patient."
So: the United States built 11 treatment units in Liberia, drawing from the $1.4 billion allotted for the Ebola mission. Eighty percent of those units have never seen a single Ebola patient.
This may seem shocking, but it actually shouldn't be.
The timelines of global health and short-term-ism of politics are usually not aligned. World leaders react to global health crises slowly (instead of taking a proactive approach), and they prioritize politically expedient (read: ineffective but sexy) fixes over real fixes.
If the world truly wanted to address Ebola and its root causes, the focus of the Ebola response should have been on things like training more health professionals, building up health systems and disease-surveillance networks in the country, and working with countries to prioritize health in their national budgets — all efforts that could take decades and wouldn't immediately produce results for bragging rights.
Many of the investments that would most help West Africa deal with diseases like Ebola wouldn't go to health care at all. They'd go to boosting education (the single biggest predictor of health) and literacy, and building infrastructure (so that people can get to hospitals and clinics when they need to).
These efforts are long-term, less tangible, and a lot more difficult to measure than passing out medicines or building treatment units. But they would undeniably save more lives and drastically improve health.
In an interview with Vox in March, former US Ebola Czar Ron Klain — who, incidentally, bragged about building those treatment units — also shared his very astute views on the wrongness of the current approach to global health crises and how it will eventually catch up to us:
"This constant pattern of responding to these things after the fact is going to result in a disaster, a horrible disaster well beyond Ebola at some point in time in the future. There eventually will be a fast-spreading highly lethal flu that will get out of control and the world won’t have the time we had on Ebola to try to bring it back under control. We’re either going to get that message before it comes or learn after."
This is something Bill Gates and Paul Farmer — two of the biggest heavyweights in global health — have also echoed for years, long before the current epidemic. Now the world just needs to listen before the next one.An man in the Israeli city of Netanya watches a television broadcast of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing the U.S. Congress in Washington. (Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew home Wednesday to face a tougher, less adoring crowd than the cheering legislators in Washington. Awaiting him were Israeli voters — and a tight election in less than two weeks.
According to polls carried out by Israeli TV news channels Wednesday, the day after his high-stakes speech to Congress, Netanyahu’s address had only a modest influence on the Israeli electorate.
[Read the transcript of Netanyahu’s speech]
Israel’s Channel 2 news said Netanyahu’s Likud party had increased its likely support by one seat in the parliament. On rival Channel 10, Likud had gained two seats to tie its main challenger.
In answer to Channel 2’s question — “Did the speech strengthen or weaken support for Netanyahu?” — 44 percent of those surveyed said it strengthened support, 43 percent said it had no influence and 12 percent said it weakened support for the premier.
Israeli political analysts had predicted that Netanyahu and Likud would probably see at least a small bump in support after he warned U.S. lawmakers to reject President Obama’s draft deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
Many Israelis said it was a strong address about an important topic, although many also acknowledged that TV images of rapturously applauding members of Congress wouldn’t hurt his reelection bid, either.
[Read: Israelis’ immediate reactions to Netanyahu’s speech to Congress]
It is too soon to know whether any electoral boost that Netanyahu gains from the speech will be sustained.
The real scrum of the election has just begun.
Likudniks are hoping the boss’s address to Congress will pull them ahead of their main challenger, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, and his running mate, former justice minister and peace negotiator Tzipi Livni, who are running under the banner of the Zionist Union.
Herzog and the Zionist Union plan to hammer away on the theme that Netanyahu’s address to Congress may do nothing to change the Iran nuclear deal but has spoiled relations with Washington.
Iran's potential nuclear capability Graphic: Iran's potential nuclear capability
(BONNIE BERKOWITZ AND RICHARD JOHNSON/THE WASHINGTON POST/SOURCE: The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control's IranWatch.org;International Atomic Energy Agency; Institute for Science and International Security)
Israeli newspapers and TV were filled Wednesday with images of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) looking vexed during Netanyahu’s address. “I was near tears throughout the prime minister’s speech — saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States,” Pelosi said afterward.
For the past month, the Zionist Union and Likud have been running neck and neck in opinion surveys, with a small, flickering advantage for the Zionist Union.
Camil Fuchs, a veteran Israeli pollster at Tel Aviv University, said that in the past, Netanyahu has always gotten a bump in job-
approval ratings after he gives a tough speech in English, whether at the United Nations or before Congress.
“Warm applause is very good” for poll numbers, Fuchs said.
This time, he said, may be different. He noted that Netanyahu went to Congress under a cloud of controversy, given the very public spat between Obama and the prime minister over the speech and its timing.
“Nobody here cares about Obama and his feelings. But they do care about Israeli relations with the United States,” Fuchs said, citing consistent polling that shows worry about whether Netanyahu is endangering ties.
As lunchtime crowds came to shop and eat at the old central Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, Netanyahu’s supporters described his address in Washington as a master class in oratory.
“He did what he set out to do. He convinced the Congress to make a better deal with the Iranians,” said Chaim Levy, a retired builder sitting with his chums at a pensioners’ club in the market, where retirees gather daily to play cards, drink tea and sneak a smoke.
Levy called the speech “one for the history books.”
His friend Nissim Armoza interrupted to point out that Netanyahu went to America to warn that “if Iran gets the bomb, there will be another Holocaust.” Heads nodded.
The card players were die-hard supporters of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Armoza said: “We don’t care what Obama thinks. He’s a Muslim who wants to destroy Israel.”
Netanyahu critics said they thought the speech would benefit Netanyahu in opinion surveys this week.
“Will it help? Of course it will help,” said Ori Vaknin, an artist who runs after-school programs for children and was enjoying a lunchtime espresso in the market.
“I don’t like it, but what can I do?” he said, rolling his eyes when asked whether he had watched the speech. “I didn’t really watch. He never says anything new. All the time, repeating himself.”
A couple of Israeli university students were celebrating completed exams with a beer and a glass of wine at an outdoor table. Guy Cohen, an economics major, said, “The fact that he went to speak shows that Bibi is strong.” Israelis commonly call Netanyahu by his nickname “Bibi.”
Regardless, Cohen said, he will probably vote for a candidate and party a bit more to the right than Netanyahu.His friend, Yael Markovitch, a law student, said the large number of undecided voters might be swayed by news of the strong speech, but she wasn’t sure.
Israeli news media on Wednesday appeared obsessed with what American pundits and politicians thought of Netanyahu’s speech, just as many in Washington were interested in how the speech had played in Israel.
“Traditionally we see a Likud bump for two or three weeks after a big Netanyahu speech,” said Jeremy Man Saltan, an analyst and blogger associated with the right-wing bloc. “But this is the first time we have a major Netanyahu speech this close to an election.”
Saltan said that with the election so close, “the news cycle is on steroids... and it will be interesting to see how long Netanyahu's speech remains on the front page of Israeli papers.”
“For most people in Israel, the speech was something that they did not watch live but they picked it up from the news afterwards. I don’t think that it will have a dramatic impact,” said Jonathan Rynhold, an expert in U.S.-Israeli relations at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
Rynhold guessed that the speech might pull some voters from the hard-line right toward Likud, as well as bulk up Netanyahu’s support among Likud voters, but that it might not move the center left or those still undecided.
Upon landing in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu said he was heartened by the response he had received in Washington, adding that both Democrats and Republicans “now better understand why this is a bad deal and what the proper alternative is.”Download Episode Here – right click link and select “Save Link As…”
In this episode Joel and Antonia tackle the question… should you only date certain Myers-Briggs personality types? In this podcast you’ll find:
Does type predict a good/bad relationship?
The short, unhelpful answer is – NO, you cannot predict a good relationship based on MBTI.
The longer answer is – Sometimes.
There is an entire system running when it comes to an individual – culture, Enneagram, Myers-Briggs type, etc.
We forget that attraction isn’t a choice. It is just something that happens to us.
I would caution anyone who limits their dating pool to ideal MB types. You are removing the element of surprise. You may find your ideal type just outside what you consider as acceptable.
Where most people start is which MB types are the most compatible?
The more helpful place to come from is what do you, as an individual, find attractive?
If you are making individual decisions based on massive broad-brush rules, you might have a bad time of it.
Shared values and interests are far more impactful than type.
Enneagram is another strong predictor of compatibility. It determines how a person deals with stress.
Lots of different demographic breakdowns we can look at that will influence one’s ability to maintain attraction and long-term compatibility.
If you break things down to the theoretical level of type, there is a danger. There are lots of other factors that go into a relationship than just type.
In business, just because somebody is of a certain type doesn’t mean they are the best one for the job; or, that they should be discounted because they aren’t of the right type. Character comes into play.
What should you be looking for?
What are you attracted to? Some people are very attracted to a particular cognitive function.
How willing is the other person to work on the relationship?
Can you get some of your needs met outside the relationship?
The rule is there to serve you. You are not there to serve the rule.
Are you becoming the type of person that is going to be the best at who you are so you can attract the most amazing person in your life, no matter their type?
If you grow yourself, you are going to have to shift how you find compatible people. You may not be able to find dates on singles sites or community events. You may need to broaden your horizons and travel to a distant conference where you will meet others on the same personal growth trajectory as you.
The ultimate message is you can’t predict compatibility by type. The biggest node of the system is who you are, and who are you trying to become?
Typology can become rather insignificant when two people who are on the same trajectory meet.
Typology can come into play, but shared interest is paramount.
Type is only one node in the system of the emergent of attraction and a good stable relationship. Not the only node.
Not cause and effect. Just because someone is a certain personality type does not mean they are going to be your best match.
If you are on a personal growth path and that is your primary focus, type becomes a much smaller indicator. Finding a person on the same personal growth path as you is going to be bigger.
If you aren’t on a personal growth path, type may be a bigger node in the system because it will predict compatibility in ways that may prevent conflict.
Conflict is harder to manage if you are not on a personal growth path.
People on a personal growth path prefer conflict because it points to areas of growth opportunity.
If you are in a pair bond relationship, and you are feeling fatalistic about it, your partner may be your opportunity for growth.
Conversely, if you and your partner are creating a dynamic that is perpetually conflict oriented your relationship may be complete.
Typology is a tool that has its uses. In some situations, it is more useful than others.
Let your pleasure and bliss guide the process. Don’t serve the tool. Let the tool serve you.
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We want to hear from you. Leave your comments below…2015 was an important milestone for the Community Operations (CommOps) team in so many ways. CommOps is the newest official sub-project in Fedora, and the team’s role is to assist other sub-projects in Fedora. This is done by building and improving interactions within the internal Fedora community, as well as by increasing communication across the Project as a whole. In other words, CommOps is all about bringing more “heat and light” to the different areas of Fedora.
Since 2015 was the inaugural year of CommOps, the past year was a busy and engaging one. For many of us, it felt like the lists of tasks we completed (and list of tasks to be completed) grew, and continues to each day. For CommOps, this is fantastic and exciting, as it represents concrete actions we can take to improve Fedora Community Operations.
There are a few particular highlights from the past year that helped us really define our role in the Project, and we have some concrete goals we think will help Fedora succeed in the coming year.
CommOps Highlights of 2015
The CommOps team has racked up a few major accomplishments since our founding in October. Even though we’ve had only three months as part of the Project officially, it was already difficult to narrow down the list of highlights. The list is below!
CommOps is officially a sub-project
While it is a bit obvious, it was a major milestone for our sub-project to meet official recognition in Fedora. The idea of a sub-project focused specifically on the community infrastructure and architecture of Fedora has existed for many releases, but it really materialized towards the end of Fedora 22.
As the newest team in Fedora, we hope to make an even larger impact in 2016 as we continue to show ourselves and help other sub-projects in their roles of contributing to Fedora.
Introducing Community Blog
Our first major accomplishment as a sub-project was the announcement of the Community Blog, which you are visiting now! We first made the announcement on November 9th.
If this is your first experience with the Community Blog, its purpose is to be a central platform for news about Fedora, for Fedora. If a contributor in one part of Fedora wants to know what is happening in another part, they can look at the Community Blog and quickly see news and updates about what everyone is working on. The way things are now, it can sometimes be difficult to get a pulse of what’s happening across all of Fedora. You might have to dig into hard-to-find wiki pages or mailing list threads to see what’s happening. That can be tedious and sometimes frustrating! The Community Blog intends to ease this process.
Many ask what the difference between the Fedora Magazine and the Community Blog is. Good question! The Fedora Magazine focuses on a variety of content, sometimes technical “how-to” guides, announcements of things happening elsewhere in the world of Linux, or sometimes other topics with a slight relation to Fedora. In other words, not everything is specifically related to the work that Fedora contributors do every day, which is what the Community Blog is for. The wiki page for the Community Blog does a good job of explaining the difference more fully.
2015 December Elections
The most recent cycle of Fedora Elections held at the end of November and beginning of December was the next area where CommOps made our mark. As part of the Elections process, we helped the Fedora Program Manager, Jan Kuřík (jkurik), plan and execute the Elections. We guided candidates through creating and publishing their interviews on the Community Blog, created metrics and statistics about the Elections, and helped advertise the Elections across different channels of the Project. The result was the fourth most participated in Election of Fedora history, a significant improvement over the lowest turnout to date from our last Election cycle.
CommOps Goals for 2016
Federation (via Community Blog)
We want Fedorans to feel less like isolated groups working on their own separate things, and see more of their activities as part of a whole. Fedorans contribute their talents and abilities towards a common goal and mission, and we want to continue building the common platforms where those pieces can be seen coming together. And above all, promotion should not compete with execution. CommOps is here to bring light to your corner of the project, and weave individual stories into a project-wide narrative for the world to follow along with.
While this is a lofty goal, we are setting realistic expectations for this goal by aiming to double the amount of content published annually on the Community Blog as well as double the incoming traffic to the site.
Unification (via Fedora Hubs)
Unifying the disparate communication channels of a massive project like Fedora is no small task, but is another major goal of the CommOps team. Fedora Hubs has been under active research for two years now, and as a concept is well-reasoned and supported by both the design and infrastructure teams.
By 2017, we want Fedora Hubs to be the unified, mobile-friendly, modernized public “face” of Fedora.
Fedora Hubs makes use of the elegantly powerful, real-time messaging infrastructure of Fedmsg to combine and aggregate all the activity of sub-projects into one single “hub” of information. Fedora Hubs has also been heavily invested in by Design Team lead Máirín Duffy (mizmo / duffy) and her protege Meghan Richardson (mrichard), who did a phenomenal job of producing user interface and experience mock-ups and prototypes that intuitively present how the large amount of information provided by Fedmsg can be interacted with in manageable ways.
Diversification (via Outreachy and other programs)
Diversity of all kinds is healthy for any community or project. With increased diversity comes a new flow of ideas and innovation, new perspectives that might not have been realized, and an increased feeling of community. Whether it’s cultural, gender, racial, or other diversity, it is an important element of a community and has been prioritized as an area of improvement for Fedora.
As a direct way to jump-start this, we want to double our participation in the GNOME Outreachy program. 2015 Outreachy applicant Bee P. (bee2502) is a core member and leader within the CommOps team. Keerthana K. (keekri), another 2015 Outreachy applicant, was central to our Election efforts which ended up becoming a highlight of the year! The impact of these women’s contributions can be seen and felt project-wide. We want as many Bee’s and Keerthana’s in Fedora as possible, and the potential benefits offered by Outreachy are crystal clear.
CommOps is thrilled to be working with the new Fedora Diversity Adviser, María “tatica” Leandro, finding ways to improve our diversity outreach and engage new types of contributors in the Fedora Project.
To get where we want to go, we need to understand where we are. To do this, we’re going to need hard data about our community, its composition, and their priorities and interests, so that we can test hypotheses, and then create and execute a strategy.
By 2017, we want to have a Fedora Contributor and User Survey that provides us with data we can report back with on an annual basis.
Onboarding-ization (via Fedora badges)
A final goal that CommOps has set for ourselves this year is to create a series of badges for every sub-project of Fedora that serves as a “walk-through” of becoming a contributor to any given sub-project. Badges is one of the most effective ways to engage newcomers and has already had notable successes in its first few years of existence.
CommOps plans to interact with other sub-projects and find key steps or stages that new contributors typically go through on their way to becoming active contributors. Once those areas are identified, we will help come up with ideas and concepts for badges to “light the way” for newcomers who want to become involved with a specific area of Fedora.
CommOps: In summary
CommOps has had an exciting year so far and we are looking forward to getting 2016 off to a hot start. Our Trac has been active with new tickets, our IRC meetings have been busy, and the Community Blog has a bright future on the horizon.
On a more personal note, I would like to give special recognition to all the early contributors of CommOps who have helped get the sub-project running. Remy DeCausemaker, the Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead, has helped lead the team and provided mentorship to many, including myself. To the many who idle in our channel, hang out on our mailing list, and / or pop up in our meetings, thank you for your involvement, and I am looking forward to our mission of helping improve Fedora for current and future contributors!
Want to Help?
Join our team in #fedora-commops on Freenode Join the Community Operations Mailing List Participate in our weekly meetings
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Like this: Like Loading...ABOUT Average Joes Gamer
This clan is for those who are sick of playing pugs but do not want to be thrown into the "hardcoreness" of other clans. You should join if you cannot get on all time, but want an inhouse group to play with when you can. Also join if you are sick of being harassed by pugs about now having a flawless game. Join if you want to have fun and chat with people while you play, and have some cohesion in game.Dont join if you are1: An in-game Troll2: An immature child (no age restrictions as long as you can be mature)3: Cant speak English, or at least "Engrish"Please request an invite from one of the admins or leave a request in the comments section.Also check out our new Reddit thread at http://www.reddit.com/r/AverageJoesGamer/With every assessment of the world’s education programs, it seems that the U.S. falls further from its once-revered position as the intellectual center of the universe and into mediocrity. One such study, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), ranked the U.S. 17th out of 50 participating countries, behind Finland, South Korea, and Canada, among others.
The EIU conducted the study over the better part of a decade, taking into account a combination of international test scores, literacy rates, and graduation rates between 2006 and 2010. It did not, however, include the area in which the U.S has annihilated all competition—confidence.
From birth, recipients of an American education are acclimated into a climate of obdurate denial, taught to repudiate the metric system and to view the acquisition of a second language as a superfluous and menial task to be taken on later in life. As this attitude of passive superiority has come to pervade American classrooms, large blocks of legislation have been passed in order to sustain the illusion that our system is not broken.
Educational institutions are faced with more restrictions each year, both in the form of state-mandated standardized testing and various consequential accountability statutes, most famously the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Under such laws, states must set a universal standard to be met by all students and administer yearly tests in order to receive federal funding. Students and teachers are left scrambling to get students a passing grade by any means necessary, often just barely succeeding.
Aside from the glaring fact that the system put in place by these laws has left millions of children behind, it sets dangerous precedents for the way we view the overall goal of American education. By withholding federal funding for schools on the basis of state-created standardized assessments, the government has created an educational culture of the test. Whether a child is able to reach high school graduation as an educated and well-rounded individual has become secondary, at best (and forgotten, at worst), so long as he or she looks like one on paper.
In no area is this flaw more evident than in the various special education programs around the country, which have undergone their own processes of standardization over the course of the past decade. In a wave of what has been referred to by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center as “mainstreaming,” students with various disabilities spend a greater amount of time in the same classroom as their peers than ever before, engaging in the same low-grade clerical work and preparing for the same standardized assessments. All children are made to meet the same standards in math, science, and language, and they are placed on the same track for doing so, the only logical end to which seems to be a post as a college professor.
At no point in our history has the range of talent, interest, and learning ability in any particular classroom been more diverse. More children attend school than ever before, and the tools for providing them with a comprehensive and individualized education have become exponentially more accessible with the advent of various technologies. And yet, our methods for educating students have grown broader, more regulated, and further streamlined.
Rather than modifying or supplementing the material taught to students with disabilities, teachers must prepare them for mandatory testing in subjects that have remained unchanged since the inception of public education in 19th-century industrial society. While the means for doing so have improved, the question remains as to whether these tests have any benefit on the overall education of a student diagnosed with “special needs”—a term that has itself become more general over the years.
What was once an exclusive and relatively misunderstood group comprised of severely disabled children has become a much larger body of students at all levels of functionality. According to data collected by the EIU, the number of students diagnosed with disabilities and enrolled in special education programs increased by nearly 700,000 between 1993 and 2009—a jump of about 55 percent.
In that time, a standard group of modifications and accommodations has come about to aid these students in passing the federally mandated standardized tests that have become increasingly popular. Students are given extra time and access to computers in order to complete the tests, as well as readers and scribes to provide a more effective means of interacting with them. Rather than facing the problems with the material, we have found a way to cheat the system, moving children through material they have not internalized by way of an arbitrary passing grade.
Every hour a student with special needs spends preparing for and taking these standardized tests is one that he or she might have put to good use mastering the very skills that this system has absolved them of any obligation to acquire. Critical thinking, professional writing, and the expression of one’s own ideas are among the most important qualities in a potential employee for any position—yet, they are abandoned in favor of rote mechanics and test preparation. Thus, the current special educational system does a terrible disservice to its students, especially the 80 percent who enter directly into the workforce upon graduation.
Reforming our educational system must come with the realization that many children have neither the desire nor the ability to spend a life in academia. Rather than attempting to make it appear as if they do, administrators must strive for accomplishment through effectiveness and practicality, leaving behind statistical illusions of success.
Featured Image by Jordan Pentaleri / Heights EditorCabbie Rams Cyclist, Severs Woman’s Leg, Investigation Ongoing [Updated]
[Update: According to Cy Vance’s office, prosecutors are investigating this crash. We’ll have another post shortly.]
Reports say the cab driver who maimed a pedestrian in Midtown this morning was arguing with a bike messenger, whom he rammed with his cab before driving 15 to 20 feet on the sidewalk and severing a woman’s leg, but he probably won’t be charged with a crime.
The most seriously injured victim was identified by the Post and the Wall Street Journal as Sian Green, a tourist from England, whose age was reported as 22 and 23. Multiple reports say both her legs were mangled, with one severed below the knee. Green reportedly underwent surgery at Bellevue Hospital, where FDNY told us she was taken this morning.
The cyclist, who did not give his name, told reporters he was riding alongside the cab when the driver, attempting to make a left turn from Sixth Avenue onto 49th Street, became impatient. Here’s the cyclist as quoted by the Daily News:
“I told him to stop because I’m trying to go forward and people are crossing,” the cyclist said. “He loses his patience. He gets angry. He accelerates. Hits me.”
Here is the cyclist’s account in the Post:
“The hood of his car was so close to me, I could touch it. I told him to stop, he gets angry, he honks his horn, and he accelerates, and that’s it — I’m on the hood of the car, and the woman is under his car. He was in the bike lane, and he wanted to turn, but he didn’t want to wait. … I told him to calm down. … When I moved forward, that’s when he accelerated because I couldn’t escape him.”
Photos from the scene show the cyclist leaning against a police cruiser with a bandaged knee, and a bike with a bent rear wheel.
“We were crossing right in the middle of the crosswalk — we had the crossing signal — and as we were crossing with other pedestrians, the cab started to pull into the crosswalk,” said Jeffrey Hayes, of Massachusetts, to Fox News. “[There] was a man riding along this way on his bicycle with a backpack and he got picked up by the cabbie and was thrown up on the hood and up on his windshield. The cab really accelerated at a great speed. We couldn’t believe it. It smashed into the barrier here. There was a woman — maybe a few women — that were standing there. It just nailed her.”
The Post identified the cab driver as Mohammed Himon, who, despite undisputed accounts from multiple witnesses who say he caused this violent and life-altering crash, sources said “was likely to be slapped with multiple summonses … but not criminally charged.” Unnamed sources told DNAinfo Himon “has a clean driving record.”
A photo from the scene shows police directing motorists through red lights on Sixth Avenue after the crash. Wrote Streetsblog reader Clarke:One way to bolster security on your OpenStack cloud is to set up security options that go beyond password-based authentication when you create a new instance. The most common way is to use the OpenStack Dashboard, Horizon, to set up public/private key pairs to properly protect the instance at launch time.
Public/private key pairs work by keeping the public key on the server, and the private key on your local workstation. Once the server has verified that the two keys match, a secure connection can be made.
OpenStack can inject a public ssh key into an instance on launch, so that it’s ready for you the access using the private key. If you then set up ssh to deny password authentication and instead require the key, you give your instance a much stronger layer of security.
Now let’s look at how to set up key pairs in OpenStack. Basically, there are three steps: create a key pair, add it to an instance, and modify it for increased security.
Create a key pair in Horizon
The first step is to create the actual key pair, if you don’t already have one:
Click “Compute” under the “Project” option in the Horizon left-hand menu. Select “Access & Security”. Click the “Key Pairs” tab.
Click “+Create Key Pair”. Name your new key pair and click “Create Key Pair”.
The new key pair will automatically download to your local machine; make sure you don’t lose it, or you won’t be able to access the new instance.
Click Access & Security again to see your new key pair.
You can also create a key pair manually and import it, or import an existing public key, by click the “Import Key Pair” button and adding it to the form.
Add a key pair to an instance
To add a key pair to an instance, you need to specify it when you’re launching the instance.
Under Instances click “Launch Instance”. Click the “Access & Security” tab. Choose the appropriate key pair from the pulldown (or click the “+” sign to import one).
After completing the rest of the required information on the other tabs, click “Launch”.
Securing and using your new key pair
To use your new key pair, you need to make it available to your ssh client. On Linux, follow these instructions:
Copy the downloaded key pair into your ~/.ssh/ directory Change permissions to 600: # cd ~/.ssh # chmod 600 KEY_NAME.pem Now you can use the key pair to connect to the instances created using this key pair: # ssh -i ~/.ssh/KEY_NAME.pem USER@SERVER_IP
On Windows, how you use your new key will depend on your client. The PuTTY client is an open source SSH client that also handles SFTP and SCP, and enables you to specify the private key to use. The downside of PuTTY is that it doesn’t like the *.pem format OpenStack gives you, in which the public and private key are together; instead you must separate them using the PuTTYgen client:
Download PuTTYgen from the main downloads page. Run puttygen.exe. Click the Load button and specify “All files *.*” as the file format so it can find the *.pem file. Load the key pair you downloaded from OpenStack earlier. You’ll see the information in the puttygen window.
Optionally add a passphrase. Click “Save Private Key” and save the file where you’ll be able to find it.
Now you can add the private key to a connection in PuTTY:
Download PuTTY from the main downloads page. Run putty.exe. Specify the hostname or IP for the instance (you can find this information on the instances page once it’s launched). In the left-hand panel, expand “Connection->SSH” and click “Auth”.
Click “Browse” and find the *.ppk file you saved from puttygen.exe. Click “Open” to connect to the instance.
Enhanced security without the hassle
Not all OpenStack instances will be booted from Horizon, of course; it’s very common to boot an instance from the command line, and the OpenStack Compute (Nova) CLI does provide the –key-name parameter to enable you to add an existing key pair to an instance as it boots. (Note that you must add the key to the cluster first.)
Still, for users who prefer to use the OpenStack Dashboard instead, it’s convenient to be able to create and add a key pair directly through Horizon.
Looking for an easier way to deploy OpenStack? OpenStack Fuel lets you deploy OpenStack with a few clicks of your mouse. Download it now with Mirantis OpenStack.I thought the DJI Mavic Pro was small, but it is quite huge compared to the Spark. This diminutive drone was announced a couple of months back, and I have finally managed to get mine. I bought the Fly More combo that comes with a natty bag, an extra battery, the essential controller, and some spare props. It came in Alpine White, as that was all that was available when it first went on sale. DJI kindly sent me another one (in sexy red) which made my idea of filming the entire video review of it using it possible.
Previously, my reviews have been shot with traditional cameras intercut with shots using it. This was a challenge, especially with audio, but one I really wanted to do. The audio was recorded using the little Tascam DR-10 recorder and lav mic. It looks like a small radio mic, but it is a recorder with a micro sd card slot. You can actually loop audio out from it into a wireless transmitter so it can also be used as a nice handy little backup in case the radio mic cuts out at a crucial time.
I was also able to get some shots of Julian flying the Spark and demonstrating the gesture control. There was no way I was going to attempt to fly two at once; whilst it could be done, it was not a good idea for too many reasons. By filming Julian using it, I was able to get some nice circling shots of him which looked great (all manual flying control of course in GPS, as there is no ATTI mode)
The Spark is clearly aimed more at the consumer crowd – you can buy it without a controller and use your phone to fly it with virtual joysticks. This isn’t great, as you get no tactile feedback, and the range is hugely limited to 100 metres. The controller, which is very similar to the Mavic Pro one, gives you proper control and a range of up to 2KM.
The gesture control is very cool but has a few limitations. More of that in the review.
The biggest downsides for me are the camera and the gimbal. There is only a two-axis gimbal rather than the traditional 3-axis one, so the yaw isn’t stabilised. The main problem is that there are no image profiles, so you are stuck with a rather overly sharpened, contrasty, and saturated image, which results in limited dynamic range and grading options. It is also 1080p-only and records in just one frame rate, 29.97p which is a bit crap. We need 24p and 25p, so please, DJI fix the frame rate and picture profile issues with some firmware.
It has some fun but rather limited gesture controls. These are mainly for taking selfies (photos), |
ものです。 ◇ベストアルバム情報はこちら
2017.1.21
『ローリング☆ガールズ』ベストアルバムが発売決定！録り下ろしオーディオドラマも収録した豪華2枚組！
「モブ」の少女たちの旅と青春を描いたTVアニメ『ローリング☆ガールズ』。
THE BLUE HEARTSの楽曲をカバーしたその主題歌と数々の挿入歌が、ベストアルバムになって登場！
その名も「ロリガ・ロック・ベスト！ ～Songs of the mob, by the mob, for the mob～」。
小澤亜李、日高里菜、種田梨沙、花守ゆみりからなるメインキャスト４人のユニット、
「The Rolling Girls」が歌うOP『人にやさしく』、ED『月の爆撃機』や、ソング集Ⅰ＆Ⅱとして発売されていた数々の名曲のカバーはもちろん、新規カバー楽曲として『リンダリンダ』を収録！
さらには脚本のむとうやすゆきが新たに脚本を書き下ろしたオーディオドラマ『夏の地図』も収録した豪華CD2枚組です。
普通の少女たちが精一杯歌う応援ソングを皆様にお届けします！
「ロリガ・ロック・ベスト！ ～Songs of the mob, by the mob, for the mob～」
◆発売日：2017年3月15日 ◆品番：PCCG-01583 ◆定価：￥3,500（本体)+税 ◆枚数：CD2枚組 ※全12曲+新規オーディオドラマ収録予定 【CD1 Track List】
♪1. 人にやさしく
♪2. 英雄にあこがれて
♪3. 脳天気
♪4. 夕暮れ
♪5. 青空
♪6. シャララ
♪7. 終わらない歌
♪8. 1000のバイオリン
♪9. 月の爆撃機
♪10.STONES
♪11.TRAIN-TRAIN
♪12. リンダリンダ（新規収録）
【CD2 Track List】
♪13. 夏の地図（オーディオドラマ）
■オーディオドラマ詳細
タイトル： 『夏の地図』
脚本： むとうやすゆき
出演： 森友望未（CV：小澤亜李）
小坂結季奈（CV：日高里菜）
響 逢衣（CV：種田梨沙）
御園千綾（CV：花守ゆみり）
ほか
あらすじ： 富士山所有権をめぐり山梨国と争う静岡国は、うなパイ紛争で内情も不安定だった。 平和請負人代行として列島ツーリングを始めたばかりの望未たちは、月明かりの石がいっぱい 入った小ビンを見つけたことで解散を決めるが、ご当地名物を口にしたとたん突然の体調不良に襲われる…！ アニメ第4話の特殊エンディングを補完するオーディオドラマ。 おなじみのモブヒロイン4人組、望未・結季奈・逢衣・千綾のキャスト勢ぞろいでお届けします。
2017.1.21
『ローリング☆ガールズ』特製アートパネル（全4種）が発売決定！
ベストアルバム「ロリガ・ロック・ベスト！ ～Songs of the mob, by the mob, for the mob～」の発売を記念して、『ローリング☆ガールズ』のアートパネル（全4種）を「きゃにめ限定」「完全受注生産」で販売致します。軽量の木材と本物のキャンバスから出来ており、フレーム要らずで届いてすぐに飾れる商品です！ 『ローリング☆ガールズ』アートパネルＡ
『ローリング☆ガールズ』アートパネルＢ
『ローリング☆ガールズ』アートパネルＣ
『ローリング☆ガールズ』アートパネルＤ
価格：各3,500円+税 仕様：商品サイズ:縦:30cm×横:30cm×厚さ:1.5cm 木枠部分:合成パイン材 キャンバス:綿95%、ポリエステル5% 販売サイト：きゃにめ.jp限定 http://canime.jp/10000520/#product-goods 受注締切：第一次受注締切：2017年2月15日（3月15日お届け） 第二次受注締切：2017年3月20日（4月下旬お届け） ※完全受注生産商品です。(返品不可)
2015.9.4
9/8(火)よりRRE「公式パンフレット」と「月明かりの石」を数量限定で通信販売いたします！
2015.9.1
ＴＶアニメ「ローリング☆ガールズ」ソング集Ⅱ「ＳＴＯＮＥＳ」アニメイトにて販売決定！
ＴＶアニメ「ローリング☆ガールズ」ソング集Ⅱ「ＳＴＯＮＥＳ」アニメイトにて販売が決定致しました！ 【アニメイト取り扱い店舗】
・アニメイト札幌
・アニメイト仙台
・アニメイト秋葉原
・アニメイト名古屋
・アニメイト天王寺
・アニメイト小倉
※追加取り扱いが決定した場合は随時更新致します。 ＴＶアニメ「ローリング☆ガールズ」ソング集Ⅱ「ＳＴＯＮＥＳ」
税込価格：￥2,500 ◆商品内容
THE ROLLING GIRLSによるソング集の第2弾。
第8話の挿入歌「STONES」のカバー楽曲に加え、「青空」、「シャララ」、「人にやさしく」ソロVer.などを収録。 ◆収録曲
1. STONES (THE ROLLING GIRLS）
2. 青空 （御園 千綾 CV：花守ゆみり）
3. シャララ (THE ROLLING GIRLS）
4. STONES（鴨川ロッカーズ CV：久保田 薫） Bonus Track
5. 人にやさしく（森友望未 ＣＶ：小澤亜李ソロ ver）
6. 人にやさしく（小坂 結季奈 ＣＶ :日高里菜ソロ ver）
7. 人にやさしく（響 逢衣 ＣＶ：種田梨沙ソロ ver）
8. 人にやさしく（御園 千綾 ＣＶ：花守ゆみりソロ ver）
9. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（森友望未 ＣＶ：小澤亜李ソロ ver）
10. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（小坂 結季奈 ＣＶ :日高里菜ソロ ver）
11. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（響 逢衣 ＣＶ：種田梨沙ソロ ver）
12. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（御園 千綾 ＣＶ：花守ゆみりソロ ver）
13. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ [inst]
2015.8.12
「tanulog ローリング☆ガールズ コンセプトワークス」「ローリング☆ガールズ 設定資料集」発売決定！
8/14(金)アニメイトACZにて先行販売開始！ 8/21(金)からアニメイト全店＆オンライン、WIT STUDIOイベント販売ほかにて取り扱い予定
TVアニメ「ローリング☆ガールズ」公式画集が2冊同時発売！
原案イラスト集「tanulog ローリング☆ガールズ コンセプトワークス」
設定資料集「ローリング☆ガールズ 設定資料集」 「tanulog ローリング☆ガールズ コンセプトワークス」は、キャラクター原案＆イメージボード・tanuが手がけた原案作業（コンセプトアート、キャラクター原案、イメージボード）に加え、EDイラスト、版権イラストほか約300点を一冊に収録！表紙は、4人のモブ少女の旅立ちを改めて描いた“tanu”描き下ろしイラスト！ 「ローリング☆ガールズ 設定資料集」は、アニメ制作のために作成された全12話分のキャラクター設定、色彩設計、エフェクト設定、プロップ設定、メカ設定、美術設定、美術ボード、さらには作画注意事項などの資料を加え、約650点を一冊に収録！表紙は、キャラクター設定＆総作画監督・北田勝彦描き下ろしの全員集合イラスト！ また8/14(金)より、東京秋葉原アニメイトAKIBAカルチャーズZONEにて、先行販売が決定！
ご購入者には先着で「WIT STUDIO カット袋風ショッパー」をプレゼント！
秋葉原にお越しの際は、ぜひアニメイトACZ店にお立ち寄りください！！ ■ tanulog ローリング☆ガールズ コンセプトワークス 発売日：2015年8月21日(金)
価格：2,800円+税
仕様：原案イラスト集／縦B5／フルカラー／188頁
内容：
tanu描き下ろしイラスト表紙
TVアニメ「ローリング☆ガールズ」のコンセプトアート、キャラクター原案、イメージボード、版権イラストほかを本人のコメントとともに収録
発売：WIT STUDIO ※取り扱いは全国アニメイト、WIT STUDIOイベント販売を予定しております。ご注意ください。 ■ ローリング☆ガールズ 設定資料集 発売日：2015年8月21日(金)
価格：3,200円+税
仕様：設定資料集／縦B5／フルカラー、モノクロ／288頁
内容：
キャラクター設定＆総作画監督・北田勝彦描き下ろしイラスト表紙
キャラクター設定、色彩設計、エフェクト設定、プロップ設定、メカ設定、美術設定、美術ボードほかの設定資料を収録
発売：WIT STUDIO ※取り扱いは全国アニメイト、WIT STUDIOイベント販売を予定しております。ご注意ください。 ▼tanu 公式サイト「サボlog」 http://saborilog.blog.fc2.com/ ▼WIT STUDIO 公式サイト http://www.witstudio.co.jp/
2015.7.24
8/2(日)「ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロージョン！」物販施策＆開始時間決定！
8/2（日）開催「ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロージョン！」の会場物販施策が決定致しました！
会場にて下記対象商品¥3,000(税込）以上お買い上げ毎にスペシャル抽選会にご参加頂けます。
抽選で当たりが出れば下記の特典をプレゼント！ 【抽選特典】
■A賞 THE ROLLING GIRLS4名サイン入り公式パンフレット
■B賞 ロリガツアーズ！特製スタンプ（全12種のうち1種）
■C賞 アフレコ台本（全12話のうち1冊）
■D賞 B2番宣ポスター
■E賞 主題歌集ジャケット使用ブロマイド（全4種のうち1種） 更に対象商品¥6,000(税込）以上お買い上げで先着にてB2パッケージ告知ポスターをプレゼント致します！
【対象商品】
■公式パンフレット/税込価格：￥2,000
■オリジナルTシャツ（M・L）/税込価格：￥3,000
■オリジナルマフラータオル/税込価格：￥2,000
■月明かりの石/税込価格：￥2,000
■宇徳園銘茶/税込価格：￥500
■ソング集Ⅱ「STONES」/税込価格：￥2,500 ※特典・商品には数に限りがございますので、予めご了承下さい。 ＜＜＜ 会場販売スケジュール ＞＞＞ 公演チケットをお持ちのお客様 物販開始時間：11:00〜夜の部 終演後
公演チケットをお持ちで無いお客様 物販開始時間：18：30〜夜の部 終演後 ●公演チケットは物販コーナー入口にて係員が確認させていただきます。いかなる理由がございましても、公演チケットをお持ちでないお客様には販売ができません。あらかじめご了承ください。
●1会計1アイテムにつき 【3個まで】購入可能です。尚、Tシャツはサイズ違いでも 1会計 3枚までです。
●購入制限は変更になる場合がございます。
●イベント販売商品のため、数に限りがあります。品切れの際はご容赦ください。
●クレジットカードは VISA、Master、American Express の3社がご利用いただけます。また、全レジ対応可能です。
●ご購入品のお渡し間違い、釣り銭不足などないよう心がけて販売を行ないますが、必ずご購入後にその場でご確認ください。後ほどのお申し出にはご対応致しかねます。
●待機列ではスタッフの指示に従ってください。ルール違反やまわりの迷惑になる行為があった場合は、物販をお断りさせていただく場合がございます。
●会場周辺は住宅地です。大声を出したり騒いだりすることは絶対に止めてください。物販が中止になる可能性もございます。
●トイレなどで列を離れる際には、前後の方に声をかけて了承を得てください。
●列を離れる際に荷物を置きっぱなしにはしないでください。
2015.7.23
「森友望未」をキャラクター設定：北田勝彦氏の完全監修で初フィギュア化！！！！
『ローリング☆ガールズ』はWIT STUDIO制作オリジナルテレビアニメ！
「平和請負人」として世直しの旅を続ける少女4人の冒険活劇をコミカルにスピーディーに展開！！
何の取り柄もない「普通の少女」4人組が一念発起し平和を守るための旅を開始。
所沢にある焼きだんご店「もりとも」の一人娘「森友望未」をフィギュア化。
まったく普通の子。通知表もオール3で、とにかく普通の子をキャラクター設定：北田勝彦氏の完全監修で初フィギュア化！！！！ ■商品名：Hdge technical statue No.8 ローリング☆ガールズ 森友望未
■発売元：ユニオンクリエイティブ株式会社
■サイズ：約25cm
■シリーズ名：H"dge（エッヂ）
■タイプ：彩色済み完成品フィギュア
■上代：15000円＋税
■素材：ATBC-PVC（本体）、ABS（台座）
■監修：北田勝彦
■彩色監修：小針裕子
■原型＆彩色：澤田啓介（澤田工房）
■発売日：2015年11月発売予定
■JAN：4562192556766
■コピーライト：（c）2015 The Rolling Girls 製作委員会
■対象年齢15歳以上 【リリーススケジュール】
受注開始日：2015年7月23日
受注閉め日：2015年8月18日
発売時期：2015年11月発売
2015.7.15
7/17(金)18:00〜「ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロージョン！」チケット一般販売開始！
7/17(金)18:00から「ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロージョン！」チケット（昼の部・夜の部）の一般販売を開始いたします。
THE ROLLING GIRLSがライブで皆様に元気ををお届けします！
数に限りがございますので、お早めに！ 購入先：http://special.canime.jp/rollinggirls/ticket/
2015.7.15
8/2(日)「ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロージョン！」イベントグッズを公開！
8/2(日)に開催される「ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロージョン！」で販売するイベントグッズを公開しました！ ■公式パンフレット
税込価格：￥2,000
商品内容：描き下ろしイベントビジュアルを使用したイベントパンフレット。
キャスト撮りおろし写真＆インタビューや各話の場面写真・設定資料、
またスタッフからの描き下ろしイラスト・コメントなどの豪華内容をフルカラー24Pに収録！ ■オリジナルTシャツ（M・L）
税込価格：￥3,000
商品内容：ガーリーでロックなデザインのオリジナルTシャツ。M・Lの2サイズをご用意しています。
■オリジナルマフラータオル
税込価格：￥2,000
商品内容：「女の子×バイク×旅立ち」をイメージしたビビッドなマフラータオル。 ■月明かりの石
税込価格：￥2,000
商品内容：「月明かりの石」をイメージした、7色に発光するハート型オリジナルプレートライト。
楽曲に合わせて色を変え、ステージ上のTHE ROLLING GIRLSに皆様の熱い心を届けて下さい！ ■宇徳園銘茶
税込価格：￥500
商品内容：マッチャグリーンこと宇徳真茶未の実家「宇徳園」が作る銘茶をイメージしたお茶。
全ての商品にオリジナルのシリアルナンバーがプリントされています。ライブのお供にぜひ！ ■ソング集Ⅱ「STONES」
税込価格：￥2,500
商品内容：THE ROLLING GIRLSによるソング集の第2弾。
第8話の挿入歌「STONES」のカバー楽曲に加え、
「青空」、「シャララ」、「人にやさしく」ソロVer.バージョンなどを収録。 ◆収録曲
1. STONES (THE ROLLING GIRLS）
2. 青空 （御園 千綾 CV：花守ゆみり）
3. シャララ (THE ROLLING GIRLS）
4. STONES（鴨川ロッカーズ CV：久保田 薫） Bonus Track
5. 人にやさしく（森友望未 ＣＶ：小澤亜李ソロ ver）
6. 人にやさしく（小坂 結季奈 ＣＶ :日高里菜ソロ ver）
7. 人にやさしく（響 逢衣 ＣＶ：種田梨沙ソロ ver）
8. 人にやさしく（御園 千綾 ＣＶ：花守ゆみりソロ ver）
9. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（森友望未 ＣＶ：小澤亜李ソロ ver）
10. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（小坂 結季奈 ＣＶ :日高里菜ソロ ver）
11. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（響 逢衣 ＣＶ：種田梨沙ソロ ver）
12. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ（御園 千綾 ＣＶ：花守ゆみりソロ ver）
13. ＳＴＯＮＥＳ [inst] ◇その他にもグッズ販売や購入者特典を企画中！ 詳細は後日発表致しますのでお楽しみに！
2015.7.6
7/17(金)にニコニコ生放送で全話一挙放送が決定！
2015.6.25
「ローリング☆ガールズ」のカカオトークスタンプが配信開始！
スマートフォン向けメッセンジャーアプリ「カカオトーク」にて「ローリング☆ガールズ」のデジタルスタンプの配信を開始致します！
お友達とのコミュニケーションをスタンプで楽しみましょう！
特設サイト→http://camp.joysound.com/kakao-stamp/ カカオトークのアプリケーションダウンロード方法は以下です。
■Android
Google play⇒カカオトーク⇒インストール ■App Store
App Store⇒カカオトーク⇒インストール 購入方法は以下です。
カカオトークアプリ内のアイテムストアにてスタンプを選択。
対象コンテンツを選択してからダウンロードしてください。
ダウンロード後、すぐに使用することが可能です！ 販売金額：240円（税込）
2015.6.17
ライブ＆トークイベント『ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロ―ジョン!』出演者へのプレゼント・お花について
●プレゼント等につきまして 会場入口にプレゼントボックスをご用意させていただいております。出演者へのプレゼントは直接本人にはお渡しいただけませんので、
当ボックスをご利用いただければ幸いです。お預かり後、スタッフから本人にお渡しいたします。 ●スタンド花／籠花・花束につきまして お客様がご自身でスタンド等の祝花を手配される際は、以下の点を必ずお守りください。 1.配達着日時指定
指定到着日時は、公演当日2015年 8月2日(日)午前中指定にて、花屋さんまたは宅配業者に必ずご指示ください。
2.回収指定
2015年8月2日(日)すべての公演終演後、もしくは8月3日（月）午前中までにスタンド花のお引き取りをしていただきますよう、花屋さんまたは宅配業者へ必ずご指示をお願いいたします。
なお、当日の回収可能時間は同日21時30分頃とお伝えください。
（公演翌日午前中までの回収が条件となります。回収が翌日午後になります場合はお受けできませんのであらかじめご了承ください。）
3.大きさ
フラワースタンドについては、底辺(スタンド足部分)が40センチ×40センチ、高さが180センチ以下のものでお願いいたします。
4.その他禁止事項
スタンド用札に「住所」「電話番号」が記載されたものは会場に飾れません。特に法人団体様はご注意ください。 ※上記、指定時間外にお届けの場合は、お受取りいたしかねます。
※スタンド花の会場内(会場敷地内の場外も含む)での設置場所についてはご指定いただけません。
※渋滞などによる配達のトラブルや会場内の都合により、会場に設置できない場合がございますので、あらかじめご了承ください。 【送付先】
〒151-8539 東京都渋谷区代々木1-53-1
山野ホール気付 ライブ＆トークイベント『ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロ―ジョン!』事務局 宛 ●花束、フラワーアレンジメント(籠花)について 花束、アレンジメントはすべて、プレゼントと同じ扱いになります。入口の『プレゼント受付』までお持ちください。
ロビーに飾ることはできませんので、あらかじめご了承ください。
・籠花の、花を入れる容器のサイズは幅30センチ、奥行き30センチ以内のものでお願いいたします。容器の高さを含む花の高さは80センチ以下でお願いいたします。
2015.5.20
『2015年8月2日（日）開催！ライブ＆トークイベント『ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロ―ジョン!』詳細発表！
2015年8月2日（日）山野ホールにて開催されますライブ＆トークイベント『ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロ―ジョン!』詳細を発表致します。
【イベント名】ライブ＆トークイベント『ロリガ・ロック・エクスプロ―ジョン!』 【日時】２０１５年８月２日（日）
昼の部：１４：３０開場／１５：００開演
夜の部：１８：００開場／１８：３０開演 【会場】山野ホール 東京都渋谷区代々木1-53-1
【出演】小澤亜李、日高里菜、種田梨沙、花守ゆみり
※出演者は予告なく変更になる場合がございます。 【内容】ライブ＆トーク
【チケット価格】6,000円＋税
◎枚数制限：シリアルナンバー１つにつき２枚 ◎未就学児入場不可 下記、対象商品内に「イベントチケット優先販売申込券」が封入されております。 【昼の部】
2015年5月20日（水）発売
ローリング☆ガールズ Vol.3 【Blu-ray】(PCXE-50513)：8,208円(税込)
ローリング☆ガールズ Vol.3【DVD】(PCBE-54813)：7,128円(税込)
【夜の部】
2015年6月17日（水）発売
ローリング☆ガールズ Vol.4 【Blu-ray】(PCXE-50514)：8,208円(税込)
ローリング☆ガールズ Vol.4【DVD】(PCBE-54814)：7,128円(税込)
2015.4.30
マチアソビ vol.14 （5月3日～5月5日）にて「ローリング☆ガールズ」の上映＆スタッフトークイベント開催決定！
『ローリング☆ガールズ』集え、徳島自警団！
【昼の部】ロリガ トーク＆ショー!!／【夜の部】ロリガ ＜全話一挙＞ショー!! WIT STUDIO制作のオリジナルTVアニメーション、モブ少女四人組が織りなす新感覚・青春ロードムービー『ローリング☆ガールズ』が「マチ★アソビ Vol.14」に緊急参加！
出合小都美(監督)、むとうやすゆき(脚本)、和田丈嗣(プロデューサー)によるトーク＆3人とともにスタッフいち押し話数を鑑賞する【昼の部】と、全12話を一挙鑑賞する【夜の部】の二本立て！ ★【昼の部】『ローリング☆ガールズ』集え、徳島自警団！ ロリガ トーク＆ショー!!
日時：4日(月祝) 17:00～18:30
場所：ufotable CINEMA シアター2
出演：出合小都美(監督)・むとうやすゆき(脚本)・和田丈嗣(プロデューサー)
内容：トーク＆質疑応答、スタッフいち押し話数の上映
料金：無料
※イベント整理券の配布場所や時間は確定し次第お知らせいたします。 ★【夜の部】『ローリング☆ガールズ』集え、徳島自警団！ ロリガ ＜全話一挙＞ショー!!
日時：4日(月祝) 24:00～29:00(予定)
場所：ufotable CINEMA シアター1
料金：2,500円（ロリガトーク＆上映会の整理券をお持ちの方は500円引き）
内容：全12話一挙上映
※イベント整理券の配布場所や時間は確定し次第お知らせいたします。
※参加者全員にささやかではありますがお土産を検討中です。
2015.4.13
ローリング☆ガールズ ２発売記念お渡し会決定！
ローリング☆ガールズ ２の発売を記念致しまして、THE ROLLING GIRLSの４名による特典お渡し会が決定致しました。 【開催日】
2015年6月7日 日曜日 【開催場所】
東京都豊島区南池袋１丁目28-2 池袋P’PARCO B2F ニコニコ本社イベントスペース
※集合場所：東京都豊島区南池袋１丁目28-2 池袋P’PARCO 1階 正面口前 【内容】
キャスト撮り下ろしブロマイドお渡し会
※出演者各々より一枚づつ別絵柄のブロマイドをお渡し致します。 【開催時間】
・1部：11:00集合/11:30開演
・2部：13:00集合/13:30開演 【出演者】
ＴＨＥ ＲＯＬＬＩＮＧ ＧＩＲＬＳ
小澤亜李、日高里菜、種田梨沙、花守ゆみり 【対象法人】
きゃにめ.jp 【対象商品】
2015/04/15発売
【きゃにめ.jp限定版】ローリング☆ガールズ 2 BD /SCXE.00042/￥7,600(本体）+税 【予約期間】
2015/4/13(月) 19:00 〜 2015/5/20(水) 23:59 ※定員に達し次第終了 ※イベント参加される方はきゃにめ.jp特典ミュージックカードは対象外となります。
※その他応募方法と注意事項に関しては、申込ページをご確認ください。
URL：http://special.canime.jp/rollinggirls/
●お申し込みに関するお問い合わせ
きゃにめ.jp： http://special.canime.jp/ticket/
※公演の内容や当選者情報に関することはお答えできませんので何卒ご了承ください。
2015.4.8
ローリング☆ガールズ 痛印の発売決定!
2015.4.1
「ローリング☆ガールズ ロリガショップ！ ～上野編～」
2015年1月より放送の新感覚ロードムービー「ローリング☆ガールズ」から期間限定ショップが上野マルイに登場！ 「ローリング☆ガールズ」イベント開催期間中は限定グッズやコラボ商品をはじめ、会場でしか見ることのできないレアアイテムなど盛りだくさん。
「ローリング☆ガールズ」の限定商品も早くもゲットできるチャンスです！！ 開催期間：2015年4月23日（木）～5月7日（木）
開催場所：上野マルイ ８階 特設スペース 【エポスカード会員様限定抽選会】
期間中、「ロリガショップ！ ～上野編～」にて、税込3,000円以上お買上げいただき、エポスカードでご精算（現金またはクレジット払い）いただいたお客さまは、「ロリガショップ！ ～上野編～」オリジナルグッズが当たる抽選会にご参加いただけます。 ※ エポスカードはご本人様以外ご利用いただけません。
※ 抽選は1会計1回とさせていただきます。
税込3,000円毎ではございませんので、ご注意ください。
※ 景品はなくなり次第終了となりますのであらかじめご了承下さい。
※ 抽選会景品の内容は予告無く変更になる場合がございます。 この機会のご来店をお待ちしております。 「ロリガショップ！ ～上野編～」の商品情報はこちらから！
http://www.the-chara.com/html/page22.html（THEキャラ特設）
2015.3.28
第8話挿入歌「STONES」の配信が決定！
2015.3.25
第12話放送時間変更のお知らせ
テレビ愛知・ＴＶＱ九州放送にて第12話の放送時間が変更となります。
ご視聴の際はお間違いないようご注意ください。 【テレビ愛知】
放送日：3月29日
放送時間：24:35〜25:05 ⇒ 24:55〜25:25 【TVQ九州放送】
放送日：3月30日
放送時間：26:30～27:00 ⇒ 27:00～27:30
2015.3.19
3月28日（土）『ロリガツアーズ!旅の寄り道 part02』スタンプ押印について
3月28日（土）開催の『ロリガツアーズ!旅の寄り道 part02』にて行われるスタンプ押印ですが、イベント会場の新宿ピカデリー1F特設会場にて実施いたします。スタンプ押印に参加される方は、下記の時間をご確認の上、ご来場ください。 〇スタンプ押印会場
新宿ピカデリー １Ｆ特設会場 〇時間
１７：００～１８：２０（予定）
（本イベント座席指定券をお持ちの方のみ対象となります）
※１６：３０より待機列を作らせていただきます。 〇詳細
※スタンプ押印場所は新宿ピカデリー１Ｆ特設会場です。
※当日の状況により列形成時間が早まることがございます。
※スタンプ押印は本イベントの座席指定券をお持ちでない方は参加できません。
※スタンプ押印はお一人様１回とさせていただきます。
※写真撮影はご遠慮いただきます。
※開演に遅れた場合はスタンプ押印をお断りさせていただく場合がございますのでご了承ください。
2015.3.19
ローリング☆ガールズ 長崎放送での放送が決定!
「ローリング☆ガールズ」が長崎放送で放送されることが決定致しました。
4月5日（ |
organizations to create a system in Wyoming where the homeless can get some help if they manage to stick around and fill out the right paperwork, the numbers show that it just isn’t working. If we first provide shelter to those who desperately need it, with no strings attached, people then have a fighting chance to battle whatever problems led them to live in the streets in the first place.
By giving them a roof over their heads instead of a hospital bed or jail cell, Wyoming communities can show that they are both compassionate and good stewards of public funds.
— Veteran Wyoming journalist Kerry Drake is the editor-in-chief of The Casper Citizen, a nonprofit, online community newspaper. It can be viewed at www.caspercitizen.com.
— Columns are the signed perspective of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of WyoFile’s staff, board of directors or its supporters. WyoFile welcomes guest columns and op-ed pieces from all points of view. If you’d like to write a guest column for WyoFile, please contact WyoFile editor-in-chief Dustin Bleizeffer at [email protected]The characteristic composition of horsemilk explains a large part of the functioning. People drink horsemilk, because they have charge of cow milk allergy, but also in relation to other aspects of their health people benefit from the effects of horsemilk. Especially for people with skin problems, stomach-and bowel problems horsemilk seems to have a positive influence.
By reinforcing the bowel flora and by promoting the metabolism, horsemilk has a positive influence on your health. Because of this it is stamina enlarging. Horsemilk is recommended at metabolism problems, irregular chair pace, skin problems, too high cholesterol value, stiff joints, cancer and menopause symptoms.
Horsemilk can serve as a good alternative!
Many ailments at people derives from a disturbed bowel flora, which can cause a shortage to minerals and vitamins and a lack of resistance, resulting in a big change on infections and inflammation, whereby the bad bacteria can get the overhand. These bad bacteria produce toxic waste, which irritates the guts and will be transferred into the bloodstream. These irritations of the guts can cause diarrhoea or constipation, which results in rumbling bowels, gas, increased stomach acid production and nausea. The impact of absorbing the toxic waste into the blood can result to weariness, headache, overload of the liver and even forms of eczema, psoriasis, bronchitis and asthma.
A property of horsemilk is that it stimulates the increase of the good bacteria in the bowel flora, which results in the fact that the bad bacteria can not extend its self any further, the absorption of the toxic substances in the bloodstream will decrease. The bowel flora can recover, the resistance increases and the chance to ailments and infections decreases.
Horsemilk is good for you, it supports you at numerous physical affairs such as:
General physical health
It gives more energy;
It raises the resistance of the organism;
It raises the vitality ;
It promotes convalescence after sickness
It has a positive influence to meno-pause phenomena;
At stiff joints and muscle fatigue;
At shortages to minerals and vitamins;
To control the cholesterolvalue;
Stress, weariness and discomforts
It has a favorable functioning on infirmity of old age
Horsemilk can serve as a substitute to cow milk with cow milk allergy.
Metabolism problems
It promotes the internal purification;
It promotes the digestion.
Hearth and veins
It has a positive influence to heart and veins;
It has a blood purifying effect.
It ensures a better blood circulation
Hearth- and blood circulation impairments
Use of horsemilk by a complete range of patients with a high blood pressure, resulted in an obvious improvement of the whole general condition and the blood pressure was reduced its normal value.
Anaemia
The content of horsemilk shows a clear higher Iron value then mother milk and cow milk. Horsemilk has proved its impact on anaemia already multiple times by an increase of haemoglobin (red blood pigment for oxygen transport) in the blood of the users.
immunity sicknesses and shortages in the defence system
Horsemilk offers a good opportunity for regulating and strengthening of the functioning of the immune system. The effect of horsemilk can be explained by – as by human mother milk – the high value of albumin and globulin (building materials for the antibodies), to minerals and high-quality unsaturated fat acids.
Stomach function
It is good for a normal stomach function;
It clears up a feeling of flatulance.
It has a stomach strengthening functioning
Liver disease and jammings in the fat metabolism
At all liver disease (from chronicle hepatitis to fat metabolism disorders with a increased cholesterol mirror) is a diet with low-fat, light digestible food and also an absolute abstention of alcohol essential. Horsemilk has been already excellent designated for this diet by nature. The high value of unsaturated and plural saturated fat acids have a regulating effect on a derailed fat metabolism. At regular use it can decrease the cholesterol level of the blood.
Horsemilk appears to be directly regenerating and has a beneficial impact on sick liver cells
Sickness of the lungs and of the airways
Positive is the functioning of horsemilk on chronic infections, infectious and allergic processes in the organism. Overturned metabolism- and defence mechanism can be essential orientated differently. Therefore horsemilk definitely belongs in a total treatment of ailments of the airways.
Muscles, Joints and Bones
It is good for stiff muscles and joints
Supports sport performances
Takes care for good building up and maintenance of the bones. (not against detoriated bones)
Bowels
It promotes the bowel functioning as a result of which you get a regular metabolism;
It helps for bad digestion, acid belching, inconveniences in the abdomen area
Cholesterol
It promotes a justified cholesterol level.
Itch and tingling
It reduces itch and tingling (whether or not associated with a red/poor/irritated skin).
Skin
It can be used for internal and external skincare;
Skin problems such as eczema, acne/youth pimples, neurodermitis, psoriasis, skin allergy, poor or irritated skin and several other skin problems;
It purifies the skin;
Unclean skin: intolerance (hay fever, sun or cow milk);
It supports the self healing ability of the skin.
Horsemilk at cancer therapy and aftercare
The functioning of horsemilk on the total immune system, the stimulation of all detoxication mechanisms of the body (liver, kidney’s, intestines, sweat glands ect.) and the health making of the blood forming texture, that all makes the usage of horsemilk in the cancer therapy, and cancer readjustment most interesting and important.
With cancer diseases is the application of irradiation therapy and chemotherapy besides a surgical treatment mostly unavoidable; therefore should be given considerable attention to the total physical condition of the patient. Besides the heavy mental conflicts, there is also the physical burden on the patient through radiation and chemotherapy mostly to the boundaries of the carrying capacity of the patient.
Because the cancer therapy attacks not only the sick cancer cells of the patient, but also the healthy cells (among whom mainly the cells of the hair roots, the guts, the blood forming organs, the immune system and the skin) suffers the patient during and after a series of irradiations and treatment with chemotherapy, at intervals respectively, to a harsh physical weariness, loss of hair, intestinal problems, and a high grade of vulnerability for infectionalinfectional diseases. The organism is hardly capable to protect itself against banal infections, let alone that it is capable of mobilising its defence system in the battle against metastases (daughter cells) and the forming of new cancer tumours. Besides that there will be a hard burden on the body caused by the metabolism toxics which will be released during the therapy and by the damaged detoxication mechanisms.
To endure this critical phase better, to activate the immune system anew, to trigger the detoxification through liver, bowels, kidney’s and skin anew and to give the patient new strength, is horsemilk (in milk, -powder or capsule form) recommended strongly.
May it be clear that horsemilk is not a magic cure by which you can cure incurable diseases. Horsemilk has a positive influence to the health and can give support to the battle against a diversity of different ailments.Photo Credit: Contributed
The President of the Okanagan Pride Society feels the point behind the rainbow crosswalks in Kelowna has been lost and the negative comments coming forward could hurt a lot of youth in the LGBTQ community.
Debate about the rainbow crosswalks has not died down since they were unveiled on August 6th at the intersection of Lawrence and Pandosy.
Wilbur Turner, President of the Okanagan Pride Society, says he has read numerous online comments from people who are disgusted with the colourful addition to the heart of downtown Kelowna.
“I think it’s sad that someone has totally misinterpreted what they stand for and what they mean,” said Turner. “There is nothing in there that says it is for the LGBTQ community. It is a symbol of inclusion. It’s a statement that Kelowna is an inclusive and progressive community.”
Turner fears that the negative comments made about the crosswalks could have a damaging effect to vulnerable youth within the LGBTQ community, adding that they need people who will stand behind them and beside them to “let them know that it is okay to be different, who they are, and who they were born to be.”
“The rate of suicide among the LGBTQ youth is much higher than in the straight population,” said Turner. "It is simply because of these kinds of things that happen, they don’t feel supported or safe. They feel really discouraged. It is important that we put out a positive message that this is a great place to live, you will be supported here, and that it’s okay to be who you are.”
One person who is speaking out against the rainbow crosswalks is Kelowna resident Nancy Enns.
“I feel discriminated. I feel they are forcing a lifestyle on me that I do not support, I do not approve of, and I’m not interested in. Not only did they do that, they did it on my clock, and on my dime.”
Enns wants the rainbow crosswalks removed and plans to take the issue to court if she can.
“This opens up a whole can of worms. If they’re going to be so-called impartial and inclusive, then they better be prepared to do 2,001 crosswalks because there are a lot of different lifestyles out there. If you’re going to pay homage to one, you better be prepared to pay homage to 1,000 of them.”
Photo Credit: KelownaNow.com
Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran has also started to receive a few negative phone calls and anonymous messages via social media about the rainbow crosswalks, but says “the messages of support far outweigh the messages that are negative.”
According to Basran, the city is not getting rid of the rainbow crosswalks.
“I’m not doing this for any political gain. I’m doing this because I feel this is what is right for our community. That’s the bottom line for me,” said Basran. “This is what is right for our community, in my opinion, and I’m not going to let a few anonymous, negative messages sway me in a different direction.”
The rainbow colours are a symbol to the LGBTQ community, first appearing in 1978. Each colour stands for something different. Red means life, orange stands for feeling, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for serenity/harmony, and violet for spirit.I mentioned today’s Jerusalem terror attack in my earlier post, but I think it’s worth returning to in light of the information we now have as well as the bias-on-steroids we witnessed in the aftermath of the deadly attack. The only way to understand how major media outlets could behave so disreputably is to keep in mind a point I’ve made here before: the perseverance of the Palestinian narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict depends entirely on the ignorance and dishonesty of the Western press.
Here, briefly, is what happened:
A three-month-old girl was killed Wednesday afternoon and eight others were injured when a car crashed into a crowd at a light rail station in Jerusalem in what officials said was a likely terrorist attack. A suspect, identified by an Israeli official as a member of terror group Hamas, attempted to flee the scene on foot and was shot by police, a police spokesperson said.
And here, also via the Times of Israel, is the aftermath:
Major clashes took place Wednesday evening between Palestinians and Israeli police forces in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Silwan and Issawiya, following a suspected terrorist attack in which a three-month-old Israeli girl was killed. Dozens of masked Palestinians set tires and dumpsters ablaze and threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police officers in Silwan and Issawiya, police said in a statement.
If you want to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict, those two stories are a good introduction. The Israeli government built rail access to Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem to better integrate them into Israeli society. Arab Jerusalemites have made the very instruments of Israeli outreach and integration into targets of sporadic violence. That violence resulted, today, in a member of a Palestinian terror group carrying out an attack and murdering a baby. In response, the Palestinians rioted. Welcome to Jerusalem 2014.
But that’s not the end of the lesson. The media’s reaction to the murder was stomach turning–and, unfortunately, not atypical.
The Associated Press got plenty of attention for its initial headline of the story: “Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem.” As CAMERA noted, “there were clearly enough details available at the time, even with the news still in the hazy ‘breaking’ stage, that the inappropriate and misleading headline should never have appeared on the story. The story opened by noting that a driver ‘slammed into a crowded train stop’ and was thought to be a ‘terror attack.’”
Indeed. CAMERA went on to note that about an hour later, the AP re-released the story with the following headline: “Car slams into east Jerusalem train station.” You’ll notice that this, too, is repellant behavior by the AP. Many others noticed as well, and said so. To say getting the truth from the AP on Israel is like pulling teeth would be an understatement. But finally, the truth appeared; the headline currently on the story is: “Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station.”
But the AP wasn’t alone. Scanning the BBC, I had noticed their initial headline (since changed as well): “Nine hurt as car hits pedestrians at Jerusalem station.” As the Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman pointed out, the headline on the version he saw, and took a screenshot of, was “Car hits people at Jerusalem station.” Either the BBC was deliberately downplaying the story, or the editor in charge thought he was posting a story about an evil car magically becoming sentient only to lash out, like Black Sabbath’s Iron Man, at the humans around him.
Later in the day, after executives at the BBC located a shred of integrity hidden somewhere in the sofa cushions, that was changed as well. It now reads: “Jerusalem car ‘attack’ kills baby at rail station.” I say “a shred of integrity” because the BBC still saw fit to wrap “attack” in scare quotes. What are the options, here? Was it a car “love tap”? It was a terrorist attack, perpetrated by a member of a terrorist organization.
After the attack and the Jerusalem mayor’s declaration that the murdered baby was an American citizen, the bright shining star at the State Department, spokeswoman Marie Harf, apparently could only muster the following, as reported by the Times of Israel: “The Israelis are currently looking into the incident. We are in touch with them and we’ll see what more information we can get, also urge all sides to exercise restraint and maintain calm.” I suppose if the driver of the car had said something mean about John Kerry, she’d really let him have it.
In any event, all sides are not exercising restraint and maintaining calm. Only the Israeli side is. The Palestinians are agitating for more, relying on an international press to obfuscate and deploy scare quotes as needed.Piano Solo, Organ, Harpsichord, Keyboard/Synthesizer - Early Intermediate - Digital Download
Composed by Lodewijk Crommelin. Etudes and Exercises, General Instructional, Technique Training. 112 pages. Published by Crommelin Music (S0.126659).
Item Number: S0.126659
This e-book is an extensive collection of triads and seventh chords in all inversions, all the major and minor scales, the church modes, whole-tone, chromatic, octatonic, pentatonic, blues, gypsy and several other exotic scales written out in all keys. It can be used by pianists, organ players and players of any other keyboard instrument. The triads and seventh chords are presented in a basic exercise to learn each chord and its inversions in a very simple and straightforward manner. The section with scales starts with the major and minor scales, after which you will find all the other scales. This book is suitable for beginning players, who are just starting to learn the major and minor scales and triads, as well as for advanced players who want to become familiar with other chords and/or scales. With this 110-page e-book you have the most complete set of scales and chords all-in-one at your disposal!
About SMP Press
This product was created by a member of SMP Press, our global community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. Our independent musicians have created unique compositions and arrangements for the Sheet Music Plus community, many of which are not available anywhere else.
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About Digital Downloads
Digital Downloads are downloadable sheet music files that can be viewed directly on your computer, tablet or mobile device. Once you download your digital sheet music, you can view and print it at home, school, or anywhere you want to make music, and you don’t have to be connected to the internet. Just purchase, download and play!
PLEASE NOTE: Your Digital Download will have a watermark at the bottom of each page that will include your name, purchase date and number of copies purchased. You are only authorized to print the number of copies that you have purchased. You may not digitally distribute or print more copies than purchased for use (i.e., you may not print or digitally distribute individual copies to friends or students).The Labour London Mayoral hopeful Sadiq Khan has outlined a six point manifesto for cycling that he hopes will propel him to the top job.
Claiming that his plan will make cycling safer and easier in the capital, Mr Khan has also pledged to build the Rotherhithe Bridge, connecting Canary Wharf to Surrey Quays.
Sadiq Khan’s plan for cycling includes:
Continuing the Cycle Superhighway Programme, investigating new routes and learning the lessons from earlier schemes, with a focus on segregated provision where appropriate.
Prioritising Quiet Ways to broaden London’s safe cycle network, completing the roll out of the existing town-centre cycling improvement plans, and begin a new round of schemes.
An urgent review of the Safer Junction Programmes to identify and commit to improvements at more of the major accident blackspots.
Rolling out 20mph zones across the city as part of the '20’s Plenty' campaign.
Pedestrianising Oxford Street, improve cycle access and look at introducing car-free weekends, following the lead of Paris.
Delivering more cycle storage and parking, using the London Plan to ensure provision in new office and residential developments, while working with London boroughs deliver more on-street secure parking provision in residential areas.
Mr Khan said: “I’ll make London a byword for cycling around the world – making it easier and safer to get around our city by bike and encouraging thousands more Londoners to take up cycling.
“We still have a long way to go to make London safer for cyclists – and for those who would like to cycle but currently don’t feel comfortable doing so.
"I want to develop and accelerate the progress made with London’s bike hire scheme and Cycle Superhighways, learning from what has worked and what hasn’t.
"Where possible, I want to see safe and segregated provision delivered on Superhighway routes, quiet ways and in our town-centres, as well as many more cycle storage and parking spaces.”
We recently reported how plans have been unveiled for a pedestrian and cycling bridge across the River Thames in London linking Canary Wharf and Rotherhithe, with a ground-breaking design that also owes much to Tower Bridge, the next surface crossing upstream.
Like that iconic landmark, the proposed new bridge is based on a bascule design – it will open in the middle to allow ships to pass underneath – and according to the people behind the project, would be the longest such structure in the world.
At an estimated cost of £88 million, it wouldn't be cheap, although as the Guardian points out, that’s half the cost of the Garden Bridge championed by Joanna Lumley, and from which cycling would be banned.
Moreover, it links two parts of London that are increasingly in need of a river crossing as development around Canary Wharf continues, with many workers in the financial centre, also home to a sizeable shopping mall and a huge number of catering outlets, commuting there from south London.
While the counterweights for Tower Bridge are housed in the base of the two towers that give the structure its unique silhouette, those in the proposed Rotherhithe Bridge would instead be formed by the two masts.
“The result,” says Guardian architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, “is an exceptionally lean structure, which looks like a pair of whale bones held in fine balance.”
As we reported in October, Oxford Street is likely to close to motor traffic, and cyclists to be allowed to turn left at red lights, after next year, since the biggest London mayoral candidates have agreed to pursue the policies, if elected.
In response to Stop Killing Cyclists' 10 by 2020 campaign, which sets out ten asks for mayoral candidates, there was unanimous support to improve air quality on one of Europe's most polluted streets and, perhaps more surprisingly, for the Idaho Stop law (link is external), named after the US state where cyclists can treat red lights as stop signs, and proceed if the way is clear.
Mayoral candidates were chosen by their respective parties over the past weeks, and are: Sadiq Khan (Labour), Zac Goldsmith (Conservative), Caroline Pidgeon (Liberal Democrat), Sian Berry (Green). Rosalind Readhead stands as an independent candidate.General Motors (NYSE:GM) is gearing up to bring its affordable electric car, the Chevrolet Bolt, to market by the end of this year.
The Bolt is a small crossover SUV that was designed with urban environments and ride-hailing services in mind. It lacks the "coolness" of Tesla Motors' (NASDAQ:TSLA) upcoming Model 3, which has generated some 400,000 pre-orders.
GM seems OK with that: Multiple reports have suggested the Michigan factory that will produce the Bolt is set up to make around 30,000 of the electric crossovers a year, though GM officials say it could make considerably more Bolts if buyers wanted them.
But the flexibility of that Michigan factory, along with some intriguing hints from GM, suggest that GM could be planning a much bigger move into electric cars beyond the Bolt.
GM is about to have a bunch of extra room at the Bolt's factory
GM is tooling up to build the Bolt at its factory in Orion Township, Michigan. That factory was "saved" during GM's bailout and tasked with making small, fuel-efficient cars. That it does: Orion currently makes the subcompact Chevrolet Sonic and compact Buick Verano sedans.
Orion was also expected to start making a new small Cadillac crossover SUV soon, but here's where it starts to get interesting: That plan was scrapped earlier this year.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the plan to invest $245 million in the Orion factory to build an upcoming new small Cadillac crossover SUV has been cancelled, because GM has decided to build the new Caddy in a Kansas factory instead.
The Journal's report characterized the decision as a cost-saving move. But now comes word that another product currently made at Orion, the compact Buick Verano sedan, will soon be discontinued. Automotive News reported on Monday that while GM has launched an all-new version of the Verano in China, it won't be building that car in the U.S. Instead, the existing Verano will be discontinued after the 2017 model year.
Orion Assembly is expected to continue producing the Chevy Sonic until at least 2019. But its other products have been cleared out. That doesn't make sense -- unless GM is planning to move something else into the Orion factory.
Something else like more electric-car models.
Could a more dramatic electric car be in the works from GM?
Could GM be planning a bolder move into electric cars in the wake of Tesla's stunning success with Model 3 preorders?
Think about this: The Bolt isn't likely to steal very many sales from Tesla -- it just isn't that kind of car. But what if GM is planning another electric car? What if it's something very different, something more Tesla-like?
The Bolt is kind of endearingly homely, more functional than sexy. But there's no question that GM's design team can do jaw-dropping gorgeous designs when called upon to do so. We saw in the Buick Avista concept earlier this year.
Now consider: What if GM launched an electric car that looked like the Avista? What if it started around $40,000, with a nice interior in the current understated Buick style, all-wheel drive, some sort of fast-recharging capability, and thrilling performance -- for less than a loaded Model 3?
Think that would get some attention?
The takeaway: Something could be brewing here
I don't know for sure what GM has in mind. But I think the fact that it seems to be clearing other products out of its Orion factory just as it's gearing up to build the Bolt suggests that it might have something more ambitious planned.
It makes sense to me that the next GM electric car might be a flashy "halo" for the Buick brand. But obviously there are other potential electric vehicles that might make sense. Long story short: Don't be surprised if, a year from now, it turns out that GM's electric-vehicle plans are a lot bigger than we currently realize.Being a programmer, you should be very familiar with Fibbonacci numbers. It is often being introduced when teaching recursion.
Tree Recursion
Most likely the implementation of a function that calculate fib number is as follows:
( defn fib-tree [ n ] ( cond ( = n 0 ) 0 ( = n 1 ) 1 :else ( + ( fib-tree ( - n 1 )) ( fib-tree ( - n 2 )))))
This is just a direct translation from the Fibonacci number definition. Since it is straightforward and easy to understand, most textbooks use it as an typical example for illustrating recursive function. But, very few provide deeper discussions about it.
Yes, this is a recursive implementation, but it is a so called Tree Recursion. What does it mean? Let’s take a closer look together and go through the execution path.
Let’s first take the simplest case, (fib-tree 0) and (fib-tree 1), the function directly returns 0 and 1 separately.
What about (fib-tree 2), so in order to get (fib-tree 2) we need to first get (fib-tree 1) and (fib-tree 0), which we already know from above. So, fair enough.
Now let’s try (fib-tree 3). We now need (fib-tree 2) and (fib-tree 1). And in order to get (fib-tree 2), we need (fib-tree 1) and (fib-tree 0). Now pay attention here, we calculate (fib-tree 1) twice.
As a matter of fact, the bigger the n is, the more duplicate calculations there will be. And it looks like a tree as follows.
Not only there are a lot of duplicate calculations, but also each level of the tree means a call stack in memory. So this implementation is actually really bad, cause it uses a lot memory and wastes a lot of calculations. Is there a better way?
Iterative Recursion
The answer is yes. Turns out we only need 2 variables for calculating Fib number. One for the current fib number, one for storing the previous fib number in order to calculate the next one. The code looks like:
( defn fib [ n ] ( loop [ a 0 b 1 count n ] ( if ( <= count 0 ) a ( recur ( +'a b ) a ( dec count )))))
If you are still confused like I was the first time, here is a illustration.
Here we have only two variables in memory and no wasted calculations.
Conclusion
The performance of these two implementations is very big. I timed on (fib 40) on both implementations, here are the result:
For tree version: “Elapsed time: 23647.536245 msecs“
For iterative version: “Elapsed time: 0.099965 msecs“
So the verdict is, try to come up with a iterative version of recursion as much as possible.From CVS to SVN
ReZound has now switched from using CVS to SVN.
All old history has been preserved in the new SVN repository.
Read More »
0.12.3beta Release
Apologies for the long release time. This is a maintenance release just to fix some issues with compilers and platforms and other bugs. A couple of features were also added. See a complete list of changes at: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=5056&release_id=478272
Read More »
0.12.1beta Release
This release is mainly meant to address gcc4 issues and fix a few minor bugs. See a complete list of changes at: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=354037
Read More »
0.12.0beta Release
This release adds a few new major features and some overdue bug fixes. See a complete list of changes at: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=324398
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0.11.1beta Release
This is a quick fix for a mistake in the ALSA code. See also an important release note about ALSA: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=278021
Read More »
0.11.0beta Release
This release is mainly to fix a build error that several people have reported. Beyond that it also contains a preliminary native ALSA implementation and a couple of other requested features. See an important release note about ALSA and a complete list of changes at:
Read More »
0.10.0beta Release
It has been a while since the last release. The major changes include: libSoundTouch support (pitch and tempo change actions added), Adaptive Normalize, new audio output code (towards JACK correctness), some speed optimizations, more status bars, stability fixes, Spanish translation, and other fixes. See a complete list of changes at: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=254346
Read More »
0.9.0beta Release
This is a major new feature release. Mainly: LADSPA, floating point as internal type, morphing arbitrary FIR filter, burn to CD and more. See a complete list of changes at: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=196907
Read More »
Site news archive »Rep. Elijah Cummings Elijah Eugene CummingsFive things to watch as Michael Cohen testifies The Memo: Capitol Hill braces for Cohen fireworks Overnight Health Care: Senators grill drug execs over high prices | Progressive Dems unveil Medicare for all bill | House Dems to subpoena Trump officials over family separations MORE (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, blasted the panel's chairman for refusing to meet with a whistleblower who claims to have information about Michael Flynn's efforts to do away with Russian sanctions.
The unidentified whistleblower claimed Flynn, President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE’s former national security adviser, told a former business associate on Inauguration Day that sanctions against Russia would be “ripped up” early into Trump’s presidency.
Cummings said the whistleblower, whom he found “authentic, credible and reliable," was willing to meet with the committee's chairman to discuss evidence of his claims. The chairman, Trey Gowdy Harold (Trey) Watson GowdyThe family secret Bruce Ohr told Rod Rosenstein about Russia case Trey Gowdy joins Fox News as a contributor Congress must take the next steps on federal criminal justice reforms MORE (R-S.C.), refused the offer.
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“It is astonishing to me that you, as the sitting Chairman of the Oversight Committee, are declining to meet with a whistleblower who has agreed to come forward—despite fear of retaliation—to speak directly with you about evidence relating to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his plan to lift sanctions in order to work with Russia to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East,” Cummings said in a statement directed at Gowdy on Wednesday.
Cummings publicly urged the Oversight chief to investigate the matter earlier in the day, asking him to subpoena Flynn and his business associates in a letter first reported by The New York Times. Cummings detailed the whistleblower's claims in the letter.
Gowdy, who also sits on the House Intelligence Committee, pushed back on Cummings's request. The South Carolina lawmaker said this matter belongs as part of the ongoing Russia probe led by the House Intelligence Committee, not Oversight.
“I think [the House Intelligence Committee] is the right committee to do it. My committee is looking into the things that are in the jurisdiction of the oversight committee,” he told a scrum of reporters on Wednesday night, noting that his committee is not investigating Russian interference in the election.
Cummings took aim at his reasoning for not meeting with the anonymous whistleblower.
“Your letter seems to resort to desperate and baseless jurisdictional excuses to avoid conducting oversight in an apparent attempt to protect President Trump and his administration. I ask that you please reconsider your position,” he wrote.
Last week, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the nature of his communications with Russia's ambassador to the U.S.
Flynn, who had a short-lived service in the White House, has been a key person of interest in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, as well as the multiple congressional probes looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.Sad Marine
To hope and pray for peaceful days,
Those that in them a fire grew,
Burning out a sacred force,
To be with them, the proud, the few.
So marine where have you been?
Some awful place where combat slept,
And waited for your heart to come,
Then tore it out of your thick chest,
Then hung it heavy over you
To follow you for all your days,
To soak the thoughts that you have left,
To stay with you at every age.
Sad marine, sad marine,
No one knows what you have seen,
Pick up your heart and crying soul,
Place them where a few may know.
Where have all your friends gone to?
Were you the last thing that they saw?
Are they sleeping at Arlington,
Or are they resting on a wall?
Do they visit you in dreams,
Or are they just inside your brain,
Or do they haunt you as a ghost,
Or better yet, they live the same?
Is there some old monument,
A graveyard stone that tells it all?
What is left for the living who
Had to watch their brothers’ fall?
Sad marine, sad marine,
No one knows what you have seen,
Pick up your heart and crying soul,
Place them where a few may know.
And know you did not leave them
Out there in jungle air.
And know you did not leave them
At that spot on mountain top.
And know you did not leave them
Under sky in dusty dry.
And know you did not leave them
To be a ghost on battered coast.
Reflecting some on all one’s done
Under some mortal vibrant sky,
What freedom costs and then to know
Those who have fallen never die.
Their souls shine out from heaven’s place,
Some peace all seek to feel.
They have found it early on
And left you with pain that’s real.
Only left the true marine to
Love and live and dream so deep.
Loneliness stays with the heart,
Those memories that you must keep.
Sad marine, sad marine,
No one knows what you have seen,
Pick up your heart and crying soul,
Place them where a few may know.
The light and love you have for us,
In everything you do and see,
That bond of sacred freedom trust,
The life you give you true marine
Makes us believe in hope that’s left,
To patch up that heavy heart you have,
To promise you we won’t forget,
You make us proud, you make us glad.
Carrying all that heavy load,
Kneeling down to honor friends,
Even as the time will go,
What you know will never end.
Sad marine, sad marine,
No one knows what you have seen,
Pick up your heart and crying soul,
Place them where a few may know.
Kyle McHale 2010
AdvertisementsGoLio is a Lisp dialect implemented in OCaml. The syntax, semantics and library procedures are a subset of R5RS, with one important addition: a Go-like concurrency model.
Yet another Lisp interpreter...
> ( define ( curry func arg1 ) ( lambda ( arg ) ( apply func arg1 ( list arg )))) > ( map ( curry + 2 )'( 1 2 3 4 )) ( 3 4 5 6 ) ;; just plain old s-expressions > ( letrec (( even? ( lambda ( n ) ( if ( = 0 n ) #t ( odd? ( - n 1 ))))) ( odd? ( lambda ( n ) ( if ( = 0 n ) #f ( even? ( - n 1 )))))) ( even? 9875321 )) #f ;; proper tail recursion is implemented > ` ( 1 2 ` ( 10, ', ( + 2 3 ))) ( 1 2 ` ( 10, '5 )) ;; nested quasiquote is not very easy to implement right
... with Fibers and Channels
Use the go macro to start new fiber s:
> ( go ( begin ( write 1 ) ( write 2 ) ( write 3 )) ( begin ( write 'a ) ( write 'b ) ( write 'c ))) 1 a2b3c > ;; this is one possible output
The fiber s can communicate with each other using |
and froze, creating a fog-like effect. The surface of the ocean also froze within this area of effect, to an estimated depth of 1.2 meters. Test W-04
SCP-1149 Conditions: 10 km/h wind, blowing perpendicular to SCP-1149 (external fan approved for this test), tested for one hour
Weather Conditions Prior to Test: Winds southeast at approx. 15 km/h, overcast, light rain
Observed effects: Four events were recorded during this period. No unique events occurred. Researcher's note: This would seem to indicate that blowing perpendicularly doesn't have any effect. Though perhaps something will be observable at higher wind speeds. Researcher's note: Test W-06, omitted for redundancy, further supports the above theory. Only air that travels along the length of SCP-1149 affects its effects. Test W-07
SCP-1149 Conditions: 20 km/h wind, tested for one hour
Weather Conditions Prior to Test: Winds south-southeast at approx. 5 km/h, light cloud cover
Observed effects: Events were continuous during this period with many occurring simultaneously. Most were not unique, though three were of particular interest. The first was a highly dense, rapidly rotating cloud mass. After observing its odd color, further analysis indicated that it consisted of water mixed with hydrochloric acid, abnormal levels of carbon dioxide, and methane. The cloud mass was accompanied by frequent lightning and a partially formed cyclone. This event lasted for 9 minutes, 25 seconds. The second unique event was the repeated rapid formation and dispersal of an extremely low-pressure area, which was observed by the column of water that was quickly drawn up into it, then dropped. This process was repeated 6 times in a small area over the course of 1 minute, 10 seconds. The third unique event was a variation of a previously observed event. Over an area approximately 20 m in diameter, the air temperature rose and quickly peaked at 334° C, lasting for a total of 11 minutes. During this time, the surface of the ocean vaporized, creating a growing plume of steam. This event manifested near one of the observation vessels involved in testing, resulting in heat damage to part of the vessel's structure and varying degrees of burns to each of its crew. The event caused no fatalities and the vessel was able to retreat before damage became too great. Researcher's note: Containment procedures updated. With events of this nature, we need a system in place to prevent people from entering the area. Test W-17
SCP-1149 Conditions: ███ km/h wind, tested for 27 minutes
Weather Conditions Prior to Test: Calm, winds east-northeast at approx. 10 km/h, clear skies
Observed effects: Clouds immediately began to form, starting at the center of the cone of effect and spreading outward. Cloud composition was determined to be a condensed mixture of water with small amounts of hydrogen, helium, and ammonia. Lightning strikes were frequent, occurring nearly continuously starting at approximately 3 minutes. At approximately 5 minutes, the temperatures climbed above 90° C, causing the ocean within the cone of effect to begin vaporizing at an increased rate. Observation vessels retreated and were able to avoid damage for the duration of the test. At approximately 15 minutes, cloud cover began condensing drastically and rotating rapidly, causing winds to reach speeds in excess of 400 km/h. At this point, the cone of effect had doubled in size due to indirect effects and the ocean continued to vaporize at its accelerated rate. By 27 minutes, the rotating storm had reached 240 kilometers in diameter with wind speeds recorded at ███ km/h. Small pockets of extremely high temperatures and pressure were observed, resulting in ionization of the air and bursts of light and sound similar to lightning. Satellite imagery reveals that at this point the storm bore a strong resemblance to [DATA EXPUNGED]. Testing was concluded at this point. The weather effects quickly dropped off in intensity, but did not fully disperse until over three hours later. The storm made land fall 20 minutes after the conclusion of testing, but by this point clouds mostly consisted of water and caused damage no worse than that of a typical tropical storm of mid-level intensity. Researcher's note: Containment procedures updated. I think we can adequately test this thing without going over 30 km/h. We could've been in trouble if those poisonous clouds made landfall.
Addendum 1149-3: Electrical Testing Log All tests were conducted under closed conditions at Site 37. Weather stations took readings from Site 37 itself, as well as from vessels located at multiple points along the boundaries of SCP-1149's cone of influence. When high-accuracy readings were required, a geostationary satellite was used. SCP-1149 was under 5 km/h wind speeds for each of these tests. The wires leading into SCP-1149's base were connected to varying electrical signals.Former HP CEO and 2016 presidential contender Carly Fiorina is actively laying the groundwork for a bid to be the next chair of the Republican National Committee, according to state GOP officials who have followed her plans.
Fiorina and her aides have plotted an aggressive season of travel this fall to states with and without close Republicans races as she looks to help down-ballot Republicans, but people familiar with the plans said she is also looking to curry favor with the influential 168 members of the Republican National Committee. In phone calls and emails, Fiorina has reached out to party chairs across the country as well as RNC committee-men and -women who will elect a successor to incumbent RNC chairman Reince Priebus in January.
“The past few months Carly has been helping out with major races around the country, I know she is planning to reach out to your party chairman in the next week or so, just to touch base and see if there is any way she could be helpful to Republicans in the [Insert State or Territory] this Fall,” a Fiorina advisor wrote to multiple state party executive directors in recent weeks.
What elevated Fiorina’s travel from popular surrogate and fundraiser to that of RNC chair candidate, according to multiple RNC members, was her outreach to the U.S. territories, a particularly powerful voting bloc within the RNC but fall way down on the party’s priority list for the fall. Another source noted that the domains CarlyForChair.com and CarlyForRNC.com were both registered on July 14 at the same time.
The campaign for the chairmanship would be moot should Donald Trump win the White House, when custom dictates that the RNC defer to the wishes of the incumbent president. But Fiorina isn’t betting on a Trump win—in fact just the opposite. The noted Clinton critic has declined to formally endorse Trump, but has sought to burnish her spot in the conservative moment with frequent attacks on the Democratic nominee.
A failed California Senate candidate in 2010, Fiorina has served as the vice chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and chair of the American Conservative Union Foundation, which is affiliated with the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
Fiorina has been searching for another act since her presidential candidacy made her a household name. After dropping out of the presidential race in February, Fiorina briefly joined Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as a running-mate as part of a last-ditch ploy before the Indiana primary. After Trump won the state, the pair ended their candidacy. But Fiorina reconstituted her campaign as an outside group to enable her to travel in support of GOP candidates across the country.
A Fiorina spokesperson would not comment on the former candidate’s future plans, but highlighted her travel to assist vulnerable Republicans.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, already the longest serving party chairman in his sixth year, declined to rule out seeking a fourth two-year term in an interview with TIME last month. But Preibus’ announcement has been viewed inside the RNC as an effort to contain speculation about his possible successors until after the Nov. 8 general election. In the interview with TIME, Priebus encouraged aspirants for his office to remain focused on the campaign at hand.
Contact us at editors@time.com.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The Home Office says 60,000 people use steroids in the UK, but the health watchdog claims the number is far higher
The number of young men using steroids in London is rising on a "regular basis" a drugs charity has warned.
South Westminster Drug and Alcohol Service said an increasing number of young male clients were seeking support for anabolic steroid use.
Home Office figures show 60,000 people used steroids in the UK in 2014.
But the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said it was the "tip of the iceberg" and advised gyms to supply sharps bins for needles.
Roy Jones, from the South Westminster service, said: "Our numbers are increasing on a regular basis.
"I've been working with steroid users for 16 years and when I first started, the guys taking them were body builders in their 30s.
"Now the average age I see is 23."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Steroids are being increasingly used by some groups of young men, health watchdog NICE says
According to Professor Gillian Leng, deputy chief executive of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), there is a worrying trend of young professionals turning to the drugs.
She said: "It's fair to say it is becoming a much more normal thing to do among some groups of young men who are concerned about the way they look...injecting steroids has become a solution."
Although government figures suggest 60,000 people used steroids in 2014, professional bodies believe the figure is much higher, as only those ending up in police custody are recorded in the statistics.
Image copyright Getty Images
What are anabolic steroids?
Class C drugs that can be injected or taken as tablets
There are between 60 and 100 different types and though it is illegal to sell or distribute them, using them is not against the law
Steroids can enhance physical performance and stimulate muscle growth but potential side effects range from acne and hair loss to depression, liver and heart problems
Professor Leng said: "I think it is inevitable that the number is a lot higher.
"From the epidemiology (the data) we have about the kind of people who use steroids - it's a group that's not all going to appear in custody so that figure is bound to be the tip of the iceberg - it might be three times that number."
A 25-year-old, who works in the City of London and asked to remain anonymous, told BBC London he had taken steroids for two years.
He said he bought them from a dealer at his local gym and he knows many others who do the same.
"I started taking them because I felt I couldn't get any bigger training naturally," he said. "It was the next step for me."
"There's immense pressure to look good - it's part of the culture we live in, we all want that big figure."
Image caption Natural Bodybuilder Rolandas Malinauskas says you can build muscle naturally but it takes time and dedication
Easygym have installed sharps bins in all their gyms, while Fitness First, Virgin Active and David Lloyd said some of their clubs also have them.
All the gyms said they had a zero tolerance approach to steroids and the bins were a health and safety measure for diabetic members and the disposal of razors.
The Department of Health said it had "given local areas the power and the funding to tackle public health issues like this".
Despite the increased awareness, Matthew Dear, 17, from Southend, died after an adverse reaction to steroids.
Image caption Matthew Dear was 17 years old when he died from an adverse reaction to steroids
His mother Tina, who runs the Matthew Dear Foundation, which was set up to warn people about the dangers of steroid use, said: "When we lost Matthew six years ago, people thought it was a problem that wasn't going to boil over.
"We are now at that point where it is boiling over and somebody needs to take ownership."
Rolandas Malinauskas, from east London, is a natural bodybuilder - which means strictly no steroids.
The former British Champion said many young men did not consider the dangers of the drugs.
"In the long term, you do not win with steroids - they create a mirage," he said. "You can build muscle naturally but it takes time and dedication. Its all about precision, training and diet."By Reuters
Chocolate hearts for loved ones on Valentine's Day are so last year - at least in Japan where one Tokyo design firm offered up its 3D scanner to make miniature chocolate replicas of faces.
In a one-off celebration for Valentine's Day, KS Design Lab invited people to be scanned with its 3D body scanner to create silicon moulds in the shape of their heads. Participants then poured chocolate into them to make mini-me treats on a stick.
"I didn't actually think it would turn out to look this much like me, so I'm a bit surprised," said Mariya Kawae, 30, who planned to give out heads to her husband and work mates.
After the scan people were invited to edit their facial data on a computer before it was sent to a 3D printer, the next step for creating the mould. Once the mould was in hand, all that remained was to pour in the chocolate.
Give it 15 minutes to harden, and each person had a replica of their head roughly 3 cm long (1.2 inch), mounted on a stick like a lollipop for handy eating.
Though participants made only one piece of chocolate during the event, each was given the mould to take home for use in making more chocolates or perhaps even ice cubes.Despite an overall body symmetry, human behavior is full of examples of asymmetry, from writing or gesturing to kissing and cradling. Prior research has revealed that theatre patrons show a bias towards sitting on the right side of a movie theatre. Two competing theories have attempted to explain this seating asymmetry: one posits that expectation of processing demand drives the bias; the other posits that basic motor asymmetries drive the bias. To test these theories we assessed the real-world classroom seating choices of university students using photographs. A bias for students to choose seats on the left side of the classroom was observed, in contrast to the right side bias observed in theatre seating studies. These results provide evidence in support of a processing-expectation bias.
Introduction
Despite an overall bilateral symmetry in body morphology, humans display a wide range of motor and perceptual asymmetries (Palmer, 2004; for a review, see Brancucci et al., 2009). Handedness is perhaps the most obvious of these behavioral asymmetries, with approximately 90% of the population displaying a right-hand dominance for writing and the execution of other fine motor tasks (Gilbert and Wysocki, 1992; Dragovic, 2004). Less obvious examples of behavioral asymmetries can also be observed, including biases to turn to the right when entering a room (Scharine and McBeath, 2002), kissing (Barrett et al., 2006), presenting the left cheek when posing for a portrait (Nicholls et al., 1999), or leaning in with the right ear to hear a conversation in a noisy environment (Marzoli and Tommasi, 2009). In addition to these asymmetries, people also exhibit seating asymmetries in movie theatres, airplanes, and classrooms (Farnsworth, 1933; Nicholls et al., 2013; Harms et al., 2014).
Karev (2000) noted a personal observation that seats on the right side of theatres were chosen more frequently than seats on the left. To test this observation, Karev asked participants to select their preferred seating location in a movie theatre from a seating chart of available seats. With the middle seats marked as unavailable, participants were forced to select a seat to the right or left side of the theatre. Consistent with his initial observation, Karev found an overall bias for people to choose seats on the right more often than seats on the left. Although the bias was strongest for right-handed participants, the bias was attenuated, but not reversed, in left- and mixed-handed participants. To explain this asymmetrical seating bias, Karev argued that people, expecting specific processing demands, choose a seating position that will maximize the processing efficiency of the anticipated information content. Seats to the right are preferred in a movie theatre because they position the screen to the left side of the visual field, allowing for efficient processing of the film’s visuospatial and emotional content in the right hemisphere (Bryden, 1982; Corballis et al., 2000).
To test Karev (2000) expectancy hypothesis, Okubo (2010) manipulated both the level of motivation to see the film and the anticipated emotional processing demand of the participants to evaluate their influence on seating behavior using seating charts. A rightward seating bias was observed when right-handed participants were positively motivated to view the film and was absent when right-handed participants were not motivated to view the film. Additionally, when participants were specifically informed that the film contained negative emotional content, the rightward bias was again observed for right-handed participants who were positively motivated to view the film (Okubo, 2010). Okubo argued that these results were consistent with Karev’s (2000) hypothesis that an expectation for emotional processing would bias participants to choose seats to the right.
Using a method similar to Karev (2000), Weyers et al. (2006) examined seating behavior using both the standard seating chart (with the screen positioned at the top of the page) and non-standard seating charts (with the screen positioned either to the far right, the far left, or at the bottom of the page). Consistent with Karev’s (2000) findings, a rightward seating preference was observed for the standard seating chart. This bias was reduced or eliminated when seats were selected from non-standard seating charts; additionally, Weyers et al. (2006) observed a tendency for participants to choose seats to the right side of the paper when selecting a seat in a cinema. Weyers et al. (2006) argued that the observed bias patterns reflect general right-side motor biases and preferences such as a preference for turning to the right upon entering a room.
A common theme across these studies is their reliance on seating-charts. They rely on the assumption that the seat selected when imagining where one would sit in a theatre is equivalent to the seat that would be selected when one actually goes to the movies. Addressing this issue, two real-world studies have examined the seating behavior of actual theatre patrons. Nicholls et al. (2013) assessed the seating preferences of theatre patrons by counting the number of purchased seats for theatre performances booked through Ticketmaster online. Consistent with the seating chart studies, a rightward seating bias was observed for performances at 50% capacity or below. Similarly, Harms et al. (2014) photographed the seating position of movie theatre patrons at actual film screenings. Again, consistent with the seating chart studies, a significant bias for patrons to select seats to the right side of the theatre was observed.
Although much of the seating bias research has focused on a theatre setting, additional studies have examined the influence of seating position in the classroom on academic performance. For example, Farnsworth (1933) noted that academic success was correlated with classroom seating position, with the most successful students seated near the front of the classroom, slightly to the right of center. Similarly, in an examination of spelling performance in children, Morton and Kershner (1987) found that students seated on the right side of the classroom made less spelling errors compared to students seated on the left side of the classroom. An analysis of the types of errors made led the authors to suggest that right-side sitters and left-side sitters employed different processing strategies for completing the spelling test. To further examine the relationship between seating bias and processing strategy, Morton et al. (1993) evaluated how the degree of reliance on specific learning styles varied with seating position in adult participants. Overall, right-sitters were found to rely on responses that showed more artistic or holistic processing and less analytical processing compared to left-sitters. Left- and right-sitters were found to rely on learning styles that emphasized left- and right-hemisphere dominant processes, respectively. For example, left-sitters were found to perform more accurately on dichotic listening tasks using CVC and digit stimuli than right-sitters, reflecting the left hemisphere advantage for verbal processing (Kimura, 1967; Bryden, 1982).
Employing a similar method to Harms et al. (2014), this present study examines the real-world classroom seating preferences of university students. The examination of seating preferences within a classroom setting offers us an opportunity to directly test the competing explanations for seating biases proposed by Karev (2000) and Weyers et al. (2006). Whereas movies are expected to provide predominantly visuospatial and emotional content, university classes are predominantly lecture-based and, thus, are expected to provide predominantly visual and auditory verbal content requiring analytical processing (Ballantyne et al., 1999). Mathematical information (Pinel and Dehaene, 2010), analytical processing (Bever, 1975), and verbal processing (Kimura, 1961) have all been shown to demonstrate left-hemispheric processing advantages. This expectation of left-hemisphere dominant processing demand for university classes gives rise to opposing seating behavior predictions from Karev’s expectancy hypothesis and Weyers et al. (2006) hypothesis that motor asymmetries, such as turning biases, govern seating biases, affording us the opportunity to directly compare their predictions on real-world behavior.
If Karev’s (2000) expectancy hypothesis is accurate, then it follows that an expectation for predominantly verbal and analytical content that is preferentially processed in the left hemisphere should result in a leftward seating bias, as this seating position places the instructor and the projector screen in the right visual field and positions the right ear towards the center of the classroom and the source of the auditory information. This position allows the incoming visual and auditory information to be routed efficiently to the left hemisphere for processing. If the expectation of specific processing demands is what drives seat-choice behavior, then we should see an overall preference for students to choose seats to the left side of the classroom. Alternatively, if Weyers et al. (2006) are correct, and seating biases are more simply a reflection of basic motor biases, then it follows that the difference in expected processing demand between movies and lectures should not influence the seating bias at all. In that case, students in university classrooms should then show the same right side seating bias observed among movie theatre patrons.
Materials and Methods
Participants and Procedure
To assess the seating bias observed in classroom seating, the seating position of the students was photographed in lecture halls and classrooms across the University of Saskatchewan campus. Three main classroom clusters where chosen for their high density of classrooms. Over a three-week period for each cluster (for a total of 9 weeks) a research assistant was instructed to enter each classroom before the start of each class period. To ensure that limited availability of seats did not unduly influence seat choice, the number of seated students was counted, and if the number equaled 50% of maximum seating capacity or less, a photograph of the classroom was taken. Classes with greater than 50% of maximum seating capacity were not photographed. A maximum of three attempts were made to photograph each class over the three-week period. To maximize the number of classrooms that met the image selection criteria, all images were taken between five and ten minutes prior to the start of the class.
The images were collected from the center back of the classroom or lecture theatre. The focal length of the lens was adjusted for each image to ensure that all seats in the room were visible in the photograph. A total of 41 images that met the outlined selection criteria were collected from 41 different classes in 29 different classrooms across campus. As this study used the naturalistic observation method, the students in the study were unaware that their seating position was being recorded. This study was conducted following the ethical and procedural guidelines set out by the Ethics Review Board at the University of Saskatchewan.
Data Coding
A volunteer blind to the hypotheses of the study carried out image coding. The overall seating bias was calculated by counting the number of people seated on the right and left sides of the classroom separately. A laterality index was then calculated by subtracting the number of left-seated students from the number of right-seated students. Thus, a positive score would indicate a right-side seating bias whereas a negative score would indicate a left-side seating bias. Each photograph was then assigned an overall seating bias rating (−1 for left-side bias, 1 for a right-side bias, and 0 for no bias) based on its laterality index score.
In addition to the bias rating, classroom entrance position and location of the center seat were also recorded. Using the floor plan for each classroom or lecture hall where an image was collected, the lateral position (left, right, or bilateral) and axial position (front or back) of the entrance(s) was recorded. The location of the central seat was also recorded and used as the reference point for dividing seating position between the left and right sides of the classroom. Additionally, the subject of each class photographed was recorded and coded as either an Arts or a Science class, according to the class description in the course calendar.
Results
Seating Bias
Examining the overall classroom seating bias, a Chi-Square analysis on the frequency of images per seating position category revealed a significant seating bias with left-biased images (n = 25; χ2 (2) = 16.439, p < 0.001) occurring more frequently than right-biased images (n = 12) or no-bias images (n = 4). To further assess whether there was a significant difference in the frequency of leftward biased images compared to rightward biased images a second Chi-Square analysis was carried out with the no-bias images removed (χ2 (1) = 4.568, p = 0.033). These results indicate a bias for students to select seats to the left side of the classroom. The seating-density pattern observed across all images is presented in Figure 1. Additionally, a one-sample t-test was conducted to evaluate whether the overall laterality index across all images revealed a leftward or rightward bias. A significant leftward bias was observed (t (40) = −2.999, p = 0.005, 95% CI = −3.23, −0.63, M = −1.93, SD = 4.11). Figure 2 shows the frequency distribution pattern of difference scores across all images.
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Normalized seating chart showing the density of students’ seating-choices across all images. To correct for the differences in seating capacity across rooms, the seating position for each classroom was transposed such that the center seat of the classroom corresponded with the center seat of the seating chart grid.
FIGURE 2
Figure 2. The frequency distribution of the difference scores calculated by subtracting the number of left-seated patrons from the number of right-seated patrons (right-left) is shown. Negative values indicate a left-side seating bias. The number of students in the photographs ranged from 1 to 55 with a mean of 17.07 (SD = 12.58).
Influence of Entrance Location
As the images for the study were collected from a large number of classrooms, it is possible that variations in the location of classroom entrances may have influenced seat choice. Table 1 shows the frequency of left- and right-biased images for each of the three lateral entrance positions. Through post hoc analysis, we examined the potential influence of lateral entrance position on seat-choice behavior by testing the interaction of entrance location (right, or bilateral) on seating-bias (left, right). As only one image had a left-side entrance, that image was removed from the analysis to avoid a cell-count violation. The four images showing no bias in seating were also removed for this analysis. A 2 × 2 Chi-Square test was used to assess whether asymmetrical (right-side) or bilateral entrance position influences seating position. No influence of lateral entrance position on classroom seating bias was observed (χ2 (1) = 0.060, p = 0.806, V = 0.041). These results indicate that any differences in the lateral location of the entrance to the room did not significantly influence students’ choice of seating position.
TABLE 1
Table 1. Numbers of left-bias and right-bias images for all lateral entrance positions.
Additionally, the location of the entrance with respect to the front or back of the room has also been argued to influence seating position. We examined the potential influence of axial entrance position on seat-choice behavior by testing the interaction of axial position (front, back, or both) on seating bias (left, right). The four images showing no bias in seating were removed for this analysis. A 3 × 2 Chi-Square test demonstrated no influence of axial entrance position on classroom seating bias (χ2 (2) = 0.059, p = 0.971, V = 0.040; see Table 2). Similar to the results examining lateral entrance position, these results indicate that the presence of a front or rear entrance to the room did not significantly influence students’ choice of seating position.
TABLE 2
Table 2. Numbers of left-bias and right-bias images for all axial entrance positions.
Influence of Class Type
Lastly, as processing demands may vary by subject matter, we examined the potential influence of course subject on seat-choice behavior by testing the interaction between class type (Arts, Science) and seating bias (left, right). The four images showing no bias in seating were removed for this analysis. A 2 × 2 Chi-Square test demonstrated no influence of class type on classroom seating bias (χ2 (1) = 0.330, p = 0.565, V = 0.094; see Table 3).
TABLE 3
Table 3. Numbers of left-bias and right-bias images for all class types.
Comparison of Theatre and Lecture Seating Data
To assess the overall influence of processing demand, we tested the interaction between task type (theatre, lecture) and seating bias (left, right), combining the classroom seating data from the current study with the theatre seating data collected by Harms et al. (2014). Images showing no bias were removed for this analysis. A 2 × 2 Chi-Square test demonstrated a significant influence of task type on seating bias where theatre seating images showed a greater rightward bias and classroom seating images showed a greater leftward bias (χ2 (1) = 11.777, p = 0.001, V = 0.416; see Table 4).
TABLE 4
Table 4. Numbers of left-bias and right-bias images for theatre and lecture task types.
Discussion
The difference in expected processing demand between movie theatres and university classrooms afforded us a unique opportunity to test two opposing explanations for the rightward seating bias observed in theatre seating studies. Karev’s (2000) expectancy hypothesis predicted that the expectation of left-hemisphere dominant processing demands in the classroom setting would result in an overall leftward preference in seating position among university students, opposite to the rightward bias observed among movie theatre patrons. Alternatively, Weyers et al. (2006) suggestion that rightward motor asymmetries, such as the tendency to turn right upon entering a room (Scharine and McBeath, 2002), dictates seating position preference predicted an overall rightward preference in seating position among university students.
Our naturalistic observation of the classroom seating position of university students revealed a preference for seats on the left side of the classroom, confirming the prediction of a leftward bias derived from Karev’s (2000) expectancy hypothesis. This finding is complementary to Harms et al.’s (2014) observed preference for seats on the right side of the movie theatre using the same procedure as well as the rightward bias observed for online ticket purchases observed by Nicholls et al. (2013). Additionally, a direct comparison of the seating bias for theatre patrons and classroom students provided further evidence that the differing processing demands of the movie theatre and the classroom resulted in opposite seating biases. Together, these studies provide a body of evidence suggesting that lateralized processing asymmetries play a substantial role in governing seating preferences based on anticipated processing demands, with anticipated processing of left-hemisphere dominant verbal and analytical content (Kimura, 1961; Bever, 1975), resulting in a left side seating preference, and right-hemisphere dominant visuospatial and emotional content (Bryden, 1982; Corballis et al., 2000) resulting in a right side seating preference.
It is important to note, however, that hemispheric dominance is not an all-or-none phenomenon. Although individuals may show dominance for left hemisphere language processing, the right hemisphere is far from inactive in processing the linguistic information. It the degree of asymmetry in processing that is thought to play a role in influencing behavior. For example, an individual with a greater degree of left-hemisphere activation compared to right-hemisphere activation during lingusitic processing may be expected to show a stronger, more consistent bias to chose a leftward seat in the classroom compared to an individual with a smaller left-hemisphere advantage. It is overly simplistic to argue that the leftward seating bias observed in the classroom is driven exclusively by the left-hemisphere dominance for linguistic processing, rather, Karev (2000) argues that the seating bias is driven by a relative superiority in left-hemisphere processing at the population level for the given demands of the classroom environment. Additionally, it should be noted that there are individual differences in lateralization of cognitive processing and in real-world behaviors that will influence individual preferences and performance. Where the majority of the population may show left-hemisphere dominance for language processing or a leftward preference for classroom seating, there is always a portion of the population that shows different lateral processing or behavioral biases.
Weyers et al. (2006) found the expected right-side seating preference when the maps of the theatre or cinema were presented in the canonical view, with the screen at the top of the page. When the cinema maps were presented in non-canonical views, the bias shifted to the right side of the page. When presented with both theatre maps and restaurant seating maps, a consistent right side bias was observed relative to the screen and the elevator entrance, respectively. Interestingly, the seating position selected correlated perfectly with the turn at the entrance position, with right-hand turns producing right-side seat choices. This pattern of results lead the authors to argue for a motor asymmetry explanation for the seating bias, such as a right-side turning bias.
Overall, our results are contrary to this prediction. Across all classrooms, students showed a preference for seating positions to the left side of the classroom. Similar to Weyers et al. (2006), the classrooms observed in this study showed a variety of entrance positions. One potential explanation for the leftward seating bias could be the non-canonical positioning of the entrances. The canonical view on a seating chart would place the front of the classroom at the top of the page with the entrance at the rear of the room. Many of the classrooms observed in this study had entrances at the front of the room [corresponding to the bottom position on Weyers et al.’s (2006) charts].
It is possible that these non-canonical entrances required students to make seating decisions based on a view of the classroom where the front of the room was not positioned straight ahead. If this is the case, Weyers et al. (2006) data would predict specific seating distributions for each entrance position: For a front entrance position a right-hand turn would place students to the left side of the classroom. Our data shows a tendency for this leftward bias. However, for a rear entrance to the classroom (the canonical equivalent), a right-hand turn at the entrance would place students to the right side of the classroom. Here, our data shows a tendency in the opposite direction; students are choosing seats to the left side of the room rather than the right. The right and left side entrance positions for the classrooms observed in the present study are not analogous to the rear-entrance, left and right views presented by Weyers et al. (2006) as the entrance position is towards the middle of the left or right side of the classroom. In each of these cases, a right-hand turn at the entrance would either position the student towards the front or the rear of the classroom, rather than the left or the right side.
The leftward bias for classroom seating is also consistent with Morton et al. (1993) finding that preferred seating position reflects preferred learning or response style. For example, they found that left-sitters performed more accurately on CVC and digit dichotic listening tasks compared to right-sitters. They argued that this result reflected a greater reliance on left-hemisphere processing and learning or response strategies in left-sitters. Although the authors continued to suggest that actual seating position likely did not influence performance, other researchers have found visual field and ear advantages for a variety of stimulus processing tasks (e.g., Kimura, 1961; Bryden, 1982; Cherry and Hellige, 1999), suggesting that preferential positioning can improve processing efficiency.
Interestingly, our results do not fit with Farnsworth (1933) and Morton and Kershner (1987) findings of academic performance advantages for students seated on the right side of the room. We did not examine the relationship between seating position and performance, rather we simply examined seating preference in isolation. It may be that left-side seating provides a sense of greater processing fluency without providing a further advantage on a student’s ability to recall or integrate the processed information on assigned tasks; alternatively, right-side seating may provide an attentional advantage that results in greater academic performance, despite a reduced processing fluency for verbal information, that results in improved performance on learning assessments. Additional research is needed to tease apart these possibilities.
We also assessed the potential influence of course differences on student seating position. Although we did not find an influence of general class type (Arts or Science) on seating bias, it may be that the processing demands vary by specific subjects, and that the optimal seating location to improve processing fluency may vary as a function of the topic or subject being covered beyond the general classification of Arts or Science. For example, an Engineering design course and a Fine Arts course may both require a greater reliance on visuospatial (right hemisphere dominant) processing due to the heavy reliance on pictorial information. Similarly, both Mathematics and Linguistics courses rely heavily on symbolic representation processing (left hemisphere dominant). Additional controlled analyses of the relationship between preference, performance, and the differential processing demands per subject or class type are needed to further clarify whether expectation of processing fluency is truly guiding factor in seating location choice among students.
It is worth noting that, besides differences in processing demand expectations, the social contexts surrounding a trip to the movies and attending class are substantively different. Whereas a trip to the movies is typically |
do was select the shape from a menu that appeared when I opened my palm and then use both hands (thumbs + index fingers) to pull them apart to make them larger and smaller.
I launched a ball into the air with a makeshift catapult I made out of a long block. I played catch with another person (that's right, multiple people can connect and interact simultaneously with all virtual objects). I high-fived and fist-bumped another person's virtual hand. I was able to reverse gravity by raising the virtual ground up with two hands and manipulate objects as they floated in zero-gravity.
Your hands are the ultimate controller for VR. Image: raymond wong/mashable
I felt like a god, making objects out of thin air and hurling them into the air.
I felt like a god, making objects out of thin air and hurling them into the air.
All of the objects have physics to them, too. Although, since there's no haptic feedback, you can't really get a sense of depth, so for example, when I threw an object, I wasn't sure how far it would go.
Still, the ability the touch objects in VR with my real fingers was enough to get me hooked.
I'm also told the Leap Motion sensor for VR is very low-power and only eats up about 5 percent of a phone's battery life.
Despite the short demo, the lag-free hand-tracking was so darn impressive (and didn't make me nauseous) that I could have spent hours playing with the VR blocks. I genuinely didn't want to take off the headset.
Compared to PC-based VR headsets, mobile VR headsets are somewhat handicapped when it comes to controls. Gear VR cleverly integrates a touchpad and DayDream View has a slot to store the touchpad remote, but neither are perfect. It's tiring to hold your hand up to the headset and you could lose the remote.
With Leap Motion Mobile Platform, there are no remotes to misplace and your arms don't get any more fatigued than real life.
Virtual reality has this stigma of being a very isolated experience; you are, after all, cut off from the outside world. But VR can also be very social, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckeberg demonstrated with the Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch controllers at F8 this year.
Adding realistic hand-tracking to mobile VR is only going to accelerate its social use case, if only because the Leap Motion Mobile Platform doesn't even need any external cameras (like with the Rift and Vive) for hand-tracking to work. I can already picture a near future where people, millions of miles apart, put on a Leap Motion-equipped Gear VR and enter a virtual forum or playground and play ping pong in VR with nothing but their hands.
The goal right now is to get VR makers and developers on board with its hand-tracking sensor and software tools. There are certain experiences like shooting games where a physical controller makes more sense and feels more realistic with a trigger and buttons, but for most typical VR experiences, hands are the most natural input and Leap Motion is way ahead of the pack.2.7k SHARES Share Tweet
These are hard times for women. The feminist movement of the 70s and 80s raised awareness about violence against women on a global scale. As a result, today, we are able to identify the murder of women and girls as systemic under patriarchy. In Latin America and the Caribbean, where violence against women is an epidemic, we even have a term for this: femicide (or “feminicidio’” in Spanish), meaning, “the murder of women on account of their sex.”
Despite this, women’s lived reality has become unspeakable today. Those who acknowledge that females are oppressed as a class, under patriarchy, are labeled phobic and worse. In other words, feminist analysis of systems of power is set aside in order to accommodate the idea that womanhood is nothing more than a “feeling.”
Over at Equality For Her, journalist Katelyn Burns writes:
“So what does it mean to feel like a woman? It means that if you are a woman, it’s whatever you are currently feeling. Women are so diverse in their experiences that there can be no universal model of womanhood.”
Apparently, womanhood is now so all-encompassing it can be experienced by anyone, based on “feelings.” Yet, at the same time, within this analysis, womanhood is rendered meaningless and without structural roots.
“What is a woman?” is a question asked by those privileged enough to never have had to suffer the answer to this question. No one asks women what womanhood “feels” like, because, for us, being “women” is simply our reality. Most women around the world learn early on that, under patriarchy, their opinions about their subordination are irrelevant. As a structural force, patriarchy continues to degrade and violate women and girls, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not — women’s feelings be damned.
Male violence against women ensures our compliance. Femicide is the lethal extreme of this, but violence against women and girls manifests in a myriad of ways. In feminist circles, we talk about male violence against women often. Indeed, ending male violence is the most pressing point in the agenda for women’s liberation. But how can we eradicate male violence against women if we ignore the centrality of women’s bodies under male supremacy? How can we move beyond a patriarchal society if we refuse to acknowledge that women are a class of people, whose status is determined by their sex?
On August 31st, this reality was laid bare in a Chinese hospital. A 26-year-old woman named Ma Rongrong started labour a week ahead of schedule. She was advised by the medical team at the Yulin Number 1 hospital, in the Shaanxi province, that the girth of her baby’s head was too big for her to give birth naturally. Ma and her husband, Yan Zhuangzhuang, signed a document, against medical recommendations, stating that Ma still wanted to try a vaginal birth.
The Chinese newspaper Caixin reports that, as the labour pains intensified, Rongrong changed her mind and requested a cesarean section, multiple times. The problem was that, under Chinese law, a patient’s family must approve of all major surgeries their relative is to undergo. Rongrong’s family denied her the c-section.
The article explains: “Hospital records showed that both the woman and the hospital requested permission from the family three times to perform the operation, but her relatives allegedly refused and insisted on a natural delivery.” There’s video footage of Rongrong trying to walk, but kneeling in excruciating pain, surrounded by half a dozen family members.
Today, the family and the hospital staff blame each other for denying Rongrong the c-section she needed. But it seems that the last word laid with her family — specifically Rongrong’s husband, who had her written permission to decide on the method of medical treatment for his wife (after consultation with medical staff), but who still didn’t approve the surgery.
In her desperation, Rongrong even tried to leave the hospital, but was caught and brought back inside. Eventually, she made a drastic and tragic decision: Ma climbed out of a window on the fifth floor, and jumped to her death.
Why did Rongrong die? I’d argue that Rongrong died, ultimately, because of her sex.
Nobody asked Rongrong if she “felt” like a woman, patriarchy simply treated her as one — governing her female body against her will, ignoring her thoughts and feelings. A nationwide policy dictating that all surgeries have to be approve by family members affects every patient in China. But, as Rongrong’s death shows, this policy has particular repercussions for those with female bodies.
A similarly gruesome case took place around the same time in the Dominican Republic. A 16-year-old girl named Emely Peguero Polanco had been missing for over 10 days. Her disappearance and the search efforts were breaking news, in part because Peguero Polanco was five months pregnant in a country that fetishizes pregnancy. For almost two weeks, it seemed the country could talk of little else.
As many people suspected, Peguero Polanco had been murdered. Her final hours and the manner of her death were ghastly. She had been ambushed by her boyfriend, an older guy named Marlon Martinez, who told her he would take her to a doctor’s appointment. Instead, he took her to his apartment where he (probably with the aid of other people) performed a forced abortion on her.
The investigation is still open but the crime is both misogynistic and vile. Marlon’s mother, Marlin Martinez, was an influential politician in the community and actively helped her son cover up the crime. Marlin paid multiple employees to move Peguero Polanco’s body around the country so that the authorities couldn’t find it. Marlin even appeared with her son in a video recording where they pled with Peguero Polanco — who had already been murdered — to return to her loved ones, addressing her as though she were a runaway.
The forensic report states that Peguero Polanco was a victim of psychological and physical violence, as well as torture and barbaric acts:
“Inside the cadaver, there were pieces of the fetus that she was carrying in her womb, concussion to the uterine wall and vaginal canal, a perforation of the uterus, meaning that great force was applied in the area and various organs relating to a forced abortion.”
The report also explains that she had “a blunt concussion with cerebral hemorrhaging, meaning the trauma was inflicted while she was alive.”
Regardless of the “motives” her murderer and his accomplices might have had (some analysts argue that there was a class element because Peguero Polanco was poor and Marlon was upper class, so his family didn’t want a working class girl carrying his child), Peguero Polanco was killed because of her pregnant, female body. And I am certain that none of those who performed the forced abortion that killed her asked Peguero Polanco if she “identified” with the biological realities of her womanhood.
Rongrong and Peguero Polanco are merely two recent examples, but the ways in which women are killed because they are women, under a patriarchal system, are infinite. But today’s queer theory and its advocates are casting aside this brutal reality in order to depict womanhood as abstract. Reducing “womanhood” to feelings, clothing, and personal identities is a slap in the face to most women and girls whose oppression is forced on them, regardless of how they dress or identify.
Recently, British singer Sam Smith came out as “non-binary,” saying, “I feel just as much woman as I am man.” This newfound identity appears to be based solely on the superficial. He explains:
“There was one moment in my life where I didn’t own a piece of male clothing, really… I would wear full makeup every day in school, eyelashes, leggings with Dr. Martens, and huge fur coats — for two and a half years.”
Determining that you “feel like a woman” because you like to wear high heels, makeup, and dresses is deeply misogynistic, as these are merely the trappings of femininity — a projection of male fantasies about women — yet this idea appears to be gaining traction.
Much like the upper class loves the aesthetic of the working class and similar to the way male authors fetishize women in the sex trade, hoping to appear “hip,” as Kajsa Ekis Ekman argues, this watering down of womanhood is a form of gentrification. In this case, womanhood is desired and coopted by those who benefit under patriarchy (males), while the uncomfortable and violent realities of womanhood remain relegated to the underclass, who don’t have a way out.
In Being and Being Bought, Ekman writes:
“A man who romanticizes the working class applauds the physical labourer and hopes that he has some of those attributes, but it is stereotypical masculinity he admires, not a living person trying to survive under difficult conditions. The ‘wigger’ feels like he is part of the black community, but is not upset about violence in the ghetto. What he fails to understand is that by fetishizing someone’s everyday life, he shows how distant he is from it. Living conditions become and identity, and then a fetish.”
The gentrification of womanhood takes the gender stereotypes forced on women and presents them as though they define womanhood. This offers a subversive facade that functions only on an individual level, rather than a structural one, ignoring the suffering and oppression of women. Rather than advancing the rights of women and girls, this form of gentrification obscures them, erasing the reasons women need sex-based rights in the first place.
Ekman argues:
“The oppressed is keenly aware of the humanity of the privileged. For the privileged, on the other hand, the oppressed is an enigma living in a magical, half-human world. The fantasy of the privileged is having the ability to wallow in this world.”
Indeed, men may wallow, but they will never be forced to exist within the constraints of womanhood, as they were not born with female bodies. Through superficial choices like clothing and make-up, women’s oppression is transformed into something liberating… For everyone but us.
The casual cruelty of these nonsensical, circular arguments is playing out while girls and women around the world bear the brunt of what, for them, is a reality, not an identity.
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Raquel Rosario Sanchez Raquel Rosario Sanchez is a writer from the Dominican Republic. Her utmost priority in her work and as a feminist is to end violence against girls and women. Her work has appeared in several print and digital publications both in English and Spanish, including: Feminist Current, El Grillo, La Replica, Tribuna Feminista, El Caribe and La Marea. You can follow her @8rosariosanchez where she rambles about feminism, politics, and poetry.Section 1. Introduction¶
In the fall of 2016, I was a Teaching Fellow (Harvard's version of TA) for the graduate class on "Advanced Topics in Data Science (CS209/109)" at Harvard University. I was in-charge of designing the class project given to the students, and this tutorial has been built on top of the project I designed for the class.
Why write yet another Tutorial on Machine Learning and Deep Learning?¶
As a researcher on Computer Vision, I come across new blogs and tutorials on ML (Machine Learning) every day. However, most of them are just focussing on introducing the syntax and the terminology relavant to the field. For example - a 15 minute tutorial on Tensorflow using MNIST dataset, or a 10 minute intro to Deep Learning in Keras on Imagenet.
While people are able to copy paste and run the code in these tutorials and feel that working in ML is really not that hard, it doesn't help them at all in using ML for their own purposes. For example, they never introduce you to how you can run the same algorithm on your own dataset. Or, how do you get the dataset if you want to solve a problem. Or, which algorithms do you use - Conventional ML, or Deep Learning? How do you evaluate your models performance? How do you write your own model, as opposed to choosing a ready made architecture? All these form fundamental steps in any Machine Learning pipeline, and it is these steps that take most of our time as ML practitioners.
This tutorial breaks down the whole pipeline, and leads the reader through it step by step in an hope to empower you to actually use ML, and not just feel that it was not too hard. Needless to say, this will take much longer than 15-30 minutes. I believe a weekend would be a good enough estimate.
About the Author¶
I am Spandan Madan, a graduate student at Harvard University working on Computer Vision. My research work is supervised collaboratively by Professor Hanspeter Pfister at Harvard, and Professor Aude Oliva at MIT. My current research focusses on using Computer Vision and Natural Language Techniques in tandem to build systems capable of reasoning using text and visual elements simultaneusly.poster="https://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201604/2611/1155968404_4830839894001_4830767250001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Clinton camp: Wisconsin win won't help Sanders much
Regardless of Tuesday night's primary results in Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton's campaign is adamant that Bernie Sanders will not be able to close the gap in pledged delegates even if he scores an expected victory.
“I don’t think he can narrow the gap materially in pledged delegates in Wisconsin," Clinton chief pollster and strategist Joel Benenson told MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports" on Monday afternoon.
Benenson then explained that Wisconsin favors Sanders because it "is much less diverse than most of the states we compete in in Democratic primaries."
"It’s got a lower population of African-Americans, a very small population of Latinos. We’ve done very well in building a diverse coalition, which is why we’ve won far more primary elections than Sen. Sanders has and compiled a bigger net delegate lead in those primaries by a lot, than he has," Benenson said. "The key here in Wisconsin is to, you know, compete hard, try to win this state. But in either way this state comes out, I think it’s close enough there isn’t going to be a big shift in the 230 or plus pledged delegate advantage that Hillary Clinton has right now.”
Wisconsin allocates its 86 pledged delegates on a proportional basis.
A Fox Business poll released late last week showed Sanders with a five-point advantage over Clinton, though the spread is about two points smaller in the Real Clear Politics polling average since March 24, at 47.8 percent to 44.7 percent.In L.A., getting paid to go green
DWP customers can add to the city grid through solar panels. Goal is 150 megawatts.
For The Record Los Angeles Times Saturday, June 29, 2013 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 News Desk 2 inches; 102 words Type of Material: Correction Solar power: An article in the June 27 Business section about the Clean L.A. Solar program, which allows the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to pay customers to generate solar power, said four megawatts were reserved for smaller projects that can generate 30 to 150 kilowatts per hour and that the remaining 16 megawatts in the first portion of the program were reserved for large projects that can generate 150 kilowatts to 3 megawatts per hour. The correct way to describe the power-generation capacity of solar panels is in kilowatts or megawatts, not kilowatts per hour or megawatts per hour.
"It is really a no-brainer," said Christian Wentzel, chief executive of Solar Provider Group, which installed the North Hollywood panels. Long-term contracts with the DWP cemented the Los Angeles company's plans to invest $50 million in 17 projects to tap the region's sun-drenched climate.
The goal of the effort, the brainchild of the Los Angeles Business Council, is to generate 150 megawatts of solar electricity, or enough to power about 30,000 homes. The council hopes to attract investments totaling $500 million from a growing list of companies that want to invest in L.A.'s push to go green by setting up large clusters of rooftop solar panels.
Called Clean L.A. Solar, the program allows the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to pay customers to generate solar power across the city's vast expanse of flat roof space.
Atop a beige apartment complex in North Hollywood, rows of solar panels began providing energy Wednesday as part of what backers say is the nation's largest urban rooftop solar program.
Four years in the making, Clean L.A. Solar serves as part of the city's answer to the state mandate to generate 33% of electricity using renewable sources by 2020. DWP officials project the solar purchasing program will help L.A. reach 25% of the state mandate by 2016.
Clean L.A. Solar proponents have their sights set high, aiming to expand the initial 150-megawatt goal over the next several years to 600 megawatts. Mayor-elect Eric Garcetti voiced support for the upgrade during his campaign in January.
"If we have political commitments to expand, you're going to see a large amount of the industry come in and commit resources. This lowers the cost of solar over the long-term," Wentzel said, "and that can only benefit Angelenos."
Wentzel said Solar Provider Group would hire 30 people locally to operate its planned projects, with jobs including engineers, project managers, construction workers and sales representatives. The business council estimates Clean L.A. Solar will create about 4,300 jobs.
Mary Leslie, president of the council, said several studies conducted in collaboration with UCLA and USC revealed a waste of solar power training programs in the city, preparing Angelenos for jobs in a green market too small to employ them.
"At any one point a year and a half ago," Leslie said, "we had 1,300 solar installers in training. About half were working, and of that half, many were having to go outside of the county to find work."
Further studies determined the city's neighborhoods with the highest amounts of light available also tended to overlap with L.A.'s lower-income communities, neighborhoods that could likely benefit from more job opportunities.
Many of these areas, or "hot spots," are home to the programs that offer solar power training, such as those by Homeboy Industries and local chapters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Leslie said so far, 20 of the 35 approved solar projects were in hot spots.
Despite those potential gains, Clean L.A. Solar has its share of critics. DWP ratepayer advocate Fred Pickel warned the utility would be paying companies much more than necessary for the electricity, which he said would fall on DWP customers.
DWP General Manager Ron Nichols said Pickel's numbers were off, and that the utility had carefully researched market prices and the results of a competitive bidding process during the demonstration phase last year to set the current rate.A unique program pairing guard dogs with livestock could hold the key to saving the cheetah, Africa's most endangered cat. NBC 7's Dagmar Midcap reports. (Published Friday, May 9, 2014)
A unique program pairing guard dogs with livestock could hold the key to saving the cheetah, Africa's most endangered cat.
Laurie Marker, Ph D., visited Escondido recently as part of her U.S. tour to raise awareness about threats to the animal revered by many for its speed.
"What people don't realize that they're running their most important race and that's for their very survival," Marker said.
With an ongoing loss of habitat and an increase in illegal wildlife trade, their population has dwindled.
“There are only 10,000 cheetahs left in the world," she said.
Outside of hunters seeking fur, the biggest threat to cheetahs are African farmers.
Because cheetahs have been known to kill and eat livestock, many farmers kill the cats to protect their herds.
Cheetah Day at NBC 7
How does NBC 7 News in the Morning celebrate Cheetah Day? (Published Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2013)
As Executive Director and Founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, located in Namibia, Marker has developed a unique guard dog program to help stop the killing.
Marker’s team trains Anatolian Shepherd Dogs to live with a farmer’s livestock. The dogs then serve as a security system when they sense a cheetah is near.
"We've put out about 500 dogs into our rural communities," Marker said.
"The dog acts as a guardian they protect the livestock they bark loudly there is a lot of avoidance from the predators,” she said. “They don’t want to come near a herd that is protected."
The program is working.
By tracking the dogs, what they've discovered is that herds protected by guard dogs have 80 percent less livestock loss than those that were unguarded.
Marker said there is a long waiting list for dogs and she's touring the U.S. this spring asking those who care about the cheetah to help sponsor the program.
She believes that those rare opportunities when humans can get close to one of nature’s true wild wonders, will help save the cheetah.
"They listen to the cheetah purr. They see what it is looking at and they can actually kind of feel that cheetah next to them and understand why it is this beautiful animal needs help," she explains.
For those interested in learning more about the Cheetah Conservation Fund or to adopt a cheetah or a guide dog go to the organization's website.Freddie Gibbs nearly lost his life last night during a shooting that took place after his concert in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The show actually went off without incident on Tuesday evening (Nov 3) at the Rough Trade record store. Following the successful performance, Gibbs was in a black SUV parked at North 9th Street near Wythe Avenue. That’s when a lone gunman fired multiple shots at Gibbs and two people with him. Gibbs’ DJ reportedly suffered a minor leg wound and another victim was struck in the hand.
According to police, the shooting took place at 1:13 a.m. and no arrests were made in the case. Freddie’s crew members are reportedly in stable condition at Bellevue hospital in New York.
“They tried to kill Tupac. They tried to kill me,” Gibbs told The Post outside the club. “I’m still alive.”
Check out Freddie’s first Instagram post after the shooting below…
Yep. Still Livin. Thanks NYC. A photo posted by @freddiegibbs on Nov 11, 2014 at 2:12am PST
Related: Freddie Gibbs & Madlib Feat. Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$ & Ransom “Knicks (Remix)”
New Video: Freddie Gibbs & Madlib “Harolds”
Album Stream: Freddie Gibbs & Madlib ‘Piñata’
Freddie Gibbs Responds to YouTube Comments On His “Thuggin” Video“My wife works full-time as a labor-and-delivery nurse, and I have the kids,” Rob Crow explains. “Our daughter is too young to go to school, so she naps all day, and there are piles of things I have to do if I want to continue doing this dumb music thing.” Crow’s tasks might sound familiar.
“Just keeping the house from being a complete wreck is a full-time job; I am supposed to be doing dishes as we speak,” he said. “I look in the dining room, and say, ‘Oh, my God,’ then I pick up the kids in a few hours, and I haven’t even had a chance to listen to these test pressings. It will be interesting to try and go away for a month and tour....
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Crow admits.
As his band Pinback seems to be on indefinite hiatus, Crow has formed a new band, Rob Crow’s Gloomy Place, and released an album, You’re Doomed. Be Nice, his first “solo” record with a full band.
“Usually, I am playing all the instruments and recording everything in my room.” So, Crow recorded the album by himself in his room, taught it to a band, and brought it to producer/engineer Ben Moore at Singing Serpent Studios.
“I’ve never been able to have a record that sounds like my live shows as a solo artist,” Crow said, until You’re Doomed. Be Nice, that is. “I enjoy it — there is a lively sense to it, and there’s a lot of energy.” The writing and recording process would have been easier and less expensive if Crow had recorded the album in his room like past solo efforts.
Past Event Rob Crow's Gloomy Place Casbah 2501 Kettner Boulevard, San Diego
21+ / $10 - $12
“When you have to talk someone into spending money on you, and then not waste it, and get everything done as fast and as cheap as possible, that can be stressful,” he said. “I still went over....
“After you pore over something for so long, and in such detail, it’s, like, I think it’s done and I think it’s been done correctly, I can relax now and maybe get some sleep. I deserve a nap, I guess.”
Bassist Tony Gidlund (Fever Sleeves), guitarist Travis Nelson (Heavy Vegetable/Other Men), drummer Greg Sudor (Ghetto Blaster), and keyboardist Chris Fulford Brown (Singing Serpent) round out Rob Crow’s Gloomy Place. Their tour started on February 28, the day the album came out on Temporary Residence, and ends March 28 at the Casbah.Joseph Schooling's rise from relative unknown to Asian Games gold medalist has been nothing short of spectacular. As a 14-year-old, he served notice of his potential by clocking a time in the 200m butterfly than was almost three seconds faster than the US age-group mark. But it was not until the former Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) student – who joined The Bolles School in the United States in 2009 - that he really blossomed into the swimmer he is today. The Straits Times takes a look at the rise and rise of 19-year-old Joseph Schooling.
2010
Barely a year since moving to Florida, the 1.82m teenager is ranked the fastest in the US for his age in the 100 yards butterfly (short-course).
2011
April
Schooling, now 16, is part of a school relay team which shatters the country’s age-group (15-16) 4x100 yards medley relay record by almost six seconds - although the achievement was not counted because he is not a US citizen.
Swimmers from The Bolles School, a college preparatory institution in Florida's Jacksonville, include (from left) Teo D’Alessandro, Singaporean Joseph Schooling, Ryan Murphy and Ian Apple. --PHOTO: MAY SCHOOLING
June
Sets three new national records in 100m butterfly (54.19sec), 200m butterfly (2:00.05), and 200 individual medley (2:05.07) in June's National Swimming Championships
Joseph Schooling clocked 54.19sec for the men's 100m butterfly event at the National Swimming Championships on June 22, 2011, rewriting Bryan Tay’s 54.46sec mark set in 2009. -- PHOTO: ST FILE
July
Breaks the 50m (24.95sec) 100m (53.71sec) and 200m butterfly (1:57.95sec) national records again at the Asean School Games.
National swimmer Joseph Schooling (centre), the gold-medal winner of the 200m butterfly at the 2011 Asean Schools Games, pose with his medal along with fellow compatriot Quah Zheng Wen (left), who won the silver medal and Thai swimmer Navaphat Wongcharoen, who won the bronze. -- PHOTO: ST FILE
November
At the SEA Games 2011 in Palembang, Schooling is busy rewriting records again. He wins the 200m fly in 1:56.67 (a new Games and national record) and became the first Singapore swimmer to meet the “A” qualifying mark for the 2012 London Olympics.
He also wins the 50m fly in 24.06sec, also in a new Games and national record time. He finishes second in 200 individual medley but his time of 2:04.85 is another new national record. He comes in third in the 100m fly (new national record of 53.18sec).
National swimmer Joseph Schooling celebrating his win for the men's 200m butterfly event at the South-east Asian (SEA) Games in Indonesia on Nov 15, 2011. -- PHOTO: ST FILE
December
At the US Short-Course Junior National Championships, the Singaporean surpasses American superstar Michael Phelps’ age-group (15-16 years) time over the 100 yards butterfly (short course).
2012
May
Aged 16, he becomes youngest winner of the Sportsman of the Year award for his exploits in 2011.
July
He makes his Olympic debut with Singapore's contingent in London. But his swim cap and goggles were rejected before the 200m butterfly heat as they fail to meet Olympic regulations. Scrambling to find replacement equipment, he eventually clocks 1:59.18, and does not make the semis.
Schooling also fails to make the semi-final of the 100m fly in London, clocking 53.63sec, off his PB of 53.18,
Singapore swimmer Joseph Schooling reacts after competing in the men's 100m butterfly heats at the London 2012 Olympics. -- PHOTO: ST FILE
November
The teenager bounces back from his London disaster to set a US high school national record when he won the 100-yard butterfly at the Florida state high school championships. He also becomes the fastest Under-18 butterfly swimmer in the US after clinching the 100 and 200-yard titles at the Speedo Winter Junior National Championships.
2013
March
The Singaporean beats American star Ryan Lochte to win the 100m butterfly (long course) final at the Speedo South Sectional Championships in Florida. Schooling touched home in 54.71sec while 11-time Olympic medallist Lochte had to settle for second (55.20) at the Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Complex.
July
Schooling clocks 1:56.27 in the men's 200m butterfly semi-final at the Fina World Championships in Barcelona, re-writing his own national record of 1:56.67. However, he does not qualify for the final.
He also becomes the first Singapore swimmer to go below the two-minute barrier in the 200m individual medley, when he clocks 1:59.99 in Barcelona.
October
Schooling is granted deferment from National Service to allow him to prepare for the 2016 Rio Olympics. He also agrees to join the University of Texas at Austin. Its men’s swim team is ranked second in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s top division, and is coached by Eddie Reese, the assistant coach of the US men’s team at the London Olympics.
December
He emerges as Singapore's most bemedalled athlete at the 2013 SEA Games in Myanmar with five gold medals and one silver while setting four meet records on the way.
Singapore's Joseph Schooling with the gold medal from the men's 200m individual medley in the 27th South-east Asian (SEA) Games in Naypyidaw's Wunna Theikdi Swimming Complex, Myanmar on Dec 13, 2013. -- PHOTO: ST FILE
2014
July
Wins Singapore's first-ever Commonwealth Games swimming medal, finishing second to South African star Chad le Clos in 100m butterfly with a time of 51.69sec. The time is the eighth fastest in the world this year.
(Left to right) Silver medallist Singapore's Joseph Schooling, Gold medallist South Africa's Chad le Clos and Bronze medallist England's Adam Barrett pose on the podium during the Men's 100m Butterfly medal ceremony at the Tollcross International Swimming Centre during the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow on July 28, 2014. -- PHOTO: AFP
September
Schooling brings more joy to Singapore when he clinches a bronze in the 200m butterfly final with a time of 1:57.54. He then strikes gold in the 100m fly final with a Games record time of 51.76sec. That makes him the first male swimmer at the Asiad to win a swimming gold since Ang Peng Siong in 1982.
He also adds a 50m butterfly silver to his collection, after he touched home in 23.70sec to come in second in behind Chinese winner Shi Yang, who set a Games record of 23.46. It earns him a unique haul of three medals - one of every colour.
Singapore's Joseph Schooling wins Singapore's first gold in the 17th Asian Games Incheon 2014 Men's 100m butterfly event held at the Munhak Park Tae-Hwan Aquatics Center in Incheon, South Korea on Sep 24, 2014. - ST PHOTO: NEO XIAOBIN
FOUR FAST FACTS ABOUT SCHOOLING
1) His surname may not be your typical Singaporean surname but he is a born and bred Singaporean. Born to Colin and May Schooling, the former ACS (I) student counts Singapore food as the thing he misses most when in the United States. He loves milo "dinosaur" and carrot cake, the more black sauce the better.
2) He has good genes. His grand-uncle is Lloyd Valberg, who became Singapore’s first Olympian when he competed in the high jump at the 1948 London Games.
3) He may be a swimmer, but he is also a big football fan and counts Chelsea as his favourite team.
4) Schooling swam against Michael Phelps at the 2012 Olympics. But they had actually met four years ago, when Phelps was training in Singapore before the 2008 Beijing Games.The Toll of Austerity in Europe
The NYT had an interesting piece giving profiles of several young people who are struggling to find full time jobs in Europe. All of the people profiled have college degrees, several have considerably more education.
While the article notes that the situation faced by these young people is the result of the weak economy following the crash in 2008, it would have been helpful to point out that this weakness is the result of policy choices by Europe's leaders. They have deliberately decided to run low budget deficits in spite of the fact that most of the continent is operating well below its potential. Long-term interest rates are very low and inflation remains below the European Central Bank's 2.0 percent target, which itself is absurdly low.
In short, the plight of these young people and tens of millions of others should be seen as the fruit of the economic policy pursued by dogmatic leaders across Europe. It is not something that just happened.1 in 6 Nodes Now Support Bitcoin Classic
The Bitcoin block size debate is still in effect as we speak, and things are heating up once again between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic supporters. Now that a working client for Bitcoin Classic users has been released, various Bitcoin nodes seem to be favoring this solution over Bitcoin Core. However, the battle is far from over, as not everyone is for supporting blocks that are larger than 2MB in size.
Also read: Bitcoin Summer School Announced in Greece
Bitcoin Classic Nodes on the |
to compare the variability in debris selection between turtles at different life stages.
The turtles’ feeding behavior changes dramatically once they recruit to the nearshore environment. The size of first recruitment varies between species and geographic region, but on the east coast of Australia, green turtles recruit at approximately 40 cm curved carapace length (CCL) [31], and hawksbill turtles at >35 cm CCL [32]. These coastal turtles feed primarily on benthic resources such as seagrass, crustaceans, sponges, and algae, although even primarily herbivorous green turtles will opportunistically feed on jellyfish when available [33], [34]. Green turtles are known to be selective in their feeding, choosing particular species of seagrass over others, and even tending “grazing plots” to gather new shoots that are easier to digest and have higher nutritional value [35]. Hawksbill turtles also feed selectively, preferentially ingesting certain items even when they are less readily available in the environment [36].
Both Chelonia mydas (green turtles) and Eretmochelys imbricata (hawksbill turtles) begin their developmental phase in the open ocean before recruiting back as latter stage juveniles to the coastal environment, where they spend the rest of their lives [29]. Before recruitment, the post-hatchling turtles and early stage juveniles live and feed primarily at the ocean’s surface, occasionally diving to shallow depths [30]. They are thought to drift with the currents, aggregating in downwelling lines along with other floating biological material and debris [12]. During this phase they feed on plankton, comprising primarily molluscs, crustaceans, and gelatinous organisms [20]. Living in downwelling zones may provide the young turtles with increased shelter and food opportunities, but also exposes them to concentrated areas of floating debris.
Globally, estimates of debris ingestion rates in turtles vary dramatically with geographical region, species, and year. Recent work from South American populations of marine turtles found that up to 100% of stranded turtles contained marine debris in their gastrointestinal systems [11]. The problem affects turtles of all life stages, from post-hatchlings through adults [12] – [14]. It is unknown why sea turtles ingest plastic: one hypothesis is that plastic bags resemble a typical prey item, jellyfish [15]. Although this may be the case for turtles that ingest plastic bags, it does not explain the ingestion of other forms of plastic, Styrofoam, rubber, ropes, and the myriad of other items that have been found in turtles [16] – [21]. Although sea turtles can and do utilize olfaction to orient to prey, they are primarily visual feeders [22]. The presence of at least three different cone photopigments in sea turtle retinas, as well as electrophysiological measurements and behavioral studies, indicate their ability to discriminate color [23] – [25]. This color vision may play a role in feeding choices, as has been demonstrated in laboratory trials [25] – [28]. If this is the case, monitoring the color of debris ingested by turtles may offer insights to the reasons why turtles eat debris, and may also lead to conservation and management recommendations. Color preference (or avoidance) has already been investigated as a possible method for decreasing sea turtles’ interactions with the bait used in longline fisheries. Unfortunately, although turtles exhibit a preference for natural bait over blue dyed bait in a laboratory situation, dyed bait does not appear to reduce long line interactions in field trials [28].
Marine debris has become a significant global issue in recent years. Over the past five decades, global plastic production has increased exponentially [1]. Concurrently, plastic has rapidly become the dominant component of marine debris, representing as much as 80% in areas [2], [3]. Despite increasing awareness of the prevalence of plastic debris, there is little data on the total amount of debris in the marine environment, or how that quantity may have changed through time [4], [5]. The impacts of this debris, however, have been widely documented, with at least 267 marine species known to be affected by anthropogenic debris [6]. Debris can cause a number of different problems for wildlife, but all fall under two main categories: impacts from entanglement and from ingestion. Entanglement can kill wildlife by drowning or inhibiting the ability to escape predation or feed normally, while the implications of debris ingestion include death through perforation or impaction of the digestive system [7]. Additional sublethal impacts include dietary dilution [8] and exposure to chemicals leaching from plastic [9]. All six species of sea turtle listed on the IUCN Red list [10] have been documented to ingest debris [6].
We used a binomial regression to predict the probability of ingestion based on the descriptive variables CCL and species (C. mydas and E. imbricata), and a chi square analysis to determine differences between ingestion probabilities for life history stages. For the turtles that had ingested debris, we tested the relationship between CCL and debris load (both total weight and also number of pieces of debris ingested) using a generalized linear model (GLM, Gaussian model). Finally, we calculated Manly’s selectivity ratio for each debris category ingested for both life history stages. This technique has been widely used to estimate resource selection functions for habitat or diet [39]. The index takes into account the availability of each type of resource in the environment. A value greater than 1 indicates a positive selectivity for that category, while a value less than one suggests that turtles avoid ingesting that type of debris compared to what is available in the environment. All analyses were performed using R version 2.14, package nnet and adehabitat [40] – [42].
To estimate availability of anthropogenic debris, we conducted beach surveys between 2009–2011 on four beaches on N. Stradbroke Island and four beaches on the Sunshine coast, in the region where the Underwater World turtles stranded. We collected all pieces of debris over 5 mm found in a 100 m long strip transect running parallel to the water line on each beach. The strip transect width varied depending on tide and the beach in question, but encompassed the distance from the waterline to the dominant landward vegetation line. Beach debris was assigned to the same categories as debris found in turtles. We calculated the relative abundance of each type and color of plastic debris found in the environment using equations parallel to those above. For simplicity of analysis, and because no individual color represented more than 10% of the sample, we combined our color and debris types to create 10 categories in order to measure selectivity indices for the turtles. These types were: hard white plastic, hard colored plastic, hard clear plastic, soft white plastic, soft colored plastic, soft clear plastic, rope/string, rubber, foam, and miscellaneous.
where Nd is the number of items of each type of debris, and Nt is the total number of items of debris found in the turtle. Turtles were divided into two groups; pelagic sized feeders and benthic sized animals. We categorized pelagic feeders as those animals smaller than 35.0 cm, and benthic feeders as those >35 cm CCL.
We calculated the frequency of ingestion of each category of debris using the following equation: where is the number of turtles having ingested a particular type of debris, i, and N is the total number of turtles for which detailed debris information is available [38]. We also determined the relative percent abundance of debris types ingested by each turtle by calculating the percentage
Necropsies were performed on all animals using standard techniques [37]. Contents of the gastrointestinal system were sieved to retrieve any foreign matter. Debris found in the turtles was washed and stored for analysis. Each piece of debris was weighed (to within 0.01 g) and categorized into one of six main categories and additional subcategories, based on a classification system combining both composition and morphology. The categories were: hard plastic, soft plastic, foam, rope/string, rubber, and miscellaneous (includes glass, metal, paper, cloth). Hard and soft plastic objects were further categorized by color. Positive or negative buoyancy was also measured for each item. For six of the turtles, debris samples were not retained; so detailed categorical information is not available. The majority of rope and string items (>85%) were composed of plastic material, but were categorized separately due to their morphology.
From 2005–2011, 115 turtles were obtained in southeast Queensland from two sources: dead stranded sea turtles from North Stradbroke Island (n = 64), and sea turtles that did not survive treatment at the marine wildlife rehabilitation facility at Underwater World, in Mooloolaba (n = 51). Eighty-eight were green sea turtles (C. mydas), 24 were hawksbill turtles (E. imbricata), 2 were loggerhead turtles (C. caretta) and one was a flatback turtle (N. depressus). The turtles ranged from 5.4–105.8 cm CCL, with a median size of 43.4 cm. Because of the small sample size of loggerhead and flatback turtles, all investigations of inter-species differences were restricted to green and hawksbill turtles.
The majority of the debris found during all beach surveys was hard plastic, with only one other category (miscellaneous) at over 15% ( Fig. 1 ). White debris made up over 30% of collected items, followed by blue and clear/translucent ( Fig. 2 ). Using beach debris as a measure of environmental availability, Manly’s selectivity ratio highlighted the selectivity differences between turtles from different life stages. Benthic sized turtles showed strong selectivity for soft plastics in general, particularly for clear soft plastics, and for rope. They appeared to avoid hard white and colored debris ( Fig. 3 ). Pelagic turtles had the highest selection ratios for rubber, rope, and hard plastic, but these did not differ significantly from the environment ( Fig. 4 ).
A total of 1057 pieces of debris were ingested by 33 turtles. The number of pieces ingested by each individual turtle ranged from 1–329 with an average of 31.7±10.18 (s.e.) pieces per turtle. The total weight of all items found within each turtle ranged from non-detectable (<0.01 g) to 10.41 g. The average proportion of positively buoyant items ingested by the turtles was approximately 80% and did not vary significantly between the two life stages ( Table 2 ). Hard plastic comprised 33.11% of the total number of debris items ingested, 34.25% was soft plastic, and plastic rope followed at 13.06% ( Table 3 ). Including fishing line and packing straps, the total amount of plastic debris ingested by turtles made up nearly 90% of all debris items. When data were analyzed by life history stages, oceanic sized turtles ingested significantly more hard plastic and rubber than benthic turtles, while benthic turtles ingested more foam and rope than pelagic turtles ( Fig. 1 ). Colors varied between the two classes, but not significantly. The color of plastic debris found in both pelagic and benthic turtles was primarily clear or translucent, followed by white ( Fig. 2 ). Black debris comprised mainly black plastic bags, while green and blue were mostly plastic rope and string. Other colors (red, orange, yellow, and brown) were found in very small quantities.
Of the 115 necropsied animals, 22 were oceanic-size turtles, and 93 were from benthic habitats ( Table 1 ). A total of 33.9% (N = 39) of the turtles were found to have ingested debris. Ingestion frequencies differed significantly between oceanic (n = 12, 54.5%) and benthic-sized turtles (n = 27, 29.0%), despite our uneven sample sizes (chi-square 4.09, df = 1, p = 0.043). There was a significant negative correlation between CCL and probability of debris ingestion (p = 0.0338), but no correlation with the weight of debris ingested (p = 0.942), or total number of pieces of debris ingested (p = 0.215). Nor was there a significant effect of species on the probability of ingesting debris (p = 0.445), or a species by size interaction (p = 0.430). Because we do not have detailed debris information for six of the turtles, calculations on the weight and total number of debris items were carried out only on n = 33 turtles.
Discussion
Marine debris or more specifically, plastic ingestion by sea turtles is a global phenomenon, affecting populations worldwide. The vast majority (nearly 90%) of all ingested items in this study were plastic in origin, a finding common to most other studies reporting debris ingestion in turtles [16], [43]–[45]. This reflects the significant contribution of plastic to the global marine debris problem [5].
This study discovered no significant differences in debris ingestion between the species investigated; C. mydas and E. imbricata. This is perhaps due to the fact that the two species exhibit similar feeding behavior, with smaller turtles feeding pelagically, and larger turtles shifting to benthic feeding [46]. Although species had little effect on debris ingestion rates, size did. The probability of debris ingestion was inversely correlated with size (CCL), and when broken down into size classes, smaller pelagic turtles were significantly more likely to ingest debris than larger benthic feeding turtles. These results are in line with research conducted by Balazs [47] and Plotkin and Amos [17], though other studies found no significant relationship between size or life history stage and debris ingestion. Most of these studies investigated the relationship between turtle size (CCL) and weight, number, or size of the pieces of debris ingested, but did not analyze the probability of debris ingestion [16], [44], [45], nor did they investigate differences between life history stages [16], [45]. Bjorndal’s [13] analysis of ingestion probability and size class of green turtles suggested that a higher percentage of turtles <30 cm had ingested debris in comparison to their larger counterparts, however this difference was not significant. Size class or life history stage appears to be an important factor in determining the probability of debris ingestion, but the number of pieces, total weight, or volume of ingested debris rarely correlates with size class or life history stage, as highlighted by this and other studies.
Turtles in this study from different life history stages varied not only in their likelihood of ingesting debris, but also in the types of debris ingested. Pelagic turtles ingested significantly more rubber and hard plastic than did benthic feeding turtles, who primarily ingested soft plastic (Fig. 1). While there was not a significant difference in the colors ingested between the two groups, they did differ from what was available in the environment, ingesting clear debris in greater proportions, and blue at lower proportions (Fig. 2). Manly’s selectivity ratio, and its significance level, also varied with life history stage. Neritic turtles actively selected white and clear soft plastics, while avoiding hard white and colored plastics (Fig. 1). They also showed selectivity for rope and string, but this could be an artifact of the way the samples were tallied. Counts of the total number of items were used to quantify the amount of debris in each category. Multi-stranded rope and string may more readily unravel into smaller (and therefore, more numerous) pieces within the gastrointestinal system than other types of debris, which could be reflected in our results.
Pelagic turtles were much less selective than their neritic counterparts, with most of their selectivity indices not found to be significantly different to environmental levels. Only foam (with zero pieces ingested) and hard colored debris fell significantly below 1, indicating avoidance of these categories. Interestingly, the single highest preference in the pelagic turtles was for rubber. Although the preference was not statistically significant, this may be due in part to the smaller sample size of the pelagic turtles. Of the 41 pieces of rubber found inside all turtles, 32 pieces (78%) were fragments of balloons. When helium balloons are released into the environment, they rise to a height of approximately 8 kilometers before undergoing a process known as “brittle fracture”, where the balloon fragments into long strands [48]. The resulting debris bears a strong resemblance to jellyfish or squid (Fig. 5). Indeed, the brittle fracturing of balloons creates tentacle-like structures typical of Scyphomedusae which all species of sea turtles have been documented to eat [46], [49]–[51]. This may be the cause for the high ingestion selectivity seen in both pelagic and neritic turtles. Several studies have reported ingestion of balloons by sea turtles [11], [17], [52], [53], and anecdotal evidence exists for ingestion of balloons by whales and dolphins [54]. Worldwide cleanups sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy over the past 25 years have found over 1.2 million balloons, or about 0.7% of all debris items collected [55]. This is in line with our study, which found a total of 0.9% of rubber items on the beach. Although balloons and other rubber items make up only a small fraction of the total amount of debris collected, the current data indicating that turtles may selectively ingest balloons and other rubber could provide guidance for policy makers addressing mass balloon releases.
The differences in debris preference and selectivity may be a result of feeding styles; young pelagic turtles live an epipelagic lifestyle, floating at the surface and feeding within the top five meters [30]. As they drift with the currents, encountering pelagic gyres and downwelling zones where debris accumulates, they may be susceptible to accidental or purposeful ingestion of debris along with their natural food sources. The presence of encrusting organisms further blurs the line between food and debris. Post hatchlings are thought to be relatively non-selective feeders [56], a finding supported by this research. Conversely, benthic-feeding green turtles and hawksbill turtles are thought to be more selective about their diet [35], [36]. They also may be less likely to come into contact with plastic marine debris, much of which is positively buoyant [57], [58]. However, they also eat gelatinous organisms, which are usually soft and transparent, much like the debris that they most commonly ingest. Our findings lend further support to the hypothesis that turtles mistakenly eat plastic because of its similarity to jellyfish [15]. Other factors may also contribute to the differences in ingestion rates; for example as turtles grow, the internal diameter of their digestive tract becomes larger, making it easier for plastics to pass through, and not accumulate. Pelagic turtles, therefore, may experience a higher risk of mortality from debris ingestion, not only because they are more likely to ingest debris, but also because they are smaller in this life history stage than they are in the benthic stage and their digestive tract is correspondingly smaller. Hence, this may result in an increased possibility of impaction or perforation of the gastrointestinal tract.
There are limitations to using beach surveys as a proxy for the debris that sea turtles encounter. Differences in buoyancy, degradability, and other characteristics may result in certain types of marine debris more frequently stranding on or being retained on beaches. Conversely, some land-based materials disposed on beaches may not ultimately end up in the marine environment, and thus available to turtles. However, despite these constraints, beach debris has widely been used as an indicator of marine debris, for several key reasons [59], [60]. First, it is much less resource intensive to monitor beach debris, and collected debris can be characterized comprehensively, unlike with visual at-sea sampling. Second, because debris accumulates on beaches, statistically robust sample sizes can be gathered, while in-water sampling can lead to a paucity of data and the need to extrapolate from small sample sizes [60]. Finally, items on the beach are in dynamic flux with the nearshore marine environment, and can easily become resuspended [61], so while not ideal, beach debris measurements provide a reasonable proxy for environmental availability. However, it is recommended that more in-water sampling of marine debris be carried out to provide quantitative estimates of marine debris and types of marine debris, especially in areas where turtles are likely to occur.
Research in Australia and elsewhere has shown an inverse correlation between the amount of beach debris and the distance from major population centers [3], [62], suggesting that neritic turtles in SE Queensland, near Australia’s 3rd largest city, Brisbane (population >2 million), might come into contact with different amounts of debris than would open ocean turtles. Despite this, pelagic turtles in this study are more likely to ingest debris than are the benthic turtles. This leads us to speculate as to whether pelagic turtles encounter increased amounts of debris in oceanic gyres and in wind rows [63], whether they are less selective due to the decreased food availability in the open ocean, or whether their feeding ecology simply places them at higher risk for debris ingestion.As Apple and the FBI tangle over encryption in courtrooms and Congress, one family who nearly lost a loved one during the mass shooting in San Bernardino is speaking up.
Salihin Kondoker, the husband of Anies Kondoker, who was shot three times but survived the attack, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Apple vs. FBI legal dispute — on Apple’s behalf. In an impassioned letter to Judge Sheri Pym, Salihin says he doubts there’s useful information on the confiscated iPhone, and worries that what the government is demanding of Apple will invite rampant government surveillance.
“In my opinion it is unlikely there is any valuable information on this phone,” Salihin wrote in the letter, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“This was a work phone. My wife also had an iPhone issued by the County and she did not use it for any personal communication,” Salihin continued. “San Bernardino is one of the largest counties in the country. They can track the phone on GPS in case they needed to determine where people were. Second, both the iCloud account and carrier account were controlled by the county so they could track any communications. This was common knowledge among my wife and other employees.
"Why then would someone store vital contacts related to an attack on a phone they knew the county had access to? They destroyed their personal phones after the attack. And I believe they did that for a reason.”
Submitted to Pym on Monday morning, Salihin's letter explains that his support of Apple follows some initial frustration and confusion over what's at stake.
“When I first learned Apple was opposing the order I was frustrated that it would be yet another roadblock. But as I read more about their case, I have come to understand their fight is for something much bigger than one phone,” he wrote.
Salihin said he shares Apple’s fear that the security-suppressing software the government has asked the company to create will be used against innocent people.
“I support Apple and the decision they have made," Salihin wrote.
His letter also speaks to concerns about the iPhone's value to the investigation — concerns apparently shared by those leading it. In an essay published last week, FBI Director James Comey appeared to concede that the device might not contain useful information.
"Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists," Comey wrote. "Maybe it doesn’t. But we can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead."
In an interview with NPR, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan also expressed doubt that the confiscated iPhone holds within it information valuable to the FBI investigation.
“I'll be honest with you, I think that there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone,” he said. “This is an effort to leave no stone unturned in the investigation.”
Below, Salihin Kondoker's letter in full.UPDATE: James Tully fundraiser raises four times its goal in two days amid Eric Frein hunt
James Tully, who walks five miles to work in Monroe County and who says he has been stopped more than 20 times when mistaken for alleged cop killer Eric Frien, is well on his way to getting a vehicle, according to a crowdfunding website.
The "Help James get safe to work" effort, which hoped to raise $2,500 from small donations, was above $5,000 this morning at gofundme.com/g43pg8.
The fundraising was begun by Dawn DiBiase with the simple words "James needs our help."
Comments came with the donations.
"This story broke my heart. Hope the donations help you get a car! Best of luck!" Cheri Magistro wrote this morning on the gofundme site.
The Pocono Record told Tully's story earlier this week. Some of Tully's experiences with police have been physical near his Barrett Township home.
In one case — an encounter with a man in camo and wearing a tactical vest but no obvious badge — Tully just had one thing on his mind.
"From the minute I saw him with that gun I thought, 'let me survive this,'" he told the newspaper.
Tully has taken to wearing his identification so it's publicly visible, published reports say.
Frein is charged with the Sept. 12 murder of a Pennsylvania State Police corporal in Pike County and the wounding of another trooper. The search for Frein enters its 41st day today.
Commenters on the fundraising site suggested efforts continue beyond the amount needed to buy a vehicle to help Tully pay for insurance, gas and vehicle registration.
"Wow u guys r AMAZING!!! Thank u all sooo much!!" DiBiase, the organizer, said on the site.Source: michaelmascolo
What is the most effective way to “oppose hate”? What should we do when someone makes a comment that we experience as racist, sexist, homophobic or ethnocentric? Do we ignore it in order to get along? Do we confront the person? If so, how?
When we ignore remarks we experience as bigoted, we enable them. However, while confronting our opponents might make us feel good, it is rarely effective. Direct confrontations tend to provoke feelings of, defensiveness and. When this happens, opposing parties become invested in defending themselves and protecting their.
We can’t oppose hate by “opposing hate”. Hate is not something that can be shamed away. In fact, attempts to shame away hate simply tend to foment more hate.
We often hear that “love trumps hate”. There is much truth in this maxim. However, this doesn’t mean simply loving lovable people. It means acting out of love for people who espouse beliefs we hate.
War is easy. Love is hard.
We rarely convince each other about sensitive topics through confrontation. Instead, we simply push away the very people we hope to influence.
Political Talk Gone Wrong
We know this from our everyday life. Here is an example of how our contemporary approach to political discussions fails. In this exchange, Larry, Greg and Aron are discussing hate crimes in an online forum (Southern Poverty Law Center -- reference below for the extended discussion).
GREG: Don't be so sure that the FBI will continue to be as diligent [pursuing hate crimes] under the Jeff Sessions DOJ as they have been for the last 8 years. People should report to their local police, the FBI, and civil rights groups in hopes at least one of them will respond.
LARRY: Diligent? They don't go after left-wing radicals. Besides, many or most of the so-called hate crimes are being committed against Jews and people trying to stand up against the hatred coming from the left, BLM, Farrakhan devotees, and thugs rioting in the streets burning down their own neighborhoods.
Larry responds not by seeking to address the problems raised by Greg, but by attacking Greg’s position. Larry engages in three practices that cause the discussion to degenerate quickly. He invokes “us versus them” thinking; diminishes the importance of Greg’s concerns; and blames hateful violence on groups described using language that many would regard as racist. Taking offense, Aron attacks back:
ARON: Uhm, those hate crimes against Jews are coming from supporters like yourself…You are ADORABLY ignorant.
And so, the discussion quickly degenerates into name calling. No one has changed their views. If anything, the parties are more entrenched than they were when they began.
Engaging the Humanity of the Other—Even When the Other Isn’t Very Engaging
We cannot eliminate hate by force. If we want to oppose hate, we have to do it by tending to the internal and external conditions that foster hate. This can only be done by forging with those with whom we disagree.
This isn’t easy. To do this, we must look beneath what a person says to uncover the fears, needs, and beliefs – however reasonable or unreasonable – that motivate people to adopt their positions. We need to separate the other’s position from the person herself. When we engage the needs behind the position, we can begin to explore why the other thinks and feels as they do.
Something like this occurred in when Greg asked Larry an open-ended question about how to bridge the gap between them:
GREG: You and I look like a perfect example of Americans who seem to live in different universes, Larry. I wish has had some idea what to do about it. Do you? (Either one of just telling the other just to get out of their bubble is probably useless.)
Greg’s compassionate question -- do you have an idea about what to do about our differences? -- opens up space for Larry to respond. If we seek to understand rather than simply condemn, we can learn much about Larry’s thinking and feeling.
LARRY: [If] you're speaking…about the world the left lives in, then I think there is nothing that can be done about it. Those under 50 have no idea what socialism or communism is so they will not change their beliefs until they live under the forms of they champion. I, for one, fought against communism and socialism while serving in VN in the 60s and I assure you they are butchers, they are criminals, they are Godless, and they are cruel….Muslims as well suffer under the Islamist Nazis running rampant in the world today. My world is one of traditional values where good is good, evil is evil, we want the government to leave us the he!! alone and people fight for freedoms, not the right to force their beliefs onto others…
If we put aside our own biases long enough, we learn that Larry believes in freedom. As a product of his experiences in Vietnam, he believes that socialism, communism and forms of totalitarianism breed cruelty. Larry embraces traditional values in which good and evil are not relative values. If we listen closely, we may find that we can appreciate some of what Larry has to say. But we need not agree with Larry’s views to understand them and appreciate how he could embrace them. He is not an alien.
We Must Engage Our Opponents
Once we begin to see our opponent as human being with human needs, real problem solving can begin. We can begin to look for ways to mitigate the fears and concerns that incite views we regard as hateful, racist, bigoted, and so forth. For example, Greg and Aron might be able to introduce Larry to minorities, leftists, and persons from diverse cultures and religions whose ways of being in the world disconfirm Larry’s expectations. Conversely, drawing upon his wartime experiences, Larry might be able to remind his interlocutors of the privileges they enjoy as citizens of a democratic nation.
We must always act forcefully to protect those who are harmed by bigotry and hate. However, we cannot eliminate hate through force or violence. We must talk to our enemies and seek to understand the pleas behind their positions. It does not diminish me to understand and even empathize with persons with whom I disagree – it actually increases the likelihood that we will be able to create some sort of common ground. I am diminished, however, when I reject the other without trying to make contact with their humanity – even when it appears that they are unable or unwilling to do the same.Last summer, when Donald Trump began his rise to the nomination, Hillary Clinton responded by pointing a finger squarely and firmly at the Republican Party.
Trump might sound extreme, she said, “but if you look at everyone else’s policies, they’re pretty much the same.” He might make “hateful comments,” she said, “but how many others disagree with him?”
Later that year, when Trump proposed his ban on Muslims, Clinton responded again by implicating the rest of the Republican Party. “Their language may be more veiled than Trump’s,” she said, “but their ideas are not so different.”
And the following spring, when Trump solidified his lead in the primary, Clinton yet again faulted the modern Republican Party. “Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere,” she said. “What the Republicans have sown with their extremist tactics, they are now reaping with [his] candidacy.”
So when Trump secured the nomination just a few weeks later in May, officials at the Democratic Party expected to hear more of the same from their own candidate, turning the new GOP standard-bearer into a sweeping indictment of the Republican Party, the Republican platform, and every Republican running for the House and Senate.
What Clinton did instead was vastly different.
That month, the candidate and her team of aides in Brooklyn set out on a new approach, outlined for the Democratic National Committee in an internal email that landed in the communications shop as something of a shock. “They want to make Trump look even more extreme than the rank-and-file Republican member of Congress,” the DNC’s deputy communications director wrote on the night of May 13, summarizing a conversation earlier that evening with Clinton’s rapid response director, Zac Petkanas. “He doesn’t want to link the House and Senate Republicans to Trump,” the message read.
The bottom line?
“The campaign does not want to connect Trump and the Republican Party.”
The email, made public along with 20,000 others on WikiLeaks as part of a massive cyberattack on the DNC this summer, is one of about two dozen exchanges that reveal a running tension this spring over the campaign’s decision to “disaggregate” Trump from the Republican Party. The strategic shift made back in May didn’t just drive a wedge between Clinton’s team and the officials tasked with coordinating the party across the states. It fundamentally upended the way Democrats talk about Republicans.
“I think that’s crazy” was the reply from the DNC’s communications director, Luis Miranda, whose emails make up more than half of those on WikiLeaks. (Miranda and other top officials at the DNC, including the chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, later stepped down in the wake of the hack.) “Insane,” he wrote again a few hours later, concerned that campaign's approach might let down-ballot Republicans off the hook.
Months later, Clinton's strategy is unrecognizable from the first year of her campaign. She doesn't tie Trump to the rest of the Republican Party. She doesn’t talk about Republican extremism or Republican rhetoric or Republican ideology. She has made the race almost exclusively about Donald Trump, his temperament, his qualifications, his character, and his fitness to serve, leaving the rest of the Democratic Party to adjust to a general election that has little to do with traditional partisan policy or politics.
The result, with less than 50 days until Election Day, is a Democratic nominee who praises establishment Republicans, makes forceful appeals for bipartisan support, and only rarely addresses Trump as President Obama might have John McCain or Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012, strictly avoiding attacks on Republicans writ large.
It’s a message that requires great discipline from a candidate who once made a starkly different case, appearing at times to delight in attacking Republican policy. (At one rally in Rhode Island before the end of the primary, Clinton memorably nodded along in approval when the crowd booed one of her lines stating that Trump and his competitor, Ted Cruz, were peddling “the same snake oil” as the rest of Republicans.)
When she recently deviated from her general election approach, describing “half” of Trump's supporters as “deplorables” — a remark that cast millions of Republicans as racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic — Clinton quickly apologized for the broad characterization. “I regret saying ‘half,’” she said. (The retraction notably did nothing to back away from what she again described as Trump’s “deplorable” behavior.)
On the trail, Clinton doesn't engage much in the economic and social debates that typically animate both parties in a presidential election. (In May, on at least two occasions, WikiLeaks emails show, Clinton’s team asked the DNC to stay “out of policy” when it came to framing Trump — once around his May 12 meeting with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and a second time in relation to infrastructure messaging.)
Clinton's stump speech from the primary — a laundry list of policy proposals, capped off with a reminder that “everything I've just said, the Republicans disagree with” — gave way this summer to highly specific and often personal portraits of Trump, his record, and his credentials. A stray comment last month to a crowd in St. Petersburg, Florida — that his tax plan would “basically just repackage trickle-down economics” — is perhaps the closest she’s come since the spring to identifying Trump with mainstream GOP policy.
Instead, as Clinton presents it now, this election is about “values.” (“Consider our plans and the values behind them,” the candidate tells voters.) And she means values in the most basic sense of the word — touchstones of decency and fairness that, against Trump, have suddenly become (big-D) Democratic slogans. Her speeches cast the GOP nominee as a threat to “big-heartedness,” “tolerance” — the belief that “no one’s worthless, no one's less-than.” Her tagline on the trail is the simple idea that “love trumps hate.” Her running mate describes the race as “near existential” — a choice about “fidelity to our values.” And her field offices across the country are decorated more often with words like “kindness” than anything overtly partisan. (Next to “Hillary for President” and “Yaaas Hillary” posters on the wall in Nashua, New Hampshire, one sign simply reads, “Be Respectful.”)
Earlier this month, delivering a speech about the hallmark Republican theme of American exceptionalism, Clinton admitted that such topics should normally be “above politics.” But, she told the crowd at the American Legion, “this is not a normal election.”
“The debates are not the normal disagreements between Republicans and Democrats.”
Through the month of May, the party’s adjustment to Clinton’s new normal did not come quickly, easily, or without some resistance inside the Democratic apparatus in Washington tasked with races at the state and local levels and presented with the opportunity of a historically unpopular Republican nominee. The internal DNC emails on WikiLeaks offer an unvarnished glimpse at a campaign |
myself.
Chicago is about to have a shared bike system. The ‘Divvy‘ bikes. I have already seen them when they were presented to the public and they look very good. San Francisco is getting a small system this August. The ‘Citi bike‘ system in New York has just been implemented and it is very successful. Shared bikes are coming to more US cities. If there are many of those bikes on the streets that may change the image of the ‘cyclist’ a bit. A necessity in my opinion if there is to be a good future for cycling in the US. The image of the ‘cyclist’ would have to change from the more racer type of cyclist to the more ordinary person on an upright bicycle. If a combination were possible of more riders like the ones in Davis, and more cycling infrastruture of the quality I saw in Chicago (or better), then cycling will appeal to a much wider range of people. That is the way forward for cycling in my opinion, not only in the US, but everywhere.
My personal observations of cycling in the US. (Filmed in Chicago, San Francisco, Davis (CA), the Lake Tahoe area and in Virginia City (NV). Some of the footage from the rental car was filmed by Lei Lennaerts.)
—
For this blog post I need to thank Steven Vance for showing me around in Chicago and giving me valuable explanations with what I saw.
—
This blog is about cycling in the Netherlands, but I sometimes write about places outside the Netherlands to look at cycling there from a Dutch perspective. Previous posts featured cycling in London, Budapest, the Czech Republic, Brussels, Kortrijk (Belgium), Berlin and Milan (Italy). There are also later posts about Sydney and Brisbane, Australia.Team Rubicon’s goal to replicate its disaster response model in other countries took a great leap forward this week with the first donation to Team Rubicon Global. The donation is as unique as Team Rubicon, coming in the form of 109 bitcoins from the bitcoin community. The donation wallet was created by Vaurum, a crypto-currency company based in Palo Alto.
Bitcoins are a digital currency that allow users to conduct transactions online, peer-to-peer. Like other currencies, its value fluctuates and it can be converted to cash. Vaurum’s donation wallet for Team Rubicon Global was valued at $71,500 upon conversion.
“We’re pleased with the way this campaign turned out – bitcoiners around the world came together to pitch in and help out with a very tragic situation that occurred in the Philippines,” said Avish Bhama, Vaurum founder and CEO. “Team Rubicon has put together great initiatives to help with rebuilding efforts, and the donation wallet was a simple way to facilitate donations via bitcoin – we received hundreds of contributions from anonymous bitcoiners around the world.”
The funds will be applied to engage Filipino military veterans in construction and medical projects—vital as the Philippines continue to recover from Typhoon Haiyan.
“Since our start four years ago, we have always sought innovative methods to improve disaster response, and provide military veterans with a renewed sense of purpose,” said William McNulty, Team Rubicon cofounder and managing director of TR Global. “Thanks to the generosity of the bitcoin community, we are better poised to help our colleagues around the world.”
Team Rubicon was founded in the wake of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake with a dual mission: to apply the skills of military veterans to disaster response; and to help ease the reintegration of veterans through continued service at home.
While initially established for American military veterans, veterans from the United Kingdom, Norway, and the Philippines have worked with Team Rubicon—including in Haiti, the Philippines, and after Hurricane Sandy in NY. Many have experienced the same difficulties transitioning from military to civilian life and a desire to continue serving.
“More than 40 countries made up the coalition in Iraq and Afghanistan, creating millions of veterans with skills and experiences that are incredibly effective during disaster,” said McNulty, “Through the development of Team Rubicon Global, we can help more disaster survivors while helping these veterans regain the community, mission, and sense of self that many have lost upon leaving the service.”
To learn more about Team Rubicon’s mission, visit http://www.teamrubiconusa.org.
About Team Rubicon: Team Rubicon (TR) unites the skills and experience of military veterans with first responders to rapidly deploy emergency response teams. TR offers veterans a chance to continue their service by helping and empowering those afflicted by disasters, and also themselves. For more about Team Rubicon, visit http://www.teamrubiconusa.org.
Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/bitcoin/teamrubicon/prweb11657622.htmWILLIAMSBURG, VA — Theodore Bennett decided to take his lunch break at a local pizzeria today. He made his way down to one of his favorite pizza joints, Pizza Town, and ordered a large pizza loaded with sausage, mushroom, peppers and onions. Pizza Town’s owner, Mike Miller, described the terrifying scene that unfolded next.
“We saw that Theodore Bennett was a police officer, so we wanted to give him the best service we could offer. I told my staff to make sure Officer Bennett’s pizza was hot and ready right out of the oven when it was delivered to his table.”
As Officer Bennett took a bite of his pizza, he burnt his mouth and shouted, “Mother of f***a**, that is hot!” He then pulled out his firearm and shot the pizza 9 times before fleeing the restaurant, leaving the staff to clean up his mess.
“Everyone was startled,” said patron Melony Fairweather. “He scared everyone at Pizza Town. I hope someone reprimands him.”
We caught up with Officer Bennett who tried to defend his actions.
“The minute that pizza burned me I immediately felt threatened, which is why I shot the pizza.”
We asked Officer Bennett why he decided to shoot the pizza 9 times. He replied by saying, “I wanted to make sure that the pizza was not able to burn my mouth again.”
We told Officer Bennett that a pizza was an inanimate object, that had no way of hurting him, he responded by saying that we couldn’t adequately understand the situation unless we had been there.
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Missed out on the first Halo Wars 2 beta? You will have another chance to play the game ahead of its February 2017 release, Microsoft has confirmed.
A second beta for the RTS sequel will be held "closer to launch," a Microsoft representative told GameSpot. Unlike the first beta, which ran June 13-23, the second one will be held on both Xbox One and Windows 10 PC.
Additionally, there will be a new mode. The first beta included multiplayer modes deathmatch and domination. There is no word yet on what the other new mode will be or the specific dates for when the second beta will run.
Although the second Halo Wars 2 beta will be held on Xbox One and PC, there will not be cross-play since the game does not support it.
Halo Wars 2 is a Play Anywhere game, meaning buying it (digitally) on Xbox One gets you the PC version free and vice versa. Originally set to come out in 2016, Halo Wars 2 is now pegged to arrive in February 2017.
For more on Halo Wars 2, check out GameSpot's preview from E3 2016, "Will Halo Wars 2 Please RTS Fans?" We also recently learned that 343 brought on Call of Duty and Mirror's Edge actors to play the game's lead roles, replacing the talent from the first game.We couldn't be more thankful for the great fan support and feedback to date, and these updates are only the start. We'll continue to update you on these improvements, and everything Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, via our studio social channels: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Instagram.
Game Update: 7/21/16
In Game Updates:
ATLAS Gorge Map Added to Multiplayer
Connectivity Improvements
Matchmaking Improvements
Game Update: 11/17/15
In-Game Store Additions:
Added Advanced Supply Drop 40-Pack, includes 18 Bonus ASDs and 1 Guaranteed Legendary Item.
In-Game Updates:
Connectivity Improvements
Optimized Playlists for Matchmaking
Game Update: 9/29/15
In Game Updates:
Fixed an issue where the Sentinel Operator Pants were mismarked as the Ronin Pants in the Armory.
Fixed an issue where the “III” and Nanotech camouflage were not displaying correctly when equipped on the AK47 Assault Rifle.
Scorestreak Updates:
Fixed Aerial Assault Drone and Recon Drone out of world exploits on the Swarm map.
Fixed Aerial Assault Drone and Recon Drone out of world exploits on the Fracture map.
Fixed a rare issue where a player could use an exploit with the XS1 Goliath.
Game Mode Specific Updates:
Uplink: Fixed an issue where the satellite drone could get stuck behind collision on the Overload map.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Overload map.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Swarm map.
Fixed an issue where spectators in third person could pass through a wall on the Swarm map.
Fixed some lighting issues on the Swarm map.
Fixed some missing geo on the Swarm map.
Fixed out of map exploits on Swarm when using Exo-Grapple.
Fixed an issue where spectators in third person could pass through a wall on the Swarm map.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Fracture map.
Fixed some lighting issues on the Fracture map.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Parliament map.
Fixed out of map exploits on Parliament when using Exo-Grapple.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Greenband map.
Fixed out of map/wall breach exploit on the Skyrise map.
Fixed out of map exploit on the Ascend map.
Fixed out of map exploit on the Retreat map.
Fixed out of map exploit on the Horizon map.
Exo Zombies Updates:
Fixed an issue where the weapon upgrade cost shown wasn't being subtracted correction in Double Feature mode on the Descent Exo-Zombies map.
Fixed an issue where the music when attempting the Easter Egg on the Descent Exo-Zombies map was not present.
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies on the Descent Exo-Zombies map.
Game Update: 8/28/15
Players will receive an update for these following fixes when they login to play Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare today. This update doesn’t require an installation, but is done on the client side when connecting to our servers to play online.
In-Game Updates:
Fixed an issue where Point Blank medals were not counting towards unlocking the camo for some pistols.
Fixed an issue where Double Kill medals were not counting towards unlocking the camo for the SVO.
Scorestreak Updates:
Fixed Aerial Assault Drone and Recon Drone out of world exploits on the Parliament map.
Fixed a rare issue where the Skyfire VFX would remain on the players screen for the duration of the match.
Fixed a rare issue where the XS1 Goliath would get stuck when being called in on the Skyrise map.
Game Mode Specific Updates:
Fixed out of map exploits on Parliament when using Exo-Grapple.
Fixed out of map exploits on Climate when using Exo-Grapple.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Parliament map.
Fixed out of map exploits on Parliament when using Exo-Hover.
Fixed an area where players could get stuck behind an object on the Parliament map.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Skyrise map. ( Please note that this is not for the spot under the helipad on Skyrise. We are still investigating a fix for this and should have a solution live in the next patch. Please continue to report players abusing this glitch in game, and our Security and Enforcement team will investigate these players).
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Climate map.
Fixed out of map exploits on Climate when using Exo-Hover.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Overload map.
Fixed a rare issue where players would spawn in the same location on the Terrace map.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Greenband map.
Exo Zombies Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies on the Descent Exo-Zombies map.
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies on the Infection Exo-Zombies map.
Game Update: 8/4/15
DLC 4 / Reckoning Content
New Maps Added for Multiplayer: Fracture, Overload, Quarantine, and Swarm
New Playlist Added for DLC 4 Maps:
Reckoning TDM; Reckoning Grapple; Reckoning Moshpit
Moshpit
Reckoning maps added to Hardcore Mosh Pit
maps added to Hardcore Mosh Pit
Part Four of the Exo Zombies Saga: Descent
In-Game Updates:
Fixed an issue where the Aces Shirt was not being displayed correctly in first person.
Fixed an issue where two bullet cartridges would eject from the Lynx and SVO Sniper Rifles.
Fixed a rare issue where the player would lose functionality when repeatedly leaving and rejoining a Ranked Play lobby.
Fixed a rare issue where some players were not receiving a Match Bonus at the end of the match.
Weapon Updates:
Fixed an issue where the SVO weapon variants were not able to display applied camouflages correctly.
Fixed an issue where the Blunderbuss variants were not able to display applied camouflages correctly.
Fixed an issue where the “III” camouflage was not displaying correctly when equipped on the IMR Assault Rifle.
UI Updates:
Fixed a rare issue where the player’s avatar wouldn’t show up in the player lobby after failing to join a game.
Scorestreak Updates:
Fixed a rare issue where the player could freeze after getting a kill with the AST Goliath scorestreak.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed out of map exploits on the Kremlin map when using Exo-Grapple.
Fixed various out of map exploits on the Parliament map.
Fixed an issue where the Skylight Missile’s VFX could remain on the players screen for the duration of the match on the Parliament map.
Fixed an area where players could get stuck behind an object on the Drift map.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Climate map.
Fixed various out of map/wall breach exploits on the Skyrise map.
Fixed an area where players could get stuck behind an object on the Skyrise map.
Fixed various out of map exploits on the Site 244 map when using Exo-Grapple.
Fixed various out of map exploits on the Greenband map.
Fixed various out of map exploits on the Bio Lab map.
Fixed various wall breach exploits on the Defender map.
Broadcaster Mode:
Adjustments made to the layout of buttons and text in Broadcaster mode for different languages.
Exo Zombies Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits for the Carrier Exo-Zombies map.
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies on the Carrier Exo-Zombies map.
Fixed an out of map exploit which allowed players to fire grenades into the back of the grenade disposal machine.
Game Update: 7/7/15
In-Game Updates:
Connectivity optimizations.
Matchmaking improvements.
Fixed a rare frame rate drop issue that occurred in multiplayer.
Fixed a rare issue where the underwater HUD would not display after a host migration occurs.
Fixed an issue where some Scorestreak and medals were not being tallied when leaving in the middle of a match.
Fixed a rare issue where the player could use the Exo Hover ability for longer than intended.
Weapon Updates:
Fixed some missing geometry on the gun barrel of some of the M1 Irons variants.
PDW - increased damage, max damage range increased.
MP443 Grach - Increased damage, max damage range increased.
Atlas 45 - increased damage, max damage range increased.
MORS - increased damage modifier on upper arm hitbox.
Crossbow - decreased reload time, increased projectile speed.
UI Updates:
Fixed an issue where players were able to accept an invite to join a DLC playlist when they didn’t own the DLC, resulting in the player not joining a match.
Fixed an issue where a large number of previously unlocked or owned items could show under the "New Items" menu after signing in.
Fixed an issue where the player would return to the multiplayer menu after selecting a secondary weapon through the Armory.
Fixed a rare issue where Player One would spawn with Player Two's loadout after equipping an item directly from a Supply Drop in the Firing Range.
Scorestreak Updates:
Fixed a rare issue with the Missile Strike scorestreak where the fog settings would remain on screen until the player respawns.
Fixed a rare crash issue with the Goliath.
Fixed an issue where the player wouldn't receive an "Out of Bounds" message when using the XS 1 Vulcan outside of the playable map on Compound.
Fixed Aerial Assault Drone and Recon Drone out of world exploits on the Parliament map.
Game Mode Specific Updates:
Kill Confirmed / Grapple Moshpit - Fixed an issue where players were able to use the grape grapple on dog tags in Kill Confirmed.
Grapple Playlist - Fixed an issue where players were able to fire a grapple while climbing a ladder but stay in a first person viewpoint.
Gun Game - Fixed an issue where the player would not be able to progress in gun rank when getting a kill from the grave after being setback by a melee.
Search and Destroy - Fixed an issue where the player could get stuck on the Search and Destroy bomb site.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits across different multiplayer maps.
Kremlin - Fixed an issue where the player could get stuck on the Search and Destroy bomb site.
Compound - Fixed an issue where the player wouldn't receive an "Out of Bounds" message when using the XS 1 Vulcan outside of the playable map on Compound.
Parliament - Fixed Aerial Assault Drone and Recon Drone out of world exploits on the Parliament map.
Exo Zombies Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies.
Fixed an issue where players were not able to crawl off a ledge while downed in Exo Zombies.
Fixed a rare issue where called in Sentinel Reinforcements wouldn't revive the player in a solo match.
Fixed an issue where a solo player would not be able to use the Exo Medic upgrade while the Sentinel Reinforcements were spawned.
Fixed an issue where players were able to pick up and throw back a Contact Grenade after it's been used.
Fixed an issue where the player could keep a scorestreak item forever.
Fixed a rare issue where a player could fall to their death with Exo Revive, and be forced into spectator mode.
Game Update: 6/2/15
DLC 3 / Supremacy Content
New Maps Added for Multiplayer: Skyrise, Parliament, Kremlin, and Compound
New Playlist Added for DLC 3 Maps:
Supremacy TDM; Supremacy Grapple; Supremacy Moshpit
Supremacy maps added to Hardcore Mosh Pit
Part Three of the Exo Zombies Saga: Carrier
In-Game Updates:
Fixed a rare issue when a splitscreen guest player would have their weapon removed from their loadout when starting a match.
Fixed a rare crash issue for players using splitscreen and joining a lobby.
Fixed an issue with player connectivity to some online services after disconnecting from the Combat Readiness Program.
The Flak Jacket perk now prevents weapon flinch when taking explosive damage from lethal equipment.
The Hard Wired perk now prevents weapon flinch when taking explosive damage from tactical equipment (Stuns, EMP)
Weapon Updates:
Fixed a rare issue where the Variable Zoom Scope overlay would temporarily disappear after respawning.
Fixed an issue where the M1 Irons’ attachments would be reset in Master Prestige ranks.
UI Updates:
Added two new categories for loot, Retired and Legendary. [Feature Live: 6/9] Legendary: Added the Sentinel CI Gear Set. Retired: Re-categorized the MP443 Grach - Latitude, Atlas 45 - A3, & PDW - CQB.
Challenges Updates:
The “Pincushion” and “Deadeye” medals are now awarded correctly when using a Crossbow variant.
Scorestreak Updates:
Fixed an issue where the ammo count for a rippable turret head scorestreak would display incorrectly with the akimbo weapon UI.
Ranked Play Updates:
Fixed an issue where players were not able to access the “New Items” list if a Reinforcement package was in the list.
Game Mode Specific Updates:
Players will now receive an error message of “invalid surface” if firing the Exo Grapple at a friendly teammate in the Exo Grapple Playlist.
Replaced the MK14 weapon with the M1 Irons in the Gun Game progression.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed an issue where an enemy System Hack could remain on screen while using the Super Serum on Site-244.
Made improvements for performance issues near the “B” Domination marker for the Site-244.
Fixed various out of map exploits across different multiplayer maps.
Exo Zombies Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits allowing players to remain in place and not be attacked by zombies.
Fixed an issue where the secondary weapon name would not show up after switching from the OHM in shotgun mode.
Game Update: 4/27/15
In-Game Updates:
Matchmaking improvements.
Connectivity optimizations.
Fixed a rare issue where players were not able to host a private match after returning from suspend/resume mode.
Fixed an issue where a player’s controller could be unresponsive in splitscreen if either player unplugs their controller.
Fixed an issue where players were not able to accept an invitation while in suspend/resume mode.
Fixed a rare crash issue when entering the System Link menu.
Fixed an issue where spectators in third person would see first person crosshairs on some weapons.
Fixed an issue where the stock of the ARX-160 would disappear when cloaked.
Fixed an issue where scopes would not display after viewing a player in third person Spectator mode.
Fixed an issue where the field of view would not change when changing from first person to third person in Spectator mode.
Weapon Updates:
MK14 – Increased headshot damage multiplier.
ASM1 – Reduced the magazine size.
Pytaek – Decreased initial recoil, decreased aim down sights time.
EPM3 – Increased the headshot damage multiplier, decreased the heat build up when firing.
UI Updates:
Fixed a rare issue where the game could freeze when redeeming an item from the Armory.
Fixed an issue for the virtual firing range could display a higher than 100% accuracy when using shotguns and grenades.
Fixed an issue where arms without bodies would show up in the virtual lobby.
Fixed an issue where some players were not able to pass leadership of a party to another player in the party.
Challenges Updates:
Fixed an issue where the "Woo Who?" slide-kill challenge was not tracking kills with certain variants.
Store Updates:
Added quick access to the in-game store to the Message of the Day.
Various improvements and network optimizations for the in-game store.
Scorestreak Updates:
Fixed an exploit with the Aerial Attack Drone scorestreak.
Fixed a rare animation bug for the XS1 Goliath scorestreak.
Fixed a rare issue where a player could be invincible after calling in a Goliath.
Ranked Play Updates:
Fixed a rare issue where players would lose functionality after entering and exiting the Create A Class menu.
Fixed an issue where players were able to get around the probation period when leaving a game early.
Game Mode Specific Updates:
Adjusted various spawning logic for Domination, Momentum, Capture the Flag, Hardpoint, and Uplink game modes.
Fixed an issue where players were able to enter into a Free-For-All match while using splitscreen.
Fixed a rare issue wher players were able to advance more than one Gun Rank with a multi-kill in Gun Game.
Fixed an issue where the "Contested" and "Taking" notifications were displaying incorrectly in Domination.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits across different multiplayer maps.
Adjusted various spawns for Drift for before and after the dynamic map event.
Fixed an issue where the animation for Aiming down sights would not show correctly after the map based scorestreak has worn off on Site 244.
Adjusted the height of the XS1 Vulcan scorestreak on Perplex.
Fixed a rare issue where the Missile Strike would be uncontrollable on Climate.
Fixed an issue where orbital care packages could be called into inaccessible areas.
Fixed an issue where the playercard would show up twice in the killcam when the player was using the map based scorestreak on Site 244.
Exo Survival Updates:
Adjusted damage for the EM1.
Exo Zombies Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies.
Exo Zombies Fixed a rare issue where the UI icons for downed teammates, orbital supply drops, and civilians would not show up in later rounds.
Fixed a rare issue where the fire rate of some weapons would affect the secondary weapon of a player.
Various improvements to the Exo Zombies menu.
Improved graphical stability when using the Magnetron gun.
Fixed an exploit where the Magnetron weapon could have unlimited ammo.
Fixed an issue where a trap was issuing an incorrect amount of credits.
Fixed an issue where players weren't being damaged by Toxic Gas.
Fixed an issue where Bubby could focus on the Distraction Drone.
Fixed an issue where the Achivement for rescuing 20 suvivors was not unlocking.
Game Update: 4/8/15
Map Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits across different multiplayer maps.
Fixed various out of map exploits using Exo Grapple in the Ascendance Grapple Mosh Pit Playlist.
Game Mode Updates:
Players no longer advance more than one gun rank with a multikill in Gun Game.
Scorestreaks:
Fixed an exploit where players were able to have infinite health using the XS1 Goliath scorestreak.
Removed the ability for the XS1 Goliath to use the Exo Grapple in the Ascendance Grapple Mosh Pit.
Exo Zombies:
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies.
Game Update: 3/31/15
DLC 2 Ascendance Content:
New Maps Added for Multiplayer: Site 244, Perplex, Chop Shop, and Climate.
New Playlist Added for DLC 2 Maps: Ascendance TDM; Ascendance Grapple; Ascendance Moshpit Ascendance maps added to Hardcore Mosh Pit
New Weapon Added: OHM, OHM - Werewolf, and 10 of the OHM variants have been added to the loot pool.
In-Game Updates:
Adjusted the amount of damage reduction by the Flak Jacket perk in Hardcore modes.
Fixed a rare issue where viewing the scoreboard could result in a crash.
Fixed an exploit where players were able to join a playlist with a party size larger than the playlist allowed.
Fixed an exploit where players were able to shoot directed energy weapons continuously without overheating.
Fixed an issue where some HUD elements were viewable when spectating in third-person mode.
Fixed an issue where some static UI would remain on the screen after spectating.
Fixed a rare crash issue when leaving a Private Match.
Fixed an issue where players were not able to accept an invitation while in suspend/resume mode.
Fixed a rare issue where players were not able to add camos to the secondary weapon while using Overkill in Private Matches.
Fixed a rare issue where players were not able to join a match together from an invite.
Improvements to the "Invite to Game", accepting invitations systems, and joining friend's games.
Weapon Updates:
Atlas 20mm - Snapper now has the correct magazine size.
Fixed an issue where the OHM's shotgun mode would not have any spread for its shots.
MP443 Grach - Added laser sight attachment.
UI Updates:
Fixed an issue where Advanced Supply Drops sometimes open on the left side of the screen.
Added Gun Game medals to Combat Record menu.
Added Gun Game to the list of modes in the Combat Record.
Fixed an issue where the "Favorite Weapon" displayed in the Combat Record was not tallying kills from weapon variants.
Double XP Images shown in game are now localized.
Fixed where the correct alternate weapon mode would display when a character has more than one weapon with an alternate weapon mode.
Challenges Updates:
Fixed an issue where players were earning a Underdog and Vandalism medal from their own team.
Fixed an issue where some weapons picked up from an enemy did not count towards the Backfire medal or Guerrilla Warfare challenge.
Fixed an issue where the Tac-19's Parabolic microphone attachment displayed it unlocked after 40 kills while aiming down the sights.
Store Updates:
Store UI Improvements.
Emblem Updates:
Added a confirmation pop-up when using copy / paste over an existing emblem.
Fixed a rare issue where emblems from purchased mDLC wouldn't show in the Emblem Editor.
Scorestreak Updates:
Fixed a rare issue where players could obtain a turret head with infinite ammo.
Fixed an exploit with the Aerial Recon Drone scorestreak.
Broadcaster Updates
Adjusted the kill feed team color to match scorecard team color.
Improvements made to the legibility of the player card.
Game Mode Specific Updates:
Gun Game: Increased the Party Size limit from 1 to 8.
Gun Game: Added random loot variants to each weapon tier.
Adjusted the Satellite drone mechanics so it would not be dropped immediately after going prone or sliding in water.
Adjusted spawning logic for Free-For-All & Gun Game game modes.
Adjusting various spawning logic for Domination game mode.
Adjusted various spawning logic for Search and Rescue game mode.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits across different multiplayer maps.
Adjusted various spawns for CTF and Uplink on Solar.
Adjusted various spawns for Uplink on Recovery.
Adjusted various spawns for Momentum on Comeback.
Fixes for out of map exploits and bomb defusing on Comeback.
Various fixes related to the dynamic map event for the map Drift.
Exo Survival Updates:
Fixed an issue where parties were being split when entering matchmaking.
Exo Zombies Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies.
Enemies will now correctly ignore players in the incinerator room.
Fixed an issue where items required for the Exo Zombies Easter Egg would disappear when a player respawns.
Fixed an issue where the nano swarm would remain for a longer duration after a host migration.
Fixed an issue where the 3D printer would malfunction without having enough credits to operate.
Game Update: 3/3/15
In-Game Updates:
Full Royalty Character Loot Set unlocked.
Connectivity Optimizations.
Connectivity and matchmaking improvements when in a party.
Added 15 Master Prestige ranks and Grand Master Prestige.
Added 15 more Daily Supply Drop Challenges.
Fixed a rare issue where players were not able to spawn into the game.
Fixed the sound of the SAC3 with the Suppressor Attachment to not play in stereo to all players on the map.
Fixed a rare issue where players would spawn without a gun.
Added the ability for purchased Create-A-Class slots to appear in Private Matches.
Fixed a rare crash issue with signing out with one player while split screen.
Players will now be shown a “Player does not own the map pack” message when a player without the Havoc DLC joins their party.
Weapon Balancing Updates (Note: Adjustments affect base weapon and all loot variants):
Heavy weapons: increase player movement speed by 5%
Corrected scopes on the AE4.
MK14 - reduced recoil
ARX160 - increased magazine size
AMR9 - increased damage, decreased time between bursts
SN6 - reduced recoil
KF5 - mid damage range increased
Atlas 45 - mid damage range increased, max damage range increased
PDW - increased damage
Shotguns: reduced spread when using Gung-Ho
S12 - increased fire rate, increased damage
EPM3 - reduced recoil
Lynx - reduced recoil
ASM1 – slightly reduced initial fire rate
UI Updates:
Rare Supply Drop Error messages when opening fixed.
Added a display for how many free slots you have in the Armory from the “Redeem Items” menu.
Replaced the camouflage images for Diamond and Royalty with the correct images in the Create-A-Class menu.
Replaced the Valkyrie loadout for the Centurion loadout for players who were incorrected rewarded this character gear in Clan Wars.
Fixed an issue where duplicates of unlocked items were showing in the New Items list.
Fixed an issue where some Create-A-Class were showing the incorrect lock status when selecting a Permanent Unlock when Prestiging.
Adjusted kill feed speed from 4 seconds to 6 seconds.
Challenges Updates:
Removed ability to earn more than one of a non-redeemable character gear from the Daily Supply Drop Challenges.
Players will no longer receive a Daily Supply Drop Challenge for non-redeemable gear they have already acquired.
Removed the incorrect challenge for the Crossbow Scope to unlock at 10 kills.
Store Update:
Players with other profiles who purchased DLC on the same console are now able to properly purchase DLC on their own profile.
Emblem Updates:
Fixed an issue where the Emblem would sometimes apply incorrectly to the player card.
Scorestreak Updates:
Sentry Gun turrets now die in one melee hit.
Decreased the amount of time the player has to hold X to exit a remote controlled Sentry Turret.
Unmodified Missile Strike missiles now travel faster when boosting (by hitting the fire button while coming down).
The Vulcan laser scorestreak now fires longer.
Ranked Play Updates:
Added probation time for players who do not complete or disconnect from Ranked Play matches.
Will properly award Division Points in the case of a forfeited match (when the entire other team leaves).
Broadcaster Updates
Adjusted the colors and over all look for Broadcaster mode to make text and names easier to read and a better experience for viewers.
Fixed a rare issue where HUD elements would get stuck on the broadcaster’s screen.
Game Mode Specific Updates:
S&D: Added UI to show if you were attacking or defending at the start of the round.
One Shot: Increased Kill Confirmed score limit to 80 in the One Shot Mosh Pit playlist.
Gun Game: Added a leaderboard for Gun Game.
Momentum: Adjusted spawn locations for the Drift map.
Uplink: Fixed an issue where the satellite drone could get stuck on the Clown Inn sign.
Map Specific Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits across different multiplayer maps.
Fixed an issue where Orbital Care Packages were removed from areas of the map on Drift after the dynamic map event.
Fixed an issue where indestructible objects would show up on the Sideshow map.
Adjusted the A Bomb site location on Sideshow.
Fixed a performance issue with some of the dynamic map pieces on the Core map.
Adjusted spawns locations for the Drift map..
Fixed Aerial Assault Drone and Recon Drone out of world exploits on the Sideshow map.
Exo Survival Updates:
Fixed various out of map exploits across different multiplayer maps.
Exo Zombies Updates
Added ability for players to pause the game in single-player Private match.
Fixed an issue where players were not able to join a match together while in a party.
Fixed various out of map exploits where players could remain in place and not be attacked by zombies.
Removed the ability for host to start the match before players were ready in a Private Match setting.
Fixed an issue for the 20/20 Achievement so weapons that are reacquired after leveling it up to level 20 still count towards the achievement status.
Exo Zombies intro movie is now skippable.
Fixed a rare crash issue in Exo Zombies.
Fixed an issue where certain camos were missing for the ARX160.
Fixed an issue where the pop-up messaging for Player 2 could only be closed by Player 1.
Fixed a rare issue where the After Action Report was showing the incorrect map information after joining a Private Match.
Game Update: 2/3/15
Fixed rare crash in Exo Zombies.
Fixed rare save game issue.
Game Update: 1/27/15
DLC 1 Havoc New Content:
New Maps Added for Multiplayer and Exo Survival: Drift, Urban, Core, and Sideshow.
New Mode Added: Exo Zombies.
New Weapon Added: AE4, and 10 of the AE4 variants have been added to the loot pool.
Added DLC playlists; HAVOC TDM and HAVOC Mosh Pit
In-Game Updates:
Adjusted the center point of some sniper scopes.
Fixed a rare crash issue when switching profiles for guest users.
Fixed a rare crash issue when using camos on a weapon.
Fixed the sound of the SAC3 with the Suppressor Attachment to not play in stereo to all players on the map.
Various matchmaking and connectivity improvements.
Fixed issue where announcer's voice ignores the in-game option to disable it.
Fixed a rare issue when the Riot Shield would not be selected when changing classes.
Various adjustments to the Riot Shield; including model popping up at random, mantling onto, jumping off from, and interaction with grenades.
Fixed an exploit of rapidly firing a bolt action gun while sprinting.
Adjusted the time limit expiration for Red Baron gear after challenge has been completed.
Weapon Balancing Updates (Note: Adjustments affect base weapon and all loot variants):
HBRa3: max damage range increased
AE4: reduce recoil, increase number of shots before overheating
EPM3: reduce recoil
Tac-19: max damage range increased, reduced spread when using Gung-Ho
Security and Anti-Cheat Updates:
Added security updates and features.
UI Updates:
Fixed a rare issue when Supply Drops would not open.
Adjusted kill feed speed.
Adjusted UI of Exo Abilities descriptions for better readability.
Fixed an issue where the default player was not always being displayed properly in the Virtual Lobby.
Fixed a rare issue where the player is unable to sign into their Call of Duty account if connection is interrupted.
Clan Updates:
Added confirmation window when kicking a member from a clan.
Fixed a rare issue where Clan Wars Bonus XP was not being awarded.
Fixed an issue where clan members could see your presence even if you were set to appear offline.
Store Updates:
Fixed various issues with players not having access to the AE4 with the Season Pass.
Fixed an issue where an item was not being marked “Purchased” in the in-game store after installing.
Improvements to the in-game Store UI and purchasing.
Game will no longer prompt a player to install Atlas Gorge if they already have it.
Emblem Updates:
Fixed a rare issue with emblems on a second profile that's signed in a guest.
Scorestreak Updates:
Removed skull HUD element from System Hack Scorestreak UI effect.
Adjusted the score value the System Hack Scorestreak.
Adjusted the view of the XS1 Vulcan Killcam.
Fixed a rare occurrence of the Goliath Drop Pod getting stuck after colliding with an air-based Scorestreak.
Fixed a rare occurrence of the Orbital Care Package getting stuck after colliding with an air |
, but the efficient networks performed best in the MTurk experiment (10, 11).
Turk Tomfoolery? It’s fast, easy, and cheap, but does MTurk magnify the perils of online research? Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University in New Haven, laments how often researchers turn to it without considering that it may be unsuitable for their work. “You should wonder about the value of something you’re paying a few cents for,” he warns. Kahan cautions that people on MTurk might be atypical precisely because they are attracted to the site. Because so many psychologists are using MTurk, and some individual Turkers are completing hundreds or thousands of studies, the workers may be more familiar with classic research materials than the average person, Chandler notes. That might skew results: for example, someone who takes a lot of IQ tests is likely to get better at them over time. Another downside, Kahan points out, is that Turkers connect online to exchange tips on the best studies and how to complete them quickly. Foreknowledge of an experiment could alter results. “I don’t want to have a lounge where people who are about to take the study mingle with people who have just finished,” he says. “It’s just bad social science hygiene.” Chandler thinks this problem is rare, but says he usually asks at the end of a study if participants saw the survey discussed anywhere. “The question is always, is the sample valid given the kind of inference you want to draw?” Kahan says. “With respect to a lot of things people are using MTurk for, the answer is ‘no.’” For example, he’d worry about studies of Turkers who claim to have psychological symptoms, based on Chandler’s report that about 10% of Turkers scored high for malingering: they claimed rare symptoms, perhaps in the hopes of qualifying for more work (12). Of course, the Internet will never work for many kinds of psychology studies. Germine points out that no survey can replace a face-to-face clinical interview. Nor can Internet tests replace observational studies of people interacting in person, whether in real-life activities or in response to staged scenarios, although they can link up multiple online participants in games or cooperative tests. “There will never be a time, especially with behavioral research, where there isn’t a use for having people in person,” Nosek says. Despite these potential stumbling blocks, psychologists continue to plumb the Internet for greater and greater subject numbers. Hartshorne, for example, expects to publish a study soon with 700,000 participants, on how age affects learning of a second language. Learning another language can take decades, he points out. “I don’t have 30 years to wait for the longitudinal study to get done.” Thanks to the online community, he doesn’t have to.The phrase “identity politics” has been thrown around so haphazardly in the wake of the election that it’s lost more of its meaning with every casually derisive mention. As Democrats grapple with what they can do to gain traction after Donald Trump’s victory, arguments have raged on over whether highlighting “identity politics” — now largely understood to mean any issues specific to women, minorities, and LGBTQ people — cost Democrats the election.
Samantha Bee, for one, thinks that’s basically bullshit.
“Identity politics is the dismissive term for what we used to call ‘civil rights’ and ‘equality,’” Bee said on her December 12 show. Also, she made sure to add, white and male is an identity, as is being Christian — the two fronts Steve Doocy’s Fox News roundtable and other like-minded media outlets feel are most under attack.
Basically, as Vox’s Matt Yglesias put it: “There is no other way to do politics than to do identity politics.”
What’s more, Bee said, standing up for civil rights can, and did, win Democrats elections. “You know what happens when Democrats stand up for transgender rights? They win,” she said, pointing to North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, which was recently called for Democrat Roy Cooper over Republican incumbent Pat McCrory, a staunch supporter of the state’s discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws.
Bee did acknowledge that Hillary Clinton’s messaging on jobs, while far more present than most coverage gave her credit for, could’ve used some work beyond “trumped-up trickle-down economics.” But the real shame, she insisted, would be losing the people who did vote for Democrats over those who might someday.
“If your panic over a loss makes you abandon both your principles and the people who actually vote for you,” Bee pleaded to Democrats, “you’ll be in the wilderness for a decade — or until Trump’s Cabinet sells the wilderness to oil companies, so really, like a month.”
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee airs Monday nights at 10:30 pm on TBS.[bitcoin-dev] A summary list of all concerns related to rising the block size
We've identified a fundamental disagreement in: - The block size maximum consensus rule serves to limit mining centralization But as said I believe at least 2 different formal proofs can be produced that in fact this is the case. One of them (the one I'm working on) remains true even after superluminal communication, free unlimited global bandwidth and science fiction snarks. But let's just list the concerns first. I believe there's 2 categories: 1) Increasing the block size may increase centralization. - Mining centralization will get worse (for example, China's aggregate hashrate becomes even larger) - Government control in a single jurisdiction could enforce transaction censorship and destroy irreversibility of transactions - Some use cases that rely on a decentralized chain (like trustless options) cannot rely on Bitcoin anymore. - Reversible transactions will have proportional fees rather than flat ones. - Some use cases that rely on flat fees (like remittance) may not be practical in Bitcoin anymore - The full node count will decrease, leaving less resources to serve SPV nodes. 2) Trying to avoid "hitting the limit" permanently minimizes minimum fees (currently zero) and fees in general - If fees' block reward doesn't increase enough, the subsidy block reward may become insufficient to protect the irreversibility of the system at some point in time, and the system is attacked and destroyed at that point in time - Miners will continue to run noncompetitive block creation policies (ie accepting free transactions) - More new Bitcoin businesses may be created based on unsustainable assumptions and consequently fail. - "Free transactions bitcoin marketing" may continue and users may get angry when they discover they have been lied about the sustainability of that property and the reliability of free transactions. Please suggest more concerns or new categories if you think they're needed.Education in Victoria is succeeding in some areas, but failing in many others – we have new school buildings, but they are overflowing and the school rolls climbing so quickly that teachers and principals have no bandwidth left for improving educational outcomes. Schools are adapting to technology, but failing to handle the wide range of ability and rates of learning our kids have. The system is not flexible enough to handle the needs of low achievers and high achievers in specific areas.
Every couple of months there is a new study showing how badly Australia is doing compared to other countries in areas such as Math. We know there are approaches that have worked elsewhere but we seem unwilling or unable to change and adopt them.
Homeschooling is an important right for Victorians – in many cases it is the only way to solve problems with bullying, with low achieving students and with high achieving students. Homeschooling is a rising demographic which serves as an important barometer of how well our schools are serving students and parents.
If the government understands this, then it will understand the value in Homeschooling, and will preserve that right as a legal option, and keep the current registration regulations intact. Homeschooling also serves the Dept of Education – it relieves pressure form a strained system, and gives a flexible way of educating students who are not well served by schools. It is part of the solution, not part of the problem.
It is so important that the Department of Education _listen_ to Homeschoolers, not try to tell them how to educate, or punish them – rather use it as important feedback. I was surprised to find many ex-teachers among Homeschool parents, and other parents had studied education theories in some depth. Homeschoolers as a rule are those who value education highly – they are pro-education, not anti-education.
I can say personally, it is heart rending to make the decision to take your child from school, you would only do it if there was a real problem to solve, or a clear benefit in doing so.
My son has just turned 13yo, he is by some accounts gifted – but the reality is simply that he was read to a lot from an early age, and had some opportunities for books and learning and discussion, and excelled because of normal healthy genes and a supportive environment. He has attended public schools in inner Melbourne for 3 years, the other years being Homeschooled – so I have some basis on which to compare the good and bad of each approach.
Early this year he was accepted into the SEAL program at a very good new school in inner Melbourne. The SEAL program is great for many kids because they immediately skip a year and jump ahead closer to their current level. I’m in favor of the SEAL program, its a good thing – but its not the complete answer. In my sons case he was repeating material he had done a couple years earlier in Math, so the homework was ‘busy work’.
I tried him out on year 10 questions and he worked through them well, so it seemed he was at that level. I asked the teacher if he could work ahead in Math, then asked the year coordinator and finally the deputy principal – and was surprised that this request was politely ignored in every case. At first I was angry, but then I realized that they probably just saw my request as “more work” for them, and they are already straining to keep up with massive expansion in student numbers. The roll is growing at a massive rate, and I think this is why they just don’t have bandwidth to gather a real focus on learning outcomes, let alone catering flexibly to students who fall outside the norm.
As an aside, there are ways to teach and learn math that are vastly better for all students than the approach we have in most Australian schools now. You don’t have to invent new methods, they are tried and work well overseas – you can read about Jo Boaler, ProofSchool, MathCircles, KhanAcademy, AoPS.com, Australian Math Competition etc. You can read any review of our current math texts by university mathematicians, or look at any comparison study with other countries to know we are doing it badly. The system needs to be flexible enough to accommodate and experiment with these new methods. Its not the curricula per-se, it is the way its communicated – it is not visual enough, it is too topic-centric and should be more problem-centric, it is not interactively explored.
Id like to see schools adopt these approaches – but right now they are too busy handling roll growth alone, and in moving from paper books to ipads.
This means the only solution, for now, is to Homeschool your child if they excel in Math – school is a hostile environment towards learning math deeply.
We need to change the way we think about Homeschooling – it is valuable for mainstream education in Australia, it is a place to see how new methods work and take the needed risks in new approaches to learning. It is a pressure valve for a school system experiencing the stress of rapid growth, and it is the only way to accommodate that small minority of students who will not excel at schools, no matter how good those schools become in future.
To this end I propose that the Victorian Government / Department of Education Victoria consider supporting Homeschooling in the following practical ways :"Lionsgate announced that a film adaptation of Catching Fire will be released November 22, 2013, as a sequel to the film adaptation of The Hunger Games, which was released March 23, 2012.
Lionsgate has announced the film's November 22, 2013 release date with principal photography to take place in summer/fall 2012. The shooting timeframe was co-ordinated between Lionsgate and Fox, in order to allow time for star Jennifer Lawrence to shoot the sequel to Fox's X-Men: First Class in January 2013.
On April 10, 2012, it was announced that Gary Ross, the director of The Hunger Games, would not return due to a 'tight' and 'fitted' schedule. On April 19, 2012, it was announced that Francis Lawrence was offered the director position for the film. According to sources, the adaptation must be done filming by December 2012 to fit Jennifer Lawrence's schedule. Lionsgate officially announced Francis Lawrence as the director for Catching Fire on May 3, 2012. Two days later, it was reported that Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3, Little Miss Sunshine) is in talks to re-write the script for Catching Fire. On May 24, 2012, the film was renamed The Hunger Games: Catching Fire."Thanks to a series of riveting reports by Carol Marbin Miller of the Miami Herald, the circumstances of his death have come to public attention.
His young life was extinguished by a lethal cocktail of drugs–which included two antipsychotic drugs prescribed at mega doses–Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa and AstraZeneca’s Seroquel.
These drugs’ manufacturers were successfully prosecuted by the US Attorney for deceptive, illegal marketing practices that promoted these unsafe drugs for unapproved uses.
The lethal combination of drugs were prescribed for the boy by a state licensed psychiatrist in the Florida public mental health sector, who was entrusted with the care of 800 children in foster care–despite receiving "hundreds of letters" from the state suggesting that he change his prescribing practices. his ecord of disregarding warnings and prescribing these toxic drugs for children at dangerously high doses.
In April, 2009, 7-year-old, Gabriel Myers, hanged himself months after being drugged with a lethal psychotropic drug cocktail–including several antipsychotics and antidepressants. Gabriel hanged himself.
The Miami Herald reported that when state medical regulators sent Dr. Steven Kaplan letters suggesting the dosages he was prescribing for children were worrisome, he ignored them. "In his deposition, Kaplan acknowledged he received “hundreds” of letters from the state suggesting he revise his prescribing practices. “I didn’t think it required any kind of response,” he said.
"July 17, 2006. Denis Maltez, a 67-pound wisp confined to a state-licensed group home, suffered the debilitating effects of his startling drug cocktail. He was ferried over to Miami Children’s Hospital for emergency services.
Aug. 4, 2006. This time, the severely autistic boy was taken to Baptist Hospital, vomiting, dehydrated, bleeding from his gums. Baptist doctors cite his regime of powerful prescription drugs.
Oct. 26, 2006. A teacher reports sleeping, shaking, trembling. Suspects overmedication.
Jan. 9, 2007. According to the Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities, the agency received an abuse hot-line report warning that Denis was neglected and overmedicated.
“Overmedicated” became an understatement of fatal dimensions.
The child’s medical records indicate he had been addled with maximum adult dosages of Zyprexa and Seroquel. “Adult dosages” should have been an irrelevant term. Neither antipsychotic was approved for children.
Add a tranquilizer and a mood stabilizer to the concoction, and it’s little wonder that young Denis descended into such a dangerous zombie state during his stay at Miami’s Rainbow Ranch Group Home that he twice had to go to an ER.
None of the warnings mattered. Some caregivers may have been worried, but the psychotropics kept coming. On May 23, 2007, the kid quit breathing. He was 12."
State regulators only decided to oust Dr. Kaplan from the state Medicaid insurance program this week, the day after their inaction was publicized in a story by The Miami Herald.
Reead more
* Red flags overlooked in 12-year-old’s prescription drug death
* Amendment to bill targeting foster kids’ medication draws fire
* FDA warns psychiatrist who treated dead foster child
* Regulations sought for foster kids prescribed psychiatric drugs
* Autopsy proves foster child hanged himself; why is a mystery
* DCF report assails Fort Lauderdale drug treatment program
* Foster care task force created after 7-year-old Margate boy killed himself wants changes
* Child-welfare panel: Drugs misused on foster kids
*State let dangerous doctor continue
*Controversial Miami psychiatrist
* Miami psychiatrist dropped from Medicaid program
Vera Hassner Sharav
Denis Maltez, 12, is pictured the day before he died. The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office attributed the death to a life-threatening side effect of over-medication. In his deposition, Maltez’s psychiatrist Dr. Steven Kaplan said he is not responsible for Denis’ death. "I don’t believe he died of anything that I did,” he said.
Denis Maltez, 12, is pictured the day before he died. The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office attributed the death to a life-threatening side effect of over-medication. In his deposition, Maltez’s psychiatrist Dr. Steven Kaplan said he is not responsible for Denis’ death. "I don’t believe he died of anything that I did,” he said.
Born with autism, 12-year-old Denis Maltez was “hyper, needy, pesty,” his psychiatrist wrote following a May 2007 visit.
Dr. Steven L. Kaplan solved the 70-pound boy’s problems with a prescription pad, writing orders for two different anti-psychotic drugs along with a tranquilizer and a mood stabilizer — two of them in the highest doses recommended for adults, records show.
When state medical regulators sent Kaplan letters suggesting the dosages were worrisome, he ignored them.
Two weeks after Kaplan last saw the boy, on May 23, 2007, Denis simply stopped breathing. The Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office attributed the death to a life-threatening side effect of over-medication, records show.
“I... never had any suspicion he was being overmedicated,” Kaplan testified in a November 2009 sworn statement.
A review of records from three state agencies, however, makes clear that plenty of other people did.
Though a number of Florida agency heads have wrung their hands about Kaplan’s methods for more than three years, he has never been disciplined. The state Medicaid program, which insures the needy, asked the state Board of Medicine to investigate Kaplan in 2008, but the complaint was dismissed, records show.
Disability administrators encouraged underlings to send him new patients just as the agency’s chief described his practices as “very disturbing.”
QUESTIONS
Florida’s regulatory history with Kaplan — which includes four state agencies and thousands of pages of records — raises important questions. Among them: Does the state have an adequate regulatory scheme for doctors who work with the most vulnerable? Can the state effectively oversee doctors who reject advice from their peers?
“Three agencies all raised concerns and red flags, and each agency was saying this is somebody else’s job to take it a step further,” said Department of Children & Families Secretary George Sheldon. “I’m not sure what the solution is.”
Sheldon blamed much of the problem on historically poor billing rates for doctors who are paid by Medicaid, the state and federal insurance program for the poor and disabled.
“I think it’s difficult to recruit in the Medicaid arena any child psychiatrist,” Sheldon said. “The rates really do have an impact on who is willing to do it.”
Kaplan, who mainly practices in Miami-Dade, declined to speak with a Miami Herald reporter.
With as many as 800 patients in South Florida — all but one percent of them disabled or impoverished children insured by either Medicaid or Medicare — Kaplan is listed by the Agency for Healthcare Administration as number five on their list of doctors whose mental health prescriptions were red-flagged by an oversight group.
Denis was 8 when his volatility and violent outbursts prompted his mother, Martha Quesada, to move him into a sparkling new Miami group home called Rainbow Ranch. Administrators for the Agency for Persons with Disabilities had recommended the home, run by a man who had once pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license.
In May 2006, the owner of Rainbow Ranch discontinued Denis’ treatment by a team at Jackson Memorial Hospital and instead hired Kaplan, who already was treating the group home’s other residents, Kaplan said in a deposition taken Nov. 2 by Quesada’s attorney, Howard Talenfeld.
In testimony that is part of an ongoing lawsuit by Denis’ mother, Kaplan acknowledged that he never once spoke to Quesada before prescribing powerful mind-altering drugs, and never sought nor obtained her consent for treatment.
“I was told that the boy’s mother had abandoned him,” Kaplan testified. In fact, Quesada had never been stripped of her parental rights by the state, and had remained actively involved in Denis’ care.
Denis was prescribed 20 milligrams of Zyprexa, 800 milligrams of Seroquel — the highest adult dose for both anti-psychotics, a reviewer said — one-half milligram of Klonopin, a tranquilizer and 2000 milligrams of Depakote, a mood stabilizer — also a high dose for Denis’ 70-pound frame. Neither of the anti-psychotic drugs has been approved for use with children.
In his deposition, Kaplan testified he was aware that the two anti-psychotic drugs both carried an “increased risk of sudden cardiac death.”
By early July, 2006, group home workers had told Kaplan the boy was “lethargic and unresponsive in the morning,” Kaplan said in his deposition. On July 17 that year, teachers at Denis’ school noted that he was sleeping through class, and he was taken to Miami Children’s Hospital for emergency medical treatment.
That same month, on July 24, Kaplan received a letter from the Medicaid Drug Therapy Management Program for Behavioral Health, a program of the Agency for Health Care Administration run by the University of South Florida, questioning his medication of Denis. On four “key” indicators, the letter said, Kaplan’s prescribing of drugs to Denis fell outside generally accepted practices.
And AHCA was not the only state agency with concerns.
DCF received its first report involving Denis on Oct. 26, 2006. The report made some findings of medical neglect based on a teacher’s complaints that Denis was “sleeping in class, shaking and trembling.”
And on Jan. 9, 2007, DCF received another report that, among other things, Denis had “a history of being overmedicated — based on an August 2006 visit to Baptist Hospital with symptoms of overmedication. “Denis was sleepy because he was over-medicated,” a DCF investigator was told.
In all, DCF conducted six investigations of Denis’ well-being, some of them including allegations that Denis was being over-drugged, an Agency for Persons with Disabilities report says. Sheldon said his agency had received a total of eight calls to the state hot line about Kaplan.
WARNINGS
The disabilities agency also had been warned that Kaplan’s patients appeared to be drugged.
An April 2007 memo from an APD administrator said a number of caregivers in Miami had expressed concerns that Kaplan’s patients at Rainbow Ranch appeared to be overmedicated. A former group home manager said she found “clients always asleep and barely walking.” The mother of one boy said he went home for Thanksgiving all doped up.
Denis last saw his psychiatrist on May 10, 2007. In progress notes from the visit, Kaplan wrote the boy was sleepy during the day, and school officials felt he was drugged. He added: “Hyper, needy, pesty.”
Denis died two weeks later, on May 23, 2007. He was 12.
In his deposition, Kaplan said he is not responsible for Denis’ death. “I don’t believe he died of anything that I did,” he said.
After Denis’ death, APD hired a psychiatrist, Jorge J. Villalba, to study the group home’s practices. He reported “overmedication with sedation of clients,” noting that 99 percent of the group home residents were on an anti-psychotic drug.
Villalba wrote that Denis had been on three different mental health drugs, two of them in the maximum dose, and that “in combination, all three of these agents have additive effects as a central nervous system depressant.” The drugs, he added, “may have been contributing factors in the client’s death.”
The following December, the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office concluded Denis did die of overmedication, from a disorder called Serotonin Syndrome.
A week after the medical examiner’s report was released, on Dec. 28, 2007, the then-head of the disabilities agency, Jane E. Johnson, called the case “very disturbing — especially if that psychiatrist is still providing services through [the] Medicaid state plan.”
During the next two years, administrators at both the healthcare and disabilities agencies continued to monitor Kaplan’s activities, writing dozens of e-mails and reports:
• A nurse on staff at APD noted on Feb. 5, 2008, that one boy under Kaplan’s care “was taking 10 medications in total,” including two anti-psychotic drugs and two tranquilizers. “All of the medication listed cause somnolence,” the nurse wrote.
• Thirteen days later, on Feb. 28, 2008, Kaplan received an “academic detailing” visit by a pharmacy expert from the University of South Florida, as part of the university’s effort to oversee problematic prescribers for the state healthcare agency. Though Kaplan was reportedly “very courteous and professional,” the reviewer noted, “he didn’t appear familiar with the material or interested in the guidelines.”
• In mid-March 2008, several disabilities administrators exchanged e-mails voicing worries about Kaplan. “He’s still practicing and we’re concerned,” Chuck Faircloth, APD’s inspector general, wrote on March 12.
The next day, Evelyn Alvarez, a top Miami administrator, wrote: “Our medical case manager as well as I continue to have concerns regarding the abundance of meds that he is prescribing to some of our consumers.”
• Two months later, another USF monitor visited Kaplan in his office. Kaplan, he wrote, said that his patients are “schizophrenic and become violent, aggressive, dangerous” — making such medication necessary. “Provider states that he does not use antipsychotic medication for sedation,” a report says.
• In June, 2008, while both agencies were expressing concern about Kaplan’s use of mental health drugs, at least two APD administrators suggested he be considered for new patients when scores of disabled people were to be moved from a large institution in Fort Myers into group homes.
“He has lots of clients, so he may well qualify from the point of view of a large and varied practice,” wrote Alvarez, who only three months earlier had expressed concerns.
• A USF monitor once again visited Kaplan on May 15, 2009.
“He said he did not find the time to deal with non-important things such as paperwork,” a report says of the visit. “He said he had been practicing long enough to know how to treat his patients and was tired of being told what to do.”
STATE CONCERNS
In his deposition, Kaplan acknowledged he received “hundreds” of letters from the state suggesting he revise his prescribing practices. “I didn’t think it required any kind of response,” he said. He later added: “I never thought of myself as a red-flagged physician.”
Talenfeld, Quesada’s lawyer, urged healthcare and disability administrators in a letter to better protect disabled children, “who are powerless to protect themselves from being unnecessarily drugged for the convenience of staff.... Without proper oversight and action by your respective state agencies, these individuals will continue to be in harm’s way.”
Administrators at AHCA declined to discuss the agency’s history with Kaplan at length. In an e-mail to The Herald, the agency’s spokeswoman, Tiffany Vause, said it was “extremely difficult to measure the quality of prescribing practices” based upon Medicaid claims.
The USF program, she said, enables doctors to explain their practices — which may be entirely appropriate — or to change their habits once they are better informed.
“Dr. Kaplan is being monitored through this system and has received feedback from the USF clinical staff, Vause said. “The agency is closely monitoring this physician’s claims and the unique patient caseload he treats and will take appropriate action. This can include termination from the Medicaid program.”
© 2010 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.The event will begin at 11 a.m. PT, and will feature a live auction of five dogs and the opportunity to adopt one of ten additional dogs following the Golden Knights practice. Golden Knights players will assist in the live auction, and the Vegas Golden Knights Foundation will contribute funds to allow for one free chance to adopt one of the ten dogs. Discounted entries for additional chances to adopt will start at $20. An online promotion to facilitate adoptions of the remaining majority of the dogs will launch at the same event, with members of the public invited to purchase tickets through 11:59pm on January 1.
VEGAS (December 16, 2017) - The Vegas Golden Knights and the Animal Foundation announced today, December 16, a partnership in hosting a Pucks for Paws community event Monday, December 18 at City National Arena. The event will kick off the adoption process for the Pomeranian dogs rescued by Las Vegas police and Clark County officials from the back of a U-Haul truck in Sandy Valley on November 30.
Winners will be chosen at random by an independent third-party raffle administrator and notified at the event. All winners must be present to win.
The entry fee will serve as the adoption fee for the drawn winners. Spay/neuter, microchip, up-to-date vaccines, a starter bag of food, 30 days of free pet insurance and a voucher for a complimentary wellness exam at participating veterinary hospitals will all be included thanks to funds contributed by the Vegas Golden Knights Foundation.
ABOUT THE VEGAS GOLDEN KNIGHTS
The Vegas Golden Knights are a National Hockey League franchise owned and operated by Black Knight Sports and Entertainment LLC. The Vegas Golden Knights were established by founding partners William Foley and his family and the Maloof family. For the latest news and information on the Golden Knights visit vegasgoldenknights.com. Fans can follow the team on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.
ABOUT THE ANIMAL FOUNDATION
The Animal Foundation is a private, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the lives of all healthy and treatable animals in the Las Vegas Valley. The Animal Foundation operates the highest volume single-site animal shelter in America, saving more than 21,000 pets every year. Founded in 1978, The Animal Foundation's lifesaving programs are designed to address the root causes of pet overpopulation and homelessness and include: adoptions; low-cost spay/neuter, microchipping and vaccination services; lost & found pets; Community Cats; and more. In June 2015, The Animal Foundation announced Mission: Possible 2020, a strategic initiative to save the lives of all healthy and treatable animals come to them in need by the end of the year 2020. To learn more about The Animal Foundation or view adoptable pets online, visit animalfoundation.com.Seems the plane crash that killed legendary cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was more complex than we were told.
Gagarin's April 1961 flight in the Vostok 1 capsule made him the first human to travel in space, and transformed him into a worldwide celebrity. His death on March 27, 1968, while on a training flight at an airbase near Moscow was a national tragedy in the Soviet Union, and has since been the subject of much speculation. Though a government commission reported that the plane went into a tailspin after Gagarin tried to avoid a foreign object (like birds or a balloon), conspiracy theorists have often claimed the Russian government is hiding something about the crash (which also killed flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin). Now one of Gagarin's fellow cosmonauts is speaking out about what he says really happened.
Alexey Leonov, a friend and colleague of Gagarin's who became the first human to walk in space in 1965, said in a recent interview with Russia Today that he's spent decades trying to gain permission to disclose a formerly classified report (which he wrote) detailing the real cause of the crash. Now, he's able to speak out.
“That conclusion is believable to a civilian – not to a professional," Leonov said of the original explanation for the crash. "In fact, everything went down differently."
According to Leonov, the real cause of the crash was an "unauthorized" aircraft, a Su-15 jet that flew too low and sent Gagarin's plane into a spin.
“We knew that a Su-15 was scheduled to be tested that day, but it was supposed to be flying at the altitude of 10,000 meters or higher, not 450-500 meters," he said. "It was a violation of the flight procedure. “While afterburning the aircraft reduced its echelon at a distance of 10-15 meters in the clouds, passing close to Gagarin, turning his plane and thus sending it into a tailspin – a deep spiral, to be precise – at a speed of 750 kilometers per hour."
Leonov also claims that when he did finally get access to the report he wrote years ago, he found that though his name was on it, it wasn't written in his hand, and that some phrasing had been changed to suggest a different course of events. He helped conduct a new study that supported his original story, and now he's able to go public with his explanation, as well as his theory for why the report was changed in the first place.
“My guess would be that one of the reasons for covering up the truth was to hide the fact that there was such a lapse so close to Moscow," he said.
And as for the Su-15 pilot who made the ultimately fatal error, Leonov's keeping that a secret.
“I was asked not to disclose the pilot’s name. He is a good test pilot…It will fix nothing,” Leonov said.
So the real sequence of events that led to Yuri Gagarin's death have finally been revealed (we think), but that likely won't stop some conspiracy theorists from continuing to look closer.
(Russia Today via BBC)On July 18, 1999, David Cone of the New York Yankees pitched the 16th perfect game in Major League Baseball (MLB) history and the third in team history, and the first no-hit game in regular season interleague play. Pitching against the Montreal Expos at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx in front of 41,930 fans in attendance, Cone retired all 27 batters that he faced. The game took 3 hours and 19 minutes, from 1:35 PM ET to 4:54 PM ET; the game was interrupted by a 33-minute rain delay in the bottom of the third inning in the middle of an at-bat for Tino Martinez. As part of the day's "Yogi Berra Day" festivities honoring the Yankees' former catcher, before the game, former Yankees pitcher Don Larsen threw the ceremonial first pitch to Berra; the two comprised the battery for Larsen's perfect game in 1956.
Cone's perfect game was the 247th no-hitter in MLB history, and 11th, and to date last no-hitter in Yankees history. The previous perfect game in both MLB and Yankee history was 14 months prior on May 17, 1998, when David Wells pitched a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins at Yankee Stadium; Wells' perfect game was also the most recent no-hitter in franchise history at the time. Cone's perfect game gave the Yankees the record for the franchise with most perfect games, breaking a two-perfect game tie with the Cleveland Indians. Since Cone's perfecto, the Oakland Athletics, Philadelphia Phillies, and Chicago White Sox have recorded their second perfect games, with the White Sox tying the Yankees with a third perfect game in 2012. To date, Cone's perfect game is the only one achieved in regular season interleague play.[1]
Background [ edit ]
Yogi Berra Day [ edit ]
The Yankees' third perfect game was witnessed by the battery that executed its first perfect game. Before the game began, Don Larsen, who himself had thrown a perfect game in the 1956 World Series, threw out the ceremonial first pitch to Yogi Berra, who caught that game.[2] It was Yogi Berra Day at the stadium, as he had recently reconciled with owner George Steinbrenner.[3]
Game synopsis [ edit ]
David Cone never worked a count more than 2–0. A 33-minute rain delay interrupted the game in the third inning.[4] The Yankees scored the bulk of their runs in the second inning. Chili Davis walked, then Ricky Ledée proceeded to hit a home run into the upper right field deck. Scott Brosius was hit by a pitch, then was knocked in on a double by Joe Girardi. Girardi was tagged out for trying to stretch the hit into a triple and was caught between 2nd and 3rd. Chuck Knoblauch worked a walk and then Derek Jeter hit a home run to make it 5–0. In the eighth inning, O'Neill led off with a double to right and was scored on a single to center by Bernie Williams. In the third inning, Cone recorded three strikeouts. In the eighth inning, Knoblauch made another game saving play when Jose Vidro hit a ball hard between first and second. He had rapid range to his left and preserved the perfect game.
9th inning [ edit ]
A summer afternoon game at Yankee Stadium always brings harsh visibility conditions due to the sun. The latter innings of the game would always test the defense for both teams. Cone struck out Chris Widger swinging to start the inning. Ryan McGuire pinch hit for Shane Andrews and hit a soft fly ball to left field for Ricky Ledée. Ledée struggled to meet the ball due to blinding sunlight but made the play and would claim afterward he was not sure how he did so. The last batter, Orlando Cabrera, popped up to third baseman Scott Brosius in foul territory to end the game.[4] Immediately afterwards, Cone fell on his knees and into the arms of his catcher Girardi.
Box score [ edit ]
July 18, Yankee Stadium, New York, New York[5]
Other info [ edit ]
HBP: Brosius, Knoblauch by Vazquez |
iquita paid money to the AUC [the Spanish acronym for a paramilitary organization whose English name is United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia] in two regions of the Republic of Colombia where Chiquita had banana-producing operations: Urabá and Santa Marta. Chiquita made these payments through its wholly-owned Colombian subsidiary known as 'Banadex.' By 2003, Banadex was Chiquita's most profitable operation. Chiquita, through Banadex, paid the AUC nearly every month. In total, Chiquita made over 100 payments to the AUC amounting to over $1.7 million." The U.S. government designated the AUC as a foreign terrorist organization in September 2001. That designation - which made it a crime for U.S. persons or companies to make payments to the AUC - "was well-publicized in the American public media," notes the Justice Department's release. "The AUC's designation was even more widely reported in the public media in Colombia." Yet Chiquita's payments continued - 50 payments totaling more than $800,000 followed. In February 2003, top Chiquita officers learned of the payments and consulted with outside counsel. Chiquita's outside lawyers unequivocally stated payments should stop. The advice from numerous communications: "Must stop payments." "Bottom Line: CANNOT MAKE THE PAYMENT." "Advised NOT TO MAKE ALTERNATIVE PAYMENT through CONVIVIR." "General Rule: Cannot do indirectly what you cannot do directly." Concluded with: "CANNOT MAKE THE PAYMENT." "You voluntarily put yourself in this position. Duress defense can wear out through repetition. Buz [business] decision to stay in harm's way. Chiquita should leave Colombia." "[T]he company should not continue to make the Santa Marta payments, given the AUC's designation as a foreign terrorist organization[.]" "[T]he company should not make the payment." But the company continued to make payments. Two months later, Chiquita self-reported the payments to the Justice Department. But even then payments continued - 20 more payments of more than $300,000 through June 2004, at which time Chiquita sold its Colombian subsidiary. Chiquita's version of the story is that it had been in a horrible dilemma. The then-leader of the AUC, Carlos Castaño, met with a senior executive of Banadex and threatened that he would harm Banadex personnel and property if the company did not pay protection money. "The payments made by the company were always motivated by our good faith concern for the safety of our employees," says Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre. "Nevertheless, we recognized - and acted upon - our legal obligation to inform the Department of Justice of this admittedly difficult situation." The plea deal, he says, "is in the best interests of the company." Says company spokesperson Michael Mitchell, "Our payments were entirely motivated by safety concerns." "It was a difficult ethical dilemma," he says. "The Department of Justice admitted it was a difficult situation." A lawsuit filed in July 2007 by family members of Colombians killed by the AUC paints a less sympathetic view of Chiquita's dilemma. The family members are represented by the Washington, D.C.-based EarthRights International and other lawyers. "The stability and social control provided by the AUC was to Chiquita's benefit," charges the suit, "in allowing exportation of bananas without interruption due to conflict. The influence of the AUC in the leadership of the banana workers' trade unions was also to Chiquita's benefit, as it reduced labor strife. The AUC also provided protection services to banana plantations dealing out reprisals against real or suspected thieves, as well as against social undesirables, suspected guerrilla sympathizers or supporters, and anyone who was suspected of opposing the AUC's activities and social programs." The lawsuit also charges that Chiquita facilitated the illegal transfer of thousands of assault rifles to the AUC. The family members filing the suit - all named as John or Jane Doe to protect them from retaliation - allege the AUC killed their relatives because they were active in labor organizing and advocating for marginalized groups. The suit seeks to represent a class of all people harmed by the AUC's "campaign of military and social control" aiming to "exert total control over the land and inhabitants of the banana-growing region of Colombia." The family members ask that the class include "individuals who were the objects of acts constituting extrajudicial killing, forced disappearance, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, kidnapping, rape, forced displacement, crimes against humanity, or crimes against civilians constituting war crimes." Chiquita "categorically denies" the allegations in the lawsuit, according to company spokesperson Mitchell. "We reiterate that Chiquita and its employees were victims and that the actions taken by the company were always motivated to protect the lives of our employees and their families." "The company," he says, "was forced to make payments to both left- and right-wing paramilitary organizations to protect the lives of our employees at time when kidnappings and murders were frequent, and government authorities were unable to provide security and protection." In the 1990s, Mitchell says, the company's workforce was put in grave danger by the escalation of violence in the region. "Among hundreds of documented attacks by left- and right-wing illegal groups were the 1995 massacre of 28 innocent Chiquita employees who were ambushed and killed on a bus on their way to work, and the 1998 cold-blooded murder of two more of our workers on a farm while their colleagues were forced to watch." In this context, the company was "forced to make protection payments to safeguard our workforce. It is absolutely untrue for anyone to suggest that these payments were made for any other purpose." Countrywide: Subprime Kings Many factors combined to create the current housing crisis in the United States. Low interest rates after the 2001 stock market crash spurred the housing boom. Housing prices skyrocketed above historic trendlines. People were duped into thinking prices would rise forever, but it was inevitable that the housing bubble would burst, and houses would suddenly be worth a lot less. With house prices falling, lots of people are now finding they owe more than their house is worth. This problem is exacerbated by predatory loan arrangements that have left millions facing suddenly rising mortgage payments. A lot of people and corporations deserve blame for this state of affairs. Instead of warning consumers about the housing bubble - which would have gone a long way to counter the excessive price run-ups - then-Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan denied a bubble was occurring. Wall Street firms created exotic investment instruments that made possible the purchase and trading of large numbers of mortgages. This created conditions so that banks and initial lenders took less care in issuing mortgages - since they wouldn't be responsible for mortgages gone bad. The Wall Street firms not only sold these instruments to duped investors, they took on major liabilities on their own - even though it was obvious the housing bubble would have to burst. Rating agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's, which evaluated the riskiness of these new mortgage investment instruments, failed utterly. The housing bubble meant mortgage investments were sure to lose money, but the ratings agencies gave them top ratings anyway. Along with the "innovation" of the Wall Street firms, the ratings agencies helped maintain a market that dramatically exacerbated, and to a considerable degree may have created, the housing bubble. Financial bubbles create an incentive for criminal and shady activity. Just like the stock bubble of the late 1990s created the climate for Enron and dozens of other companies to cook their books, the housing bubble created incentives for predatory lenders to exploit consumers. The predatory lenders offered low rates, at least at first. Rates would rise later, but the lenders said that - because home prices were rising so fast and would continue to do so - borrowers could always refinance with a new loan. The biggest of the predatory lenders was Countrywide, a mortgage lender acquired by Bank of America in January 2008. The company and its CEO, Angelo Mozilo, made a bundle, while setting up thousands and thousands of families for financial ruin. "Over the past few years," says Martin Eakes of the Center for Responsible Lending, "by steering millions of people into bad loans, Countrywide has been the largest rogue mortgage lender in the country. According to Countrywide's own data, more than 80 percent of its exotic adjustable-rate loans were made to borrowers that do not meet current banking standards. Countrywide knew that these homeowners would not be able to make their monthly loan payments after dramatic payment increases became effective." The Center for Responsible Lending has compiled a dossier on Countrywide's irresponsible practices, presented in a report, "Unfair and Unsafe." Its devastating report, based on customer complaints, lawsuits, regulatory actions, news accounts, government reports and company documents, shows how Countrywide engaged in rampant wrongdoing: o Predatory lending. "Lawsuits filed around the country have accused Countrywide of preying on borrowers through a variety of unfair and fraudulent tactics that have siphoned equity out of their homes and pushed many into foreclosure," notes "Unfair and Unsafe." "Borrowers and regulators have accused the company of: steering borrowers with good credit into higher-cost'subprime' loans; gouging minority borrowers with discriminatory rates and fees; working in cahoots with mortgage brokers who use bait-and-switch tactics to land borrowers into loans they can't afford; targeting elderly and non-English-speaking borrowers for abusive loans; and packing loans with inflated and unauthorized fees." In one lawsuit, Albert Zacholl, a 74-year-old man living in Southern California, alleges that Countrywide and a pair of mortgage brokers "cold-called and aggressively baited" him. They promised him $30,000 cash, a mortgage that would replace his previous mortgage (which was leaving him owing more each month) and a monthly payment that would not exceed $1,700. Zacholl told the brokers that his income consisted of a pension of $350 a month and Social Security payments of $958, and that with help from his son, he could afford a mortgage up to $1,700. According to the lawsuit, the broker falsified his loan application by putting down an income of $7,000 a month, and then arranged for a high-interest mortgage that required him to pay more than $3,000 a month (and failed to deliver the $30,000 cash payment). The motivation for the scam, according to the lawsuit, was to collect $13,000 in fees. In court papers, the Center for Responsible Lending reports, Countrywide responded that Zacholl "consented to the terms of the transaction" and that any problems were the result of his own "negligence and carelessness." Dangerous products. Countrywide has been a leader in pushing unsound mortgage terms. These include "exploding" subprime adjustable rate mortgages - with reasonable interest rates in the first year that jump in subsequent years, often by as much as 30 percent to 50 percent.
Countrywide has been a leader in pushing unsound mortgage terms. These include "exploding" subprime adjustable rate mortgages - with reasonable interest rates in the first year that jump in subsequent years, often by as much as 30 percent to 50 percent. Conflicts of interest. "Countrywide has created a corporate structure designed to allow its subsidiaries to work hand-in-hand in squeezing borrowers with excessive fees and penalties," according to "Unfair and Unsafe." Countrywide affiliates handle appraisals, credit reports, flood certifications and other documentation for new loans; provide "force-placing" insurance for borrowers whose homeowners insurance has lapsed; and serve as a foreclosure trustee. The interconnections enable Countrywide to charge high fees, and deny borrowers the benefit of third parties' independent judgment and independent interests.
"Countrywide has created a corporate structure designed to allow its subsidiaries to work hand-in-hand in squeezing borrowers with excessive fees and penalties," according to "Unfair and Unsafe." Countrywide affiliates handle appraisals, credit reports, flood certifications and other documentation for new loans; provide "force-placing" insurance for borrowers whose homeowners insurance has lapsed; and serve as a foreclosure trustee. The interconnections enable Countrywide to charge high fees, and deny borrowers the benefit of third parties' independent judgment and independent interests. Broken promises on loan modifications. The company has a history of failing to fully live up to its promises to help borrowers keep their homes by modifying onerous loans, according to "Unfair and Unsafe." The report cites a Fall 2007 Credit Suisse review that ranked Countrywide as one of the mortgage lenders least willing to adjust loan terms. Countrywide says it is committed to working out fair arrangements to keep homeowners in their houses. In December, it entered into an arrangement with the community group ACORN designed to help subprime borrowers. "During the first 11 months of 2007, Countrywide helped more than 69,000 customers retain their homes through solutions such as loan modifications, long-term repayment plans, special forbearance and other options," says Steve Bailey, a Countrywide senior managing director of loan administration. "Regardless of the reason for the payment difficulties, Countrywide wants to try to find reasonable solutions for our borrowers." Abusive loan servicing. Borrowers claim that Countrywide has engaged in sloppy and fraudulent loan servicing that has produced unwarranted fees and foreclosures. With the collapse of the housing market in 2007, Countrywide's fortunes turned, its mortgage-backed securities plummeted in value, and the company seemed on the edge of bankruptcy. In January 2008, Bank of America agreed to buy the company. Do not weep for company co-founder and long-time CEO Angelo Mozilo, however. Mozilo grabbed compensation worth $185 million from 2002-2006, according to an analysis by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Between November 2006 and December 2007, Mozilo sold $150 million in stock - effectively jumping from a sinking corporate ship for which he was supposedly at the helm, or at least on the captain's deck. "Particularly, the discrepancy between Mr. Mozilo's compensation and Countrywide's performance is striking," concludes the Oversight Committee analysis. "In 2007, Countrywide announced a $1.2 billion loss in the third quarter and an additional loss of $422 million in the fourth quarter." By the end of the year, the company's stock fell 80 percent from its February peak. "During the same period, Mr. Mozilo was paid $1.9 million in salary, received $20 million in stock awards contingent upon performance, and sold $121 million in stock." Mozilo retired as CEO in 2006, remaining as company chair and an employee. The House Oversight Committee analysis shows that his compensation contract, taking effect in 2007, was outrageous, and based in part on recommendations from a compensation consultant loyal to Mozilo rather than Countrywide. Even so, Mozilo was bitter that the company did not give him everything he wanted. In an e-mail message turned up by the Oversight Committee, Mozilo wrote to the compensation consultant: "I appreciate your input but at this stage in my life at Countrywide this process is no longer about money but more about respect and acknowledgement of my accomplishments.... Boards have been placed under enormous pressure by the left wing anti business press and the envious leaders of unions and other so called 'CEO Comp Watchers' and therefore Boards are being forced to protect themselves irrespective of the potential negative long term impact on public companies. I strongly believe that a decade from now there will be a recognition that entrepreneurship has been driven out of the public sector resulting in underperforming companies and a willingness on the part of Boards to pay for performance." With attention focused on the discrepancy between Mozilo's compensation package and Countrywide's well-being, he waived various payments - totaling $37.5 million - he could have received once Bank of America finalizes its takeover. In March 2008, Mozilo appeared before the House Oversight Committee to explain his compensation. "Countrywide's board," he testified, "has aligned the interests of our top executives, including me, with shareholders by making our compensation primarily performance-based - namely, tied to earnings per share and share price appreciation. Since 1982 through early 2007, Countrywide's stock appreciated over 23,000 percent, reaching a peak market value of over $25 billion from a starting value of zero. As a result, over recent years, I have received substantial income from bonuses under a formula that was approved by our shareholders on at least two occasions." He also received substantial stock options, explaining, these were "options that required the price of the stock to rise above the option price before any income could be realized, thereby aligning me squarely with our shareholders." In anticipation of his retirement, he testified, he put in place a plan to cash in some stock options earned in earlier years. His sales were thus planned in advance of Countrywide's downturn. But he continues to hold substantial shares in Countrywide - shares worth much less than before the company's stock collapsed. Mozilo testified that he is "very proud of the home ownership opportunities that Countrywide has provided for over 20 million families," while acknowledging the hardship faced by homeowners and Countrywide employees and shareholders. "In my 55 years in the industry," he said, "this by far is the worst housing crisis I have ever seen, combined with an unprecedented collapse of the credit and liquidity markets." "The problem we face," he said, "is the deterioration of the value of homes. As values were going up, we had no problem. We had no delinquencies and no foreclosures, because people had options, because people run into three things in their lives generally - loss of job, loss of marriage, loss of health. When that happens and they own a home, and it impacts their income, they generally have a way out - sell the house, refinance, do something. "That equity that they have in their homes has been virtually wiped out. And that's what's exacerbating this whole foreclosure problem." Wasn't that problem entirely foreseeable? Didn't Countrywide's lending policies - which generously might be called aggressive - depend on constantly rising housing values in what was obviously a bubble market? ExxonMobil: Planetary Endangerment It is no longer possible for even ExxonMobil to deny the reality of climate change. Here is the current company line, as elaborated by CEO Rex Tillerson in a November 2007 speech: "Many more questions on this complex subject remain and require continued research. But it has become increasingly clear that climate change poses risks to society and ecosystems that are serious enough to warrant action - by individuals, by businesses and by governments." Well, sure, lots of questions remain. And action is certainly "warranted." But that understates things by several orders of magnitude. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collaboration of hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, always presents its findings in the most cautious and restrained language. The IPCC concludes in its Fourth Assessment report, issued in April 2007: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level." Not only were 11 of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006 among the 12 warmest years recorded, the last 50 years in the Northern Hemisphere were probably the warmest in the last 1,300 years. "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [greenhouse gas] concentrations." The IPCC details a series of horrors likely to befall the planet to rival the 10 Plagues the Bible says were visited upon Egypt. Projections include: By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people in Africa are projected to be exposed to increased water stress.
By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent. Agricultural production throughout Africa is projected to be severely compromised.
Sea level rise will affect heavily populated coastal areas in Africa by the end of the century, imposing costs on affected countries of at least 5 percent to 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
African desertification will increase by 5 percent to 8 percent by 2080.
Freshwater availability throughout Asia will be a serious problem by the 2050s.
Flooding in heavily populated Asian coastal areas will intensify (posing risks to lives and imposing massive economic costs).
New patterns of flood and drought will lead to more infant and child deaths from diarrhea in Asia.
By 2020, significant loss of biodiversity is projected to occur in Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
By 2050, ongoing coastal development and population growth in some areas of Australia and New Zealand are projected to exacerbate risks from sea level rise and increases in the severity and frequency of storms and coastal flooding.
Mountainous areas in Europe will face glacier retreat, reduced snow cover and winter tourism, and extensive species losses (in some areas up to 60 percent under high emissions scenarios by 2080).
By mid-century, increases in temperature and associated decreases in soil water are projected to lead to gradual replacement of tropical forest by savanna in eastern Amazonia. Semi-arid vegetation will tend to be replaced by arid-land vegetation.
Biodiversity will be lost everywhere.
Heatwaves will increase in number, intensity and duration in North America and Europe. In a company statement, ExxonMobil responded to the April report from the IPCC, with its new line that "Because the risks to society and ecosystems could prove to be significant, ExxonMobil believes that it is prudent now to develop and implement global strategies that address the risks …" But there was a caveat. Here's the end of that sentence: "keeping in mind the central importance of energy to the economies of the world." The company therefore favors "putting policies in place that start us on a path to reduce emissions, while understanding the context of managing carbon emissions among other important world priorities, such as economic development, poverty eradication and public health." It's hard to find words to describe this posture. If the world fails to mobilize the needed, increasingly urgent response to climate change - a disturbingly likely scenario - future generations will look back on this kind of talk, and the global warming denialism that Exxon so long funded, and know who to blame for the misery and suffering that could have been avoided. If in fact addressing climate change would interfere with other important world priorities like poverty eradication and public health, perhaps there would be some moral hand-wringing about doing what must be done to prevent the worst climate change projections from being realized. However, the very cautious IPCC report conveys in unmistakable terms that global warming will impose the greatest burdens on the world's poorest countries. Climate change will devastate agricultural production and rural societies in Africa. New disease challenges will be worst in tropical countries. Flooding will be most severe in developing countries. Adapting to climate change will be expensive but ultimately affordable for rich countries; it will drain poor countries' economies, however. You only need common sense to know that the rich will be better able to buy their way out of both the hardships and inconveniences imposed by climate change. Many people concerned about global warming are seeking ways to pressure or incentivize ExxonMobil and the rest of Big Oil to change their business model. The idea is for the companies to shift from providing oil and gas to becoming energy service corporations, as ready to deliver solar power as gasoline. We're not in that camp. We think ExxonMobil and Big Oil will need to be displaced, and will be. The most serious problem is that ExxonMobil, as the largest and most vociferous of the oil majors, exerts its political and economic power to distort policy debates and stop governments from taking proportionate action to address climate change. We're not upset that ExxonMobil refuses to invest its obscenely large profits - $39.5 billion in 2007 - in renewable energy research and development. We place the company on the 10 Worst list because it continues to deploy its political power to stop the U.S. Congress from enacting a windfall profits tax, or ending tax and royalty subsidies for the oil industry, and directing the proceeds for renewable energy. Gen Re: Case Closed. Why? In 2006, the Justice Department abruptly dropped a federal criminal probe into allegations of insurance fraud at Berkshire Hathaway's General Reinsurance (Gen Re) unit. Paul McNulty was the U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia at the time. In March 2006, McNulty went on to become the Deputy Attorney General. He is currently a partner at Baker & McKenzie in Washington, D.C. McNulty did not return a call seeking comment for this article. Did anyone pressure McNulty or his successor, Chuck Rosenberg, the current U.S. Attorney, to close down the investigation? The case was looked at by the Justice Department's Inspector General, Glenn Fine. Fine's office will not comment on the current status, if any, of the investigation. Fine was dragged in after evidence was presented to his office that federal officials may have incinerated more than 100 boxes of grand jury information in April 2007, just days after the Virginia Lawyer's Weekly published an article titled, "Further Federal Indictments In Reciprocal Case Unlikely." The driving forces behind the criminal investigation of Gen Re were Thomas Gober, a certified fraud examiner based in Glen Allen, Virginia - and David Maguire, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Alexandria charged by McNulty with shepherding the case. For 12 years of his 18-year career, Gober has worked with federal investigators and prosecutors, ferreting out significant insurance and reinsurance fraud schemes. Most recently, he worked closely with Maguire on the criminal prosecution of the top executives at Reciprocal of America (ROA), a major Virginia insurance company that went belly up in January 2003. ROA provided malpractice insurance to lawyers, doctors and hospitals. When the company went out of business, the policy holders were left without coverage - and victims of malpractice, in many cases, were left with no way to collect damages. The collapse of ROA resulted in unpaid liabilities totaling $500 million. The work of Maguire, Gober and a handful of FBI agents led to the February 2003 guilty pleas of former ROA president Kenneth Patterson and former ROA CFO Carolyn Hudgins. The two pled guilty to manipulating ROA's books. By cooking the books, the ROA executives concealed from regulators the company's financial weakness. Their failure to maintain sufficient reserves paved the way for the company's collapse. In Richmond, Virginia, Judge James Spencer sentenced Patterson to 12 years in prison and Hudgins to five years in prison. Also caught up in the ROA case was the giant Gen Re company - a unit of the Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway. Gen Re is a reinsurer, a company which effectively provides insurance to insurers Between 2004 and 2007, McNulty, Maguire and their team of a half dozen FBI agents, Assistant U.S. Attorneys and forensic auditors began to build their case against Gen Re. They believed they had accumulated evidence that Gen Re had entered into sham transactions with ROA. The Justice Department lawyers believed these deals helped ROA hide its losses from regulators. Gober says that McNulty "repeatedly championed the ROA case and all of our diligent work," until McNulty left in March 2006 to become the Deputy Attorney General at Main Justice. The prosecution team believed that the evidence against Gen Re was overwhelming. Maguire, Gober and FBI agent David Hulser drafted a more than 60-page indictment against top Gen Re executives. At the same time, lawyers for the giant reinsurer were pressuring the government to drop the case or settle it as part of an overall global settlement with other matters the government was looking at involving Gen Re. When McNulty left for Main Justice in March 2006, he was replaced by Chuck Rosenberg. Soon thereafter, the case was derailed. In March 2007, in an effort to salvage years of work on the case, Gober wrote a seven-page letter to Judge Spencer - the judge who had sentenced ROA executives Patterson and Hudgins to long jail terms - chronologically laying out the derailment and pleading for advice. "First, David Maguire was totally removed from working the case," Gober wrote. "Dave called me into his office and apologized about leaving the case, telling me that Main Justice had told him he was being removed due to 'health concerns,'" Gober wrote. "Dave had lost about 10 pounds while working on the ROA matter... something I did not consider very troubling (or even unusual) because this has been a very large and very complex case. Dave is a brilliant prosecutor and he knows all of the facts of the ROA case; indeed, he can literally recite them from memory." Maguire was replaced by Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Gill, another Texas import. In his letter to Judge Spencer, Gober says that in the very first "team meeting" after Maguire's removal, Gill announced to the team of FBI agents and prosecutors that he was "glad we are all in agreement that this case is all about [name redacted] and that Gen Re is no longer a target." "To say the least, the team was a bit shocked about this 'announcement' concerning 'how we all felt.'" Gober wrote. Gill said he wanted to focus on an in-house ROA lawyer "who essentially had made many of the day-to-day reinsurance decisions that had impacted ROA and resulted in its eventual collapse." But the "team" also wanted to focus on Gen Re and top Gen Re executives because they believed, as Gober put it, that "the Gen Re issues were significant and far-reaching." "We discovered a fraud scheme which included, but was not limited to, the execution of'side letter agreements' between the reinsurer and ROA which resulted in a misleading balance sheet impression for the insurance regulators," Gober wrote. "In effect, we found that Gen Re was permitting the insurer to'rent' reinsurance certification but there was no true shifting back of risk." "Because Gen Re is owned by the parent company of Berkshire Hathaway, and the two richest men in the world (Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) serve on the Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors, I became quite concerned when the case against Gen Re was allowed to 'go away,'" Gober wrote. "Why, I wondered, was this happening when the entire team - prior to Mr. McNulty's elevation at the Justice Department - had been so absolutely sure we had a'slam dunk' case? Nevertheless, I decided to make the best of a bad situation. If Gen Re was going to be let go, that was a decision over my head. At least, I thought, the case was going to be forcefully and professionally pursued" against the ROA lawyer. Because the prosecutorial team felt that the case against the ROA lawyer was so strong, they prepared a prosecution memo outlining their case. That memo was submitted to Gill in February 2007. But the team heard nothing from Gill. All Gill would say to Gober was that he just "felt" there was not a strong enough case against the lawyer. Gober was so upset with the decision not to proceed against Gen Re and the ROA lawyer that he wrote a letter to McNulty outlining his concerns. McNulty never responded to the letter. "What has happened to this case?" Gober rhetorically asked Judge Spencer. "The facts are the same (or better) as they were when Paul McNulty left to become the #2 man in the Justice Department. The only thing that is 'different' is that two fellows from Texas have been brought in and they do not seem to want to do anything with this matter but let it die. I am very troubled that everyone on our team, and we are talking about seasoned professionals, concluded this was (and remains) a very important case that needs to go forward. Yet, somehow, the U.S. Attorney goes to D.C. and the new guy comes in and the case is over, for all intents and purposes. Something is just wrong about all of this." Gober is concerned not just because a criminal prosecution of a powerful U.S. corporation has been derailed. He's concerned not just because the case involved the largest single insurance collapse in the history of Virginia that cost $500 million and has left more than 80,000 policyholders with an insolvent and liquidated insurer. Gober is concerned also because the case "has exposed a serious problem in the reinsurance industry which is going to have to be addressed and corrected," he wrote to Judge Spencer. "Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, and very powerful people are interested in this matter simply dying," he wrote. "I am not one of them. Nothing would be worse than to see a case like this one pushed 'under the radar' by greedy people who simply want more and more money through fraud. Based on what has been going on lately at the Justice Department, I am very worried about how all of this has happened and what should be done to correct it." Judge Spencer, through his clerk, suggested that Gober directly and personally approach Glenn Fine, the Inspector General. On April 2, 2007, the Virginia Lawyer's Weekly wrote the first article outlining Gober's account. (A few months later, in July 2007, the McClatchy Newspapers ran a more detailed article titled "Justice Department Drops Massive Accounting Fraud Case," by Marisa Taylor.) On April 3, the day after the Virginia Lawyer's Weekly article hit the stands, Gober wrote a frantic e-mail to Fine's office warning that the FBI was planning on incinerating crucial evidence in the case. "I know from working past FBI cases that documents are stored for years," Gober wrote to the Office of Inspector General's (OIG) Keith Bonanno. "The agents must not know of your inquiry." On April 5, Gober wrote again to Bonanno. "Yesterday, all documents were hauled off from our site office to the FBI incinerator," Gober wrote. "My hard drive which held all of the case data was taken as well. It is my hard drive and it was to be 'wiped clean' before its return to me. I pushed for them to back it up before wiping clean or all case data would be gone. Please request that the data be copied before my drive is re-formatted. Otherwise, the investigation may be for naught. Two independent sources told me that the agents were going to incinerate them to 'get ahead of the ball' and 'not let this drag on forever.'" OIG's Bonanno responded later that day. "Our office contacted the USAO [U.S. Attorney Office] in Richmond and instructed that they (and/or the FBI) cease destruction of documents related to the case since there is a pending OIG/OPR review," Bonanno wrote. Before the whip came down, the government was in pretty serious negotiations with Gen Re to settle the ROA case amicably. Joshua Hochberg was at the time head of the Justice Department's Fraud Section. Hochberg is currently a partner at McKenna Long & Aldridge in Washington, D.C. Hochberg did not return a call seeking comment for this article. In May 2005, Hochberg wrote to Maguire about the settlement of the Gen Re case. "The bottom line has always been - what do we want to do with Gen Re." Hochberg wrote. "The options range from indicting the company, to a plea by a subsidiary to a deferred prosecution or a non-pros [non-prosecution] agreement with lots of favorable terms for the government, including large $, monitors, cooperation. … Indicting the company would have enormous collateral consequences. As you know, when we met with Gen Re's counsel, we made no promises about any final resolution." Thomas Hanusik was at the time assistant chief of the Fraud Section. He's now a partner at Crowell & Moring. Hanusik said he would have no comment on this story. On July 20, 2005, Hanusik wrote to Maguire to detail negotiations he had with Ron Olson, a partner at Munger Tolles & Olson in Los Angeles. Olson is an attorney for Gen Re and a member of the Berkshire Hathaway board of directors. Olson could not be reached for comment. But he told McClatchy's Marisa Taylor that "there was no knowledge at Gen Re that people at Reciprocal of America were hiding information from regulators or auditors." He said the Gen Re had entered into "side deals" with ROA, and that these were the industry norm. The company has since banned such arrangements as bad business practice, he told Taylor. He described the criminal case as "maybe the longest investigation I remember being associated with. We were extremely frustrated." Maguire responded to Hanusik's July 2005 note the next day. "I think we need a strong united front on Gen Re's culpability on ROA in order to get them to fess up and pay a share of the $450 million ROA loss commensurate with their conduct," he wrote. "From the mid-1980s until approximately 2001, ROA grew from a small, marginally capitalized Virginia reciprocal insurer of approximately 100 hospitals and a few hundred doctors and lawyers into four commonly managed reciprocal insurers of more than 80,000 insureds in many different states across the country," Maguire wrote. "This phenomenal growth, however, could not have happened without the world believing that ROA was fully and truly reinsured by Gen Re and the receipt of consistently high ratings from A.M. Best (A Ratings from 1983 to 2001), a national respected ratings service of insurance companies, which also believed ROA was truly backed by Gen Re." "Unfortunately, for more than 18 years, material facts about the true nature of ROA's reinsurance relationship with Gen Re were falsely represented and concealed from Best, the insurance commissioners, state legal and medical societies and hospital associations that endorsed ROA to its members, and the insureds themselves. Indeed, the losses that drove ROA into insolvency were the very losses that were supposedly covered by reinsurance contracts with Gen Re," Maguire wrote. "The dark little secret we have uncovered is that when Gen Re has to pay larger that [sic] expected losses, it uses it [sic] might to dump the losses back on the reinsured." The Gen Re investigation ultimately did not come out entirely to the company's liking - and company executives have not escaped accountability, at least as relates to other matters. The ROA case led federal prosecutors to investigate a similar alleged arrangement between Gen Re and the insurer AIG. A federal jury would later find four top Gen Re executives and an AIG executive guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud, in a scheme also allegedly involving sham transactions, these intended to make AIG's finances appear stronger than they actually were. Murray Energy: Collapse of Decency Mining disasters can transfix a nation. |
he said.
The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”
What you may not know is that the Los Angeles Times also took a crack at this story. Their version contains fewer examples of rhetoric, and attempts to illustrate how “normal” the organizers looked and sounded. To CNN’s Jake Tapper, this coverage was unforgivably tepid, and actually served to normalize a hate movement. He took his discouragement to Twitter:
Journalists in the 60s realized racism/discrimination were empirically evil and reported accordingly. This OTOH… https://t.co/1peT9AfPIg — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 21, 2016
Del Quentin Wilber, a Times writer, fired back at Tapper, accusing him of missing the point:
@jaketapper CNN should be careful criticizing real journalism. point of story is to show how white supremacists r playing game @DavidLauterpic.twitter.com/VXeLHXWOfC — Del Quentin Wilber (@DelWilber) November 21, 2016
But Tapper wasn't about to be put off:
@DelWilber sorry, snowflake. The story is weak and I'll put my journalism against yours any day. — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 21, 2016
@DelWilber tiresome. Have fun defending this story all week before it ends up in journalism textbooks for the wrong reason. — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 21, 2016
And, of course, Wilber backed down, because if mainstream newspapers have proved anything over the past year, it's that they have no spine:
@jaketapper I should not have engaged in ad hominem attack on CNN. Apologize for that. I respect this reporter and got point of her story — Del Quentin Wilber (@DelWilber) November 21, 2016
Credit to Tapper on this one—the original article may have had good intentions in its depiction of the alt-right’s professional veneer, but to consciously omit the racial language they used at the event the journalist was ostensibly covering is a tremendous disservice.Instead of waiting to be enraged in December, voters, could you please be enraged now? Once the holiday season kicks off, you'll be too busy going to parties and Christmas shopping to notice that you're suddenly living in Mexico.
Getting Obama to postpone a rancid idea isn't something to celebrate. Yay! We did it! We forced him to delay doing something the country doesn't want for SIX WEEKS! Every Republican candidate better be jamming Obama's threat down the throats of their Democratic opponents.
Obama is claiming to have the powers of a dictator. Amnesty was considered by Congress, but—here's the important thing: It didn't pass. It only passed the Senate, with the votes of all Democrats and 14 not-bright Republicans. After that, widespread public revulsion prevented Marco Rubio's amnesty bill from even being considered in the House.
But according to Obama, the only reason illegals haven't already been given amnesty is that Congress is not "doing its job."
What does Obama imagine Congress' "job" is? Being his errand boys? Their job is to represent their districts. I promise you, House members are doing a better job representing their districts than at least a dozen senators are at representing their states—or than Obama is doing representing the country. It's called the "People's House" for a reason.
Noticeably, every Republican senator running for re-election this year claims to oppose amnesty—even the ones who voted for it. (Let's hope they remember how unpopular mass immigration is when it's time to vote, not just when they're running.)
Obama's base isn't even looking for representation. We could have a 1929-level stock market crash, Obama could commit a murder on the White House lawn—and they would still support the first minority president!
But Obama says he can do whatever he wants on immigration because it's "a serious issue and Congress chooses to do nothing."
If bills became law provided only the Senate and president agreed, the Nicaraguan Contras would have been funded out of the U.S. Treasury, Reagan would have gotten his MX missiles in 1982 and the Soviet Union would have fallen five years sooner, school busing would have been eliminated without waiting for the courts to act a decade later, and most of George W. Bush's tax cuts would have been made permanent. In all those cases, a president wanted to do something—and the Senate agreed! But the House said no, so it never happened.
Obama can't ignore the House and make amnesty happen either. That's why he's talking about an "executive amnesty," which sounds like the top-tier donation category at one of the 4 million fundraisers Obama has held since becoming president, where the dinner starts at $25,000 per couple and you might bump into Jay-Z in the men's room. Actually, it just means Obama publicly, openly, officially stops enforcing immigration law.
Except in his own mind, Obama can't make illegals legal. But he can direct the entire immigration apparatus of the federal government to act as if amnesty has passed. The theory is that once they've been treated as if they're legal for a few years, it's a fait accompli, and no future president will resume enforcement of the law.
Although consistent with historical practice, it's not where the country is at all. This election is our first referendum on amnesty.
Not only do we have Obama's promise that he'll refuse to execute the law—it's not as if he took some kind of oath, after all—but there's good reason to believe him: After this election, he's got nothing to lose. Democrats will have two years to sign up 30 million illegal immigrants for Social Security benefits, food stamps and voting cards.
There is no more important political issue than this: Republicans must take the Senate this year.
You know how much you've been enjoying the courts overturning state referendums prohibiting gay marriage? Get ready for a lot more of your hard-won political victories to be nullified by the courts if Republicans don't take a Senate majority.
Remember how the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare on a 5-4 vote? Obama could have a shot at replacing another Supreme Court justice in the next two years. As a senator, he voted against both of Bush's nominees, so he can't very well complain if Republicans reject his loony-bird nominees.
Have you heard about the federal judge conspiring with Attorney General Eric Holder and the ACLU to bring deported illegal aliens back from Mexico? Yes, he's bringing them back. That judge, John A. Kronstadt, can't be impeached unless Republicans take the Senate.
With Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, Congress should just keep passing bills and sending them to the White House—or whatever golf course Obama's on, busily not executing the law. If Obama vetoes their bills, Republicans can denounce him as a "do-nothing" president.
And keep in mind, this election will determine whether President Ted Cruz or President Mitt Romney will have a Republican Congress in 2017. They won't—unless Republicans win every possible Senate race this year. The Senate seats up for election two years from now are not nearly as favorable to Republicans as the Senate seats up this year.
Unforced Republican errors in Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, Connecticut and West Virginia in the last few election cycles have already cost Republicans five Senate seats. (See my last book for the heart-breaking details.)
Five! Think of that! Republicans would have 50 seats in the Senate right now—maybe 51, if they could flip Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia—but for Republican stupidity, arrogance and narcissism. Instead of desperately hoping to win a bare majority, we would be one "wave election" away from a veto-proof majority.
Surveying the wreckage of a mere two years of a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress, all Americans should be focused like a laser beam on putting the Senate in Republican hands.
Won't you be angry if our power-mad president grants millions of illegal immigrants "executive amnesty" on the basis of his nonexistent constitutional authority to ignore the law? The surge of needy foreigners across our Southern border, so far, will be nothing compared to what's coming if Obama does this.
He says he will. He thinks voters are too stupid to notice.
Prove him wrong.
Ann Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate. She is the author of TEN New York Times bestsellers—collect them here.
Her most recent book is Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican.Let the Right One In has really connected with a generation of genre fans. From book to Swedish film adaptation to American remake, there's something about this dark tale that resonates and I hear about it when I talk to horror fans. Now the story has become a stage play, which I had no clue about.
It is currently enjoying a run at the Royal Court Theatre in London and we have a promo that's being used to push the show.
Jack Thorne adapted the material for the play which is described like this:
Oskar is a bullied lonely teenage boy living with his mother on a housing estate at the edge of town, when a spate of sinister killings rock the neighbourhood.Eli is the young girl who has just moved in next door. She doesn't go to school and never leaves the flat by day. Sensing in each other a kindred spirit, the two become devoted friends. What Oskar doesn't know is that Eli has been a teenager for a very long time… A must-see major new production, Let the Right One In is an enchanting, brutal vampire myth and teenage love story.
If you're in the area, be sure to check it out!From The TV IV
The numbers or cursed numbers are a set of numbers that recur multiple times in Lost. These mysterious numbers have grown to become a prominent, recurring plot line on the show and is one of the more supernatural aspects of the series. The numbers are first mentioned in "Numbers", although they do appear on many occasions before that episode.
Due to the numbers being one of the biggest recurring mysteries on Lost, criticism was pointed toward Damon Lindelof, who revealed in a TVGuide interview that the true nature of the numbers will never be revealed. This is one of the more persistent criticisms of the series. J.J. Abrams has used a similar non-disclosure technique with another recurring number, 47, which appears in nearly every episode of Alias.
The Valenzetti Equation
In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis resulted in the world coming to the brink of nuclear war. With their respective nations having just faced the very precipice of mutual assured destruction, the United States and Soviet Union — under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council — secretly sought Enzo Valenzetti out as a disinterested third party and charged him with the creation of an infalliable mathematical algorithm for the prediction of Armageddon.
Valenzetti's result was the Valenzetti Equation, an equation that predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself, whether through nuclear fire, chemical and biological warfare, conventional warfare, pandemic disease or over-population. Valenzetti gave numerical values to the core environmental and human factors in his equation: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. It is felt by some, such as Alvar Hanso, that only by manipulating the environment and finding scientific solutions will these core factors be changed and thereby give humanity a chance to survive.
The United Nations Security Council buried Valenzetti's findings, but the Valenzetti Equation was the catalyst for the creation of the DHARMA Initiative.
The Numbers
In 1988, slightly more than 16 years before the crash of Oceanic Flight 815, Danielle Rousseau's science team picked up a mysterious short-wave transmission from the island. The transmission was merely six numbers repeated over and over again: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. She wasn't the only one who heard them. The same transmission was also picked up by a U.S. Navy long wave transmission monitoring station where Leonard Simms and Sam Toomey worked.
Sam Toomey used the numbers to win a $50,000 (Australian) prize for guessing the exact number of beans in a jar — no one had come even close to the correct number in the 40 years the contest was running. After that, bad things started to happen to those around Sam Toomey. He moved to the middle of nowhere to try and limit the damage, but eventually he killed himself with a shotgun to make the bad things stop.
Leonard Simms wound up at the Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute, where he met Hugo "Hurley" Reyes. Leonard kept repeating the numbers over and over, and they eventually became ingrained in Hurley's mind. Hurley played the numbers in a lottery which hadn't had a winner for 16 weeks. He won 114 million dollars. After that, bad things seemed to happen to those around him too, but in a way that made him profit.
Hurley became convinced that the numbers were cursed, so he went to see Leonard, and eventually he found Sam Toomey's house in Australia and learned about the transmission but nothing more. He headed back home to Los Angeles on Oceanic flight 815, which departed from gate 23 on what was planned to be a 16-hour long flight departing at 2:15 P.M. and landing in Los Angeles at 10:42 P.M.
One interesting thing of note is that, when the numbers all appear together, they always appear in order.
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
The numbers are inscribed on the mysterious hatch in the jungle.
The latitude 4.815 and longitude 162.342 are located in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Australia.
Boone found a map of Africa on the smuggler’s plane. Latitude: 16° 23 Min.42 Sec, Longitude: 4° 8 Min. 15 Sec. will put you in Niger, pretty close to where the map showed.
When Hurley's car is breaking down on his way to the airport, the numbers all show up on the dashboard.
Hurley passed a girls sports team on the scooter in the airport that had all the numbers in order.
Desmond enters the numbers into his computer terminal upon waking up.
The bottles Desmond was using for injection have "CR 4-81516-23 42" written at the top.
The bottles holding the'medicine' for Claire's baby have "CR 4-81516-23 42" written at the top also.
According to The Map in the Swan Bunker, there were system-wide outages of the Dharmatel Intranet on 4.08.00, 8.15.01, & 01.06.05.
A notation near the center of The Map in the Swan Bunker gives x4, y8, z15 as the coordinates of a subterrainean conduit.
A notation underneath the Flame Bunker on The Map in the Swan Bunker is for the square roots of 16, 64, & 225 (i.e. 4, 8, 15)>
In the flashback for the episode "Two for the Road", three of the police cars are numbered 15, 16, & 23 and 42 (on the right side of the screen).
The Cursed Number 4
The number of years before the crash on the island (B.I.) that Locke was paralysed.
The number of years B.I. that Sam Toomey committed suicide.
Number of years before Hurley's lottery win that his grandfather had a pacemaker put in.
Leonard was playing Connect Four when Hurley visited him.
The number of years B.I. since Sawyer made his birthday wish.
Number of circles on the Oceanic "O" logo.
The number of Aces (value 1) that were on Boone’s t-shirt. Also, Boone had another t-shirt with Asian letters that say 84.
The number of refills Shannon had for her inhaler in Boone's luggage.
Number of Oceanic planes on the mobile in Claire’s dream.
Number of months Michelangelo stared at marble “working” in Locke’s story. Boone then asked if they were going to stare at the hatch for 4 months.
Number of spots on Michael’s raft.
Locke tied Boone up about 4 miles east of the caves.
Jack's bride Sara had "44" on her pyjamas
A speed that Hurley’s rental car displayed as it died.
Number of guns in the Marshall's case.
Number of months that passed between Claire's two visits to the psychic.
When being lowered into the hatch, Kate counts to 5 to allay her fears. She gets up to 4 before the light comes on.
Number of years of college that Sun took to get her degree in art history.
After the alarm has sounded, the number of minutes available to enter the code into the computer.
The Cursed Number 8
Number of years Michael worked in construction.
Walt was born in August, the 8th month. He was born on the 24th of August. 24 is 8 + 16.
Number of years B.I. since Michael was hit by the car.
The number of years Michael didn't see Walt.
The number of people who died in a fire in Hurley’s shoe factory in Canada.
The number of months Claire was pregnant when the plane crashed.
Boone had a t-shirt with 84 on it in Asian letters.
Number of months Locke was talking to Helen before the crash.
Number of days Charlie went without his guitar before Locke returned it to him.
Number of weeks Driveshaft was going to go on tour.
Shannon’s age when her father married Boone’s mother.
James Ford's (Sawyer) age when his family was destroyed by the original Frank Sawyer.
The aisle for regulation footballs in Locke’s store.
A speed that Hurley's rental car displayed as it died.
The person Hurley bought the scooter from had a Crazy Eight’s hat.
8 O’clock was the position on the radar where the Others boat showed up.
Number of the TV station that interviewed Hurley after his lottery win.
Number of days Claire was missing after her abduction.
The distance from the Environment Secretary's house that Jin was to ditch the assassin's getaway car.
Sara, Jack's Wife, was supposed to be married 8 months after the car accident which introduced her to Jack.
The number of a cart in Sara's room.
Hurley was accused of eating an 8-piece Dark Meat combo the day he quit working at Mr. Cluck's Chicken Shack.
The call number of Ana Lucia's patrol car is 8A16.
Number of Virgin Mary statues Charlie takes from the plane wreck (seven statues are shown in "The Long Con", and Charlie destroyed one of them earlier).
Number of people the deck that collapsed was built to hold.
The Cursed Number 15
The number of hours Boone spent on his flight to Sydney
The aisle for Nerf footballs in Locke’s store.
Number on the whiskey bottle that Sawyer and Christian drank from.
A speed that Hurley’s rental car displayed as it died.
Sun was supposed to slip away from Jin at 11:15 A.M. Also, all the digits add up to 8.
14:15 was the scheduled departure time for Oceanic 815.
Sawyer was supposed to meet with an investor for one of his cons at 15:30.
Michael’s estimate of how far out to sea they were when the detected the radar blip.
In backgammon, each side starts with 15 pieces.
The number of ribbons on Sam Austen's ribbon rack.
Part of the number of the safety deposit box (1516) in which Locke's father had put $700,000 from a retirement con
The Cursed Number 16
Number of years Rousseau has been on the island (after hearing the numbers transmission that brought her science team there).
$160,000 was the amount of money Sawyer was planning to con from a family.
When Jack tells Kate his story about fear as she sews him up, the patient in the story is 16 years old.
Number of circles around the outside of the Oceanic Logo when it is part of Oceanic.
Number of hours the flight to L.A. was going to take.
Number of hours after the crash when the pilot was found.
Number of weeks the lottery hadn’t been won before Hurley won it.
Number of years since Boone’s nanny Teresa fell down the stairs and broke her neck.
Number of years ago that Kate buried the time capsule
A speed that Hurley’s rental car displayed as it died.
Number in hundreds that Hurley paid an old man for his scooter.
The speed Desmond was going on his exercise bicycle.
Number of people in Locke's anger management group.
Part of the number of the safety deposit box (1516) in which Locke's father had put $700,000 from a retirement con
The Cursed Number 23
The sum of both parts of the plane's flight number.
Number of the floor Hurley stayed on at a Sydney hotel.
Number of the gate the plane took off from.
Jack’s seat number on the plane was 23B.
Rose and Bernard were sitting next to Jack in row 23, too.
The reward for turning in Kate was $23,000
The morning of their departure from Sydney, Walt woke Michael up at 5:23 A.M.
The temperature in Hurley’s rental car when it died.
The initial total number of survivors from the plane's tail section.
W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet, and W begins Walt's name.
Mr. Eko recites the 23rd Psalm when he burns the plane that contains his brother's body
Inman shows Sayid DIA video footage labeled 'Reel 23108-42'
Number of people on the deck when it collapsed, in Hurley's accident.
The Black Rock was bound for dock 23 in Portsmouth, Britain in 1881
The Cursed Number 42
Locke is playing Risk during his lunch break. In Risk, Earth is divided into 42 territories.
Leonard was playing Connect 4. 42 is the number of spaces on a connect four game board.
Rousseau wrote down the number sequence seven times, creating a matrix that totals 42.
Ana-Lucia was sitting in seat 42F.
Room number of Hurley’s room at the Sydney hotel.
The distance Hurley’s rental car had travelled when it died.
10:42 was the scheduled arrival time of flight 815 in L.A.
Scrawled on the wall as a part of the mural in the bunker.
Since winning the lottery, Hurley increased his net worth by 42 million dollars.
The letters A-L-E-X (the name of Rousseau's child who was also kidnapped by the others), when given numerical value based on their position in the alphabet, add up to 42.
Shannon had revealed during the census that she was 20. Boone would've been 22 then, as their parents married when he was 10 and she was 8. They are the only two characters with flashbacks centered to themselves (not like the Marshall with just popping in at random points) to have died, and their ages equal 42 when added together.
The prize for the boat race that Desmond entered was $42,000.
The Sum of the Cursed Numbers: 108
108 is the sum of the numbers: 4 + 8 + 15 + 16 + 23 + 42.
The number 108 is painted twice on a wall inside the hatch.
The number of minutes in the countdown in the Swan bunker.
CV III (Cerberus Vent Three) is 108 in roman numerals.
A Special Combination: 48
There were originally 48 survivors in the main group.
48 days passed on the island until The tail section survivors encountered the main group.
A Special Combination: 815
The flight number of the plane.
The number of the safety deposit box Kate robbed.
Charlie was trying to sell Copier model 815-C.
The date of Kate’s time capsule is August 15, 1989, 8-15.
The number on the building Sayid walked into in Sydney.
Adam Rutherford was pronounced dead at 8:15 A.M.
The real Henry Gale's house number.
The Significance of The Numbers outside of Lost
23 & 42 are two 'random numbers' used by hacker tradition
23 is the gate number Ross waits outside of for his newly-wed and estranged wife in the Friends episode 5x01.
23 is one of the sacred numbers of Eris, Greek Goddess of Discord
Author William S. Burroughs considered the number 23 to be very unlucky, and kept a notebook of the number's occurrences.
23 is referred to often in Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus Trilogy ; it is most often used as an example of a number that pops up in patterns and seems to have meaning, but only because one is looking for it to appear.
; it is most often used as an example of a number that pops up in patterns and seems to have meaning, but only because one is looking for it to appear. Some calculations place the end of the Mayan calendar on December 23, 2012, when an apocalyptic event is predicted to occur.
The 23rd Psalm is arguably the most famous, the "Divine Shepherd" psalm.
23 is the number of individuals (16 female and 7 male) that the One is supposed to select from the Matrix to start a 'new Zion' after re-inserting the prime program (essentially re-booting the Matrix) in the Matrix trilogy, as revealed by the Architect in Matrix Reloaded.
42 is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
. In Kabbalism, 42 is the number of characters in the unspeakable name of God.
There are 108 stitches on a baseball.
4, 8, and 16 are all powers of two: 2 2, 2 3, 2 4 ; the same digits as in 23 & 42.
, 2, 2 ; the same digits as in 23 & 42. In Japan, 4 is considered an extremely unlucky number because it is pronounced "shi", which is the same pronunciation as "death". On the other hand, the number 8 is considered a lucky number. This is because of the shape of the kanji character for eight, whose two strokes are wider at the bottom, suggesting a better time or better things to come in the future.
I-Ching
4 - Folly 8 - Grouping 15 - Humbling 16 - Providing For 23 - Splitting Apart 42 - Increasing
In the movie Battle Royale, 42 students are brought to the island to compete in the death tournament.
108 is the traditional number of beads found on both Buddhist and Hindu mala, or rosaries.
Each Hindu god has 108 names that are considered sacred and are recited during religious ceremonies.
The number of sacred stars in Chinese astrology is 108.
In The Odyssey, Penelope had 108 suitors.
August 15, or 8/15, is the Orthodox feast of Dormition (the death of the Virgin Mary) and the Catholic feast of Assumption (the reception of the Virgin Mary in heaven). There are a number of other references to the Virgin Mary in "Lost", such the small statues with the heroin inside and Locke's mother claiming he was immaculately conceived.
At position 176025488 of pi, the sequence of digits "48151623" occurs. At position 155209220, the sequence of digits "15162342" occurs. The complete sequence of numbers doesn't occur within the first 200 million positions. (of course neither one of these facts is remotely a coincidence -- if you randomly selected any 8 digit number you would expect to find it in the first 200 million digits of pi's decimal expansion)
When a person is created, 23 chromosomes from each person are put into the cell.
References to the Numbers in Other TV Shows, etc.
Cover for Catwoman #51
At the end of the Veronica Mars episode "Donut Run," the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 appear as the lucky numbers on a fortune cookie message that Veronica hangs on her mirror.
The numbers appear on the cover of Catwoman #51. (See image)
In Dan Slott's The Thing #6 the Trapster uses the numbers as the deactivation code for bombs he is using to sabotage the Thing's good works.
In Season 2, Episode 6 of British comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look, a slightly altered version of the numbers is given as the test of a military computer's ability to calculate Numberwang. The numbers fed to the computer were 4, 8,15,162, and 3420. The numbers are, in fact, Numberwang.Stereotypes aren’t always pernicious. Leftwingers have benefitted for years from being typecast as decent people. They may possesses the self-righteousness of “a teenager who had just become a vegetarian”, as Jess Phillips, the marvellous Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, warned. But like teenage vegetarians, they mean well. If the world does not always turn out the way they planned, that is the world’s fault. It would be a better place if it did as the left told it to, sat up at the table and ate its greens.
Stereotypical rightwingers could not be more different. They are sexist, racist and hypocritical. Tories are motivated by greed and prejudice. The far right is driven by brutish blood lusts.
The hold of these stereotypes among the progressive, university-educated middle classes explains why you never hear a rightwing political comedian on Radio 4 or see a leftwing villain in a television drama. Comics and writers tear into Daily Mail and Sun readers but never Guardian and Observer readers. They assume that you are virtuous.
Anyone who saw Gordon Brown and his aides in action, or watched the student left ban speakers for disagreeing with them, has found the myth of leftwing decency hard to swallow. But it has taken the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn’s “new politics” to finish it off.
Police are investigating a death threat made against Neil Coyle, the Labour MP for Bermondsey, after he voted to allow the RAF to attack Islamic State in Syria. His colleague Diana Johnson said the abuse of Labour MPs who supported the action was horrendous. “‘Murderous cunt’ is one of the terms I have seen.”
Now, as so often in the past, the similarities between the far left and far right are more striking than the differences. Coyle received death threats from the far left for supporting war against Isis. Phillips received rape threats from the far right after she mocked the idea that Britain needed an international men’s day so “their voices could be heard”.
Paula Sherriff, the Labour MP for Dewsbury, was treated no better. She made an appeal for unity between communities after a local teenager left to murder for Isis. Detectives intervened because a local racist left a message on her Facebook page that read: “Dead girl walking. Hope you get raped. We got your phone number and details. Thanks.”
Death threats, rape threats – choose your extreme and take your pick. Meanwhile, Corbyn has ensured that everything the left once said about mainstream conservatives can be thrown back its face.
I cannot see how the left can attack Tory racism while Corbyn remains leader, although doubtless it will try
You want sexism? Long before the Syria vote, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper complained of misogyny, and not just from the Mail, which was more interested in Kendall’s “lithe figure” than her politics. You expect that from the Mail if you are a woman on the left. Indeed, you expect it if you are a woman on the right or any place in between. Cooper spoke with feeling at the Labour women’s conference about the shock she and Kendall felt at finding it in the one place she never expected it: the left, whose decent adherents called them “witches” and “cows” for opposing the great Corbyn.
You can hear the same shock in the voices of other leftwing women: “The Labour party was like my family,” Ayesha Hazarika, a former aide to Harriet Harman, told me. I knew what she meant. You had your disagreements, but you kept them within reasonable limits so that relationships were not damaged beyond repair. Now, to paraphrase George Orwell, the Labour party is a family with delinquent children in control.
Hazarika learned about the new politics when she made the mildest criticism of Corbyn on television. Her Twitter timeline filled up with insults about her appearance, her dress sense and her hairstyle. “Some people stayed up all night shouting at me.” A sliver of ice has entered her heart and it will never beat with same warmth when she looks on the Corbyn Labour party again.
As for racism, Corbyn has associated with the worst type of antisemites: Holocaust deniers, men who think Jews made bread from Christian blood or were behind the 9/11 atrocities. No blood libel was too bloody for them. He keeps saying he’s not a racist, but he’s happy to keep racist company. I cannot see how the left can attack Tory racism while he remains leader, although doubtless it will try.
Or indeed attack Tory hypocrisy. Corbyn says he is against abuse “from whatever quarter it comes” and does not want to purge the Labour party. Yet he never punishes the abusers and warns MPs who defied him on Syria that “there will be “no hiding place”, which sounds like an incitement to purge to them – and to me.
In his Poem to Posterity, Brecht offered an explanation of far left excess and a partial justification for his own support for the crimes of Stalin.
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.
His lines endure because they acknowledge a truth about political commitment. Brecht understood that the certainty of your virtue will lead you into cruelty. Leftwing men can treat women appallingly and leftwing agitators can mimic the language and tactics of the far right. They are so convinced of their righteousness they cannot admit their faults.
Leftists would behave better if they stopped acting like teenage vegetarians and found the honesty to acknowledge their kinship with the rest of compromised humanity. The Corbyn generation shows no sign of doing it. And it ought to be obvious by now that Labour people will be their targets.
Brecht’s communists spent as much time fighting social democrats as Nazis in the 1930s. The Corbynites’ real enemies are not Tories, whom they rather respect for standing up for the interests of their class, but Labour MPs who fail to show the required radical virtue and betray the leftwing cause. They don’t mutter darkly that there will be “no hiding place” for Tory MPs who voted in favour of bombing Isis. They don’t scream that Conservative women are “witches” and “cows”. They don’t deliver death threats to David Cameron.
Their virtuous hatred is righteously reserved for their own side and its ugliness will destroy the myth of leftwing decency more thoroughly than the right ever could.Mathew Ryan made only 10 appearances for Valencia after joining in 2015
Brighton and Hove Albion have signed Australia goalkeeper Mathew Ryan from Valencia for an undisclosed club-record fee.
The 25-year-old will join the newly promoted Premier League club on 1 July.
Albion's first-choice keeper, David Stockdale, turned down a new contract and is set to join Championship side Birmingham City.
Ryan, who has won 32 caps, is in the Australia squad for the Confederations Cup in Russia starting on Saturday.
He joined Valencia on a six-year deal from Belgian side Club Brugge in 2015, but made only 10 appearances for the Spanish side, spending last season back in Belgium on loan at Genk.
"I'm delighted that we've been able to attract Mathew to the club, and he will certainly be an excellent addition to the squad in time for our first season in the Premier League," said Brighton manager Chris Hughton.
"We're very much looking forward to working with him for the season ahead."
Ryan made his international debut in 2012 and played all three matches as Australia were knocked out of the group stages of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
Find all the latest football transfers on our dedicated page.The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is holding a rare meeting in the San Diego area on Thursday but commissioners have postponed voting on whether to reject a request from San Diego Gas & Electric to charge customers $379 million to recover costs from a series of deadly wildfires in 2007.
And that has some community groups and consumer activists suspecting the CPUC will issue a ruling in favor of the utility.
“The (investor-owned utilities) in the state of California want to be indemnified by the ratepayers for every cost, even if they should have done a better job,” said Diane Conklin, spokeswoman for the Mussey Grade Road Alliance, based in Ramona.
The CPUC usually holds its regularly scheduled public meetings at the commission’s headquarters in San Francisco but sometimes hosts meetings elsewhere in the state.
On Thursday, starting at 9:30 a.m., the commission will hold a meeting in Chula Vista.
Originally, one of the 36 items on the public agenda was a potential vote on the SDG&E request.
But late last week, it was announced the SDG&E item would “be held for further consideration” and commissioners would put off the vote. It is now scheduled for Oct. 12 in San Francisco.
The move comes one month after a pair of CPUC administrative law judges recommended commissioners reject SDG&E’s request to bill customers $379 million for the costs of the Witch, Rice and Guejito fires in October 2007 that killed two and destroyed more than 1,300 homes.
In a 68-page opinion, the administrative law judges said SDG&E’s management and control of its facilities leading up to the wildfires was “imprudent” and “unreasonable” and recommended commissioners turn down the request.
SDG&E strongly disagreed with the proposed judgment, saying the wildfires occurred due to circumstances beyond its control and said the utility would “vigorously challenge” the decision.
SDG&E officials have pointed out that California courts have ruled utilities can spread their costs of damages to ratepayers. SDG&E has estimated its proposal would cost the average ratepayer $1.67 more per month over the space of six years.
Commissioners are free to accept, reject or alter any recommendation |
etzi's boots. They painstakingly sourced the calf, deer and bearskin used for the soles, finally managing to track down a pelt from a bear hunted in Canada.
Oetzi's shoes had been stuffed with hay to form a lining that provided warmth and comfort. The researchers re-created a handmade net made of thin strips of bark that held the hay in place.
After unsuccessfully trying to tan the leather with vegetable fats, it was decided to use boiled pig liver and raw pig's brain - a method known to have been used in the Stone Age in South America. The noxious mixture was smeared onto the skin, left for three days - and did its job.
Dr Hlavacek was allowed to take a cast of Oetzi's feet to record his exact measurements. "His feet were much smaller and slimmer than those of an adult man today - only as big as a 12-year-old boy's," said Dr Hlavacek.
He said that Oetzi's boots offered more contact with the uneven ground than modern shoes.
Vaclav Patek, a Czech mountaineer who tested the shoes, said: "They were a pleasant surprise. They were durable, warm and comfortable and far better than some modern shoes."My Red Light aims to become the Netherlands’ first official cooperative of prostitutes, where they have a say about their work schedule and the design of the rooms, and even train for managerial positions.
“One of the things we have changed in recent years is that instead of talking about what is good for prostitutes, we have started to talk to them,” said Jasper Karman, spokesman for Amsterdam’s mayor, Eberhard van der Laan.
Not everyone likes the idea, among them some fellow prostitutes who are suspicious of the city’s involvement. But My Red Light has drawn support from unlikely quarters, including award-winning Dutch furniture and interior designers, who have helped outfit the rooms.
Sitting on a blue vinyl mattress on a stage, a glowing red bathtub in one corner and a Richard Hutten red leather stool by the window, Lyle Muns, a male prostitute who is on the board of My Red Light, explained recently that the project, which opened in May, was still a work in progress.
“I am really passionate about this project and I believe it could work, but it is also an experiment, right?” he said. “We haven’t succeeded until My Red Light is run mostly by sex workers and we are making a profit.”Location: Alberta
Date Established: 1885
Size: 1,641,027 acres
Simplicity marks the origin of Banff—Canada’s first national park. In 1883, on the slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, three railway workers discovered a natural hot spring, and from there the park was born. Nowadays, Banff is one of the world’s premiere destinations, spanning a region of unparalleled majestic mountain scenery. Every year, millions of visitors make the pilgrimage to Banff to take in its stunning views and arsenal of activities.
Park Facts
Ancient Beauty: Banff is part of UNESCO’s Canadian Rocky Mountain World Heritage site. Located in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, the park boasts a cornucopia of postcard-perfect mountains. These ancient monoliths range from 45 to 120 million years old, with the highest in the park, Mount Forbes, coming in at 11,850 feet (3,612 meters).
Park Gems: The park encompasses Banff, the highest town in Canada at an elevation of 4,540 feet (1,384 meters); the hamlet of Lake Louise (5,052 feet, 1,540 meters), the highest permanent settlement in Canada; several national historic sites; Castleguard Caves, the largest cave system in Canada; more than a thousand glaciers; glacier-fed lakes such as Lake Louise as well as Moraine, Bow, and Peyto Lakes; and hundreds of hotels, restaurants, and retail shops, plus a 27-hole championship golf course.
Legacy Trail: In 2010, the park marked its 125th anniversary, commemorating some of the finest unspoiled ecosystems in the world. An integral part of the celebrations was the creation of the Banff Legacy Trail, a nonmotorized, paved trail for the likes of walking, cycling, and in-line skating. Incorporating scenic views, the 16-mile trail runs primarily along Trans-Canada 1 and the wildlife fence from the park’s East Gate to the Bow Valley Parkway.
How to Get There
Banff National Park is located 80 miles (129 kilometers) west of Calgary. Calgary’s international airport is serviced by major national and international carriers with multiple flights arriving daily. From the airport, rent a car and take Trans-Canada 1 west from Calgary straight into the park, through Banff and Lake Louise. A direct bus service from the airport or downtown Calgary is also available to Banff and Lake Louise, as are shuttle services through tour operators.
When to Go
Canada is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2017 and, to celebrate, it's offering everyone free admission to its national parks. Open year-round, Banff offers amazing wildlife viewing and sightseeing, plus plentiful shopping and dining options, any time of the year. Summer is popular for hiking, paddling, mountain biking and cycling, photography, and climbing. The best time for viewing seasonal color is fall, when the larch trees—the only coniferous trees to lose their needles in winter—turn yellow.
In winter, the mountain landscape makes for incredible downhill and cross-country skiing. In fact, three major downhill ski resorts operate within the park. Lake Louise Ski Resort, Sunshine Village, and Mount Norquay combine to offer a large skiable terrain, not to mention the backcountry trails available throughout the park. The ski season, which runs from November to May, is one of the longest in North America. Visitors can also enjoy wildlife tours, ice walks, snowshoeing, and dogsled and horse sleigh rides.
Weather in the Canadian Rockies can change quickly. A single day can have a mix of sunshine, snow, wind, and rain, so dress in layers. Summers are warm with low humidity. Temperatures average a high of 70ºF (21ºC), and daylight lasts until 11 p.m. Autumn brings cool nights and crisp air. Winters can be frigid. In January, the average daytime high is minus 19ºF (minus 7ºC), but by April it is 49ºF (9ºC).
How to Visit
Visiting the park by car or tour bus is most common. In the town of Banff you can also catch the ROAM bus, a publicly accessible and environmentally friendly hybrid outfitted with wildlife information. Pick up a map or bus schedule at the Banff or Lake Louise visitor information centers. GPS guides are also available.
To get the most out of the park, plan to spend a day in the town of Banff and the rest of your vacation outdoors, immersing yourself in the mountains, especially if you’re an experienced skier or hiker.Prime Minister Tony Abbott's apparent, if modest, conversion to the idea that climate change was an "important subject" following talks with French president Francois Hollande on Wednesday was greeted with no small measure of cynicism.
This was, after all, a politician who had built a political career on climate scepticism, with his famous remark in 2010 that it was "absolute crap" to assert the science was settled.
"Conversion" runs aground: Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Credit:Andrew Meares
It took only two days, but the doubters can claim vindication after revelations that the government sent a briefing note to Barack Obama to dissuade him that the Great Barrier Reef was under threat by climate change.
In an interview with Fairfax Media's Latika Bourke in New York, Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop said the Reef was "not under threat from climate change because its biggest threat is the nutrient runoffs agricultural land, the second biggest threat is natural disasters, but this has been for 200 years".This last week Joseph Phillips tweeted that he was going to his first big tech conference and wanted some tips and suggestions. I have a TON of tips, but I know YOU have more, so I retweeted his request and prompted folks to reply. This was well timed as I had just gotten back from OSCON and BUILD, two great conferences.
What suggestions to you offer to someone who is attending their first big tech conference? @2joephillips https://t.co/2HtRs4N6cj — Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 15, 2017
The resulting thread was fantastic, so I've pulled some of the best recommendations out. As per usual, the Community has some great ideas and you should check them out!
@saraford - Whenever you get a biz card write down why you met them or what convo was about. It might seem obvious at time but you wont remember at home
@arcdigg - Meet people and speakers. Tech is part of your success, but growing your network matters too. Conf can give you both or not. Up to you!
@marypcbuk - if approaching people is hard for you, just ask 'what do you work on?'
@ohhoe - don't be afraid to introduce yrself to people! let them know its yr first conference, often people will introduce you to other people too :)
@IrishSQL - connect with a few attendees/speakers online prior to event, and bring plenty of business cards. When u get one, write details on back
@arcdigg - Backpack and sneakers beat cute laptop bag and heels (ed: dress comfortably)
@scribblingon - You might feel left out & think everyone knows everyone else. Don't be afraid to approach people & talk even if seems random sometimes :) If you liked someone's talk, strike a convo & tell them that!!
@arcdigg - Plan session attendance in advance, have a backup in case the session is full.
@jesslynnrose - Reach out to some other folks who are using the hashtag before you get there, events can be cliquey, say hi and make friends before you go!
@thelarkinn - Never feel afraid to say hi to maintainers, and speakers!!!! Especially if you want to help!
@everettharper - Pick 3 ppl you want to meet. Prep 1 Q for each. Go early, find person #1 in the 1st hr before crowds. 1/3 done = momentum for rest of day!
@jorriss - Meet people. Skip sessions. You'll get more from meeting and talking with people then sitting in the sessions. # hallwaytrack
@stabbycutyou - Leave room in your schedule, Meet people, Eavesdrop on hallway convos, Take notes, Present on them at your job
@patrickfoley - Don't forget to sleep. Evidence that long-term memories get "written" then
@david_t_macknet - Drinking will not help you remember it better or have a better time mingling. Most of us are just as introverted & the awkwardness fades.
@carlowahlstedt - Don't feel like you have to go to EVERY session.
@davidpine7 - Try your best to NOT be an introvert -- in our industry that can be challenging, but if you put yourself out there...you will not regret it!
@frontvu - Don't rely on the conference wifi
@shepherddad - Put snacks in your bag or pocket.
@sod1102 - Find out if there will be slides (and even better!) video available post conference, then don't worry about missing stuff and relax & enjoy
@rnelson0 - Take notes. Live tweet, carry a notebook, jot it all down at 1am before sleeping, whatever method helps you remember what you did.
@hoyto - Sit [at] meal tables with random people and introduce yourself.
@_s_hari - Ask speaker when *not* to use product/methodology that they're speaking on. If they cannot explain that, then it's just a marketing session
@EricFishor - Don't be afraid to discreetly leave or enter an on going session. It's up to you to seek out sessions that interest you.
@texmandie - If you get to meet and talk to your heroes, don't freak out - they're normal people who happen to do cool stuff
@wilbers_ke - Greatest connections happen in the hallways, coffee queue and places with animated humans. Minimize seated conference halls
@CJohnsonO365 - CLEAR YOUR SCHEDULE. Don’t try to get “regular” work done during the conference— you’ll end up missing something important!
@g33konaut - Tweet with the conf hashtag to ask if people wanna meet and talk or hangout after the conference, also follow the hashtag tweets to find ppl. Don't sweat missing a talk, meeting people and talking to them is always better than than seeing a talk. Also the talks are often recorded
@foxdeploy - Who cares about swag, it's all about connections. Meet the people who've helped you over the years and say thanks.
@jfletch - Ask people which after parties they are attending. Great way to find out about smaller/more interesting events and get yourself invited!
@marxculture - The Law of Two Feet - if you aren't enjoying a session then leave. Go to at least one thing outside your normal sphere.
@joshkodroff - Bring work business cards if you're not looking for a job, personal business cards if you are.
@benjimawoo - Go to sessions that cover tehnologies you wouldn't otherwise encounter day to day. Techs you don't use in your day job.
Fantastic stuff. You'll get more out of a conference if you say hello, include the "hallway track" in your planning, stay off your phone and laptop, and check out sessions and tech you don't usually work on.
What are YOUR suggestions? Sound off in the comments.
Sponsor: Did you know VSTS can integrate closely with Octopus Deploy? Watch Damian Brady and Brian A. Randell as they show you how to automate deployments from VSTS to Octopus Deploy, and demo the new VSTS Octopus Deploy dashboard widget. Watch now!Tropical regions likely to suffer biggest increase in hot days and extreme weather because of climate change, say scientists
New evidence that poorer countries will suffer the worst effects of climate change has shown that the number of hot days in tropical developing countries is likely to increase markedly as global warming takes hold.
It has long been expected that poor people would bear the brunt of climate change, largely because so many more of the world’s poorest live in tropical latitudes whereas, wealthier people tend to live in more temperate regions.
Climate change puts 1.3bn people and $158tn at risk, says World Bank Read more
This is inverse to the generally accepted responsibility for climate change, which falls mainly on rich countries that benefited early on from industry, and thus have historically high emissions, compared with poorer countries that have only begun catching up in the past few decades.
It was only in 2014 that China’s per capita emissions caught up with those of people in the EU, even after years of above-average economic growth in China.
Those living in the poorest countries also have the most to lose, as so many depend on agriculture, which is likely to be badly affected by temperature rises and an increase in droughts, heatwaves and potential changes to rainfall that may lead to recurrent patterns of floods, droughts and higher intensity storms.
The study, led by the University of East Anglia, is the first to examine the link between cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and more frequent hot days.
Manoj Joshi of the UEA School of Environmental Sciences said: “Many of the poorest people in the world live in tropical latitudes, while many of the world’s wealthiest people live in mid-latitude climates. We know that low-latitude regions have much less variability in day-to-day temperatures when compared with the mid-latitudes, which means the signal of climate change emerges quite quickly, and because of this the frequency of extreme hot days increases rapidly too.”
The findings also call into question the commitments made at the landmark Paris conference on climate change last December, at which nations agreed to limit global temperature rises to no more than 2C, a threshold which scientists regard as the limit of safety, beyond which the ravages of climate change are likely to become catastrophic and irreversible.
However a 2C rise on average globally could still leave tens or hundreds of millions of people vulnerable to dramatic rises in their regional temperatures, which could make their current way of living impossible to maintain.
Governments are meeting this week in Bonn, the first meeting since the Paris agreement was signed.In 1881, a Spanish builder named Rafael Guastavino immigrated to the United States with no job, no family awaiting him and no grasp of English. He did possess one valuable piece of knowledge, however: Guastavino had learned a technique, unknown in the United States, for building large structures, such as decorative arched ceilings, that were both lightweight and fantastically sturdy.
Within a few decades, the family firm Guastavino founded had helped design and construct many of America’s most famous civic monuments: the arrival hall at Ellis Island, New York’s Grand Central Terminal and its old Penn Station, the Boston Public Library, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, among others.
Yet even though famous architects frequently employed Guastavino and his son — who eventually took over the family business — the family’s contributions were rarely noted. Millions of Americans have walked through Guastavino-built stations, libraries and museums without having the slightest idea who was responsible for their grand, soaring interiors.
John Ochsendorf, an associate professor of building technology in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, would like to restore the Guastavino family to its rightful place in architectural history. Ochsendorf’s new book, Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile, published this month by Princeton Architectural Press, is a richly illustrated survey of the clan’s achievements, with a twist. A trained engineer, Ochsendorf also explains how such improbably thin arches could be so strong and durable. No Guastavino building has ever collapsed.
“This one family of immigrants built many major American monuments,” says Ochsendorf. “Yet we’re trying to rescue them from anonymity so we can celebrate and understand their achievements. As a structural engineer, I’m fundamentally interested in how their vaults stand up and how they built them. That’s the magic at the very heart of the story.”
From Barcelona to Boston
As an architect in Spain, Rafael Guastavino learned a centuries-old regional building technique, using interlocking layers of thin brick tiles held together with mortar to make large, curving interior features such as domes, vaults, arches and spiral staircases. These structures could be built cheaply and were fireproof.
Several years after Guastavino moved to America, hoping to better his financial prospects, he was asked to build the interiors of the Boston Public Library. The attention Guastavino received for the landmark library led to other important commissions, even after he died in 1908 (his son, also Rafael, took over the firm). Guastavino family works include several majestic train terminals, state capitols, interiors of Harvard’s Widener Library and more than 200 structures woven into the architectural fabric of New York City.
“The Guastavinos not only built their vaults, they designed them,” says Ochsendorf. “Architects … would send them drawings with a blank space saying, ‘Guastavino here,’ and the Guastavino company would design the form and the decorative patterns and colors.”
The Guastavino influence finally declined after 1930, when the lean, straight-line architecture of the International Style began replacing the opulent Beaux-Arts fashion that allowed room for curvilinear flourishes. In the 1960s, scholars rediscovered Guastavino buildings (which are almost always unmarked as such) and noted their stylistic links to Spain; Ochsendorf’s book synthesizes research from Europe and America.
“It’s a very important work that brings back a major, major contribution to American architecture and construction,” says Richard Guy Wilson, chair of the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia. “You can go virtually anywhere in the United States and find the Guastavino system in use.”
Finding the right form
Ochsendorf also explains how the Guastavino structures have resisted gravity’s pull, even though they employ brittle materials in large, curved constructions. “The fundamental character of masonry is that it is very strong in compression but very weak in tension,” says Ochsendorf. That is, compression is a pressing force, so bricks stacked atop one another can form a strong structure. But tension is a stretching force, so an arch or dome made up of bricks is vulnerable; it must resist forces pulling the pieces apart. The gradual, shallow curves of a typical Guastavino ceiling help distribute forces across the ceiling, compressing the tiles laterally into one another and limiting tension.
The elder Guastavino, Ochsendorf notes, perpetuated the mystique that he possessed secret construction techniques. The Guastavinos opened their own tile factory in Woburn, Mass., and held numerous patents, enhancing the idea that they had a unique building recipe. But Ochsendorf argues that the Guastavino secret was not in the substance or interlocking patterns of their tiles, but the form of their structures. “The strength of these Guastavino structures depends on their shape, not the strength of their material,” says Ochsendorf.
Consider the Boston Public Library’s interiors, which were built with bricks that Guastavino did not choose, and feature eight different brickwork patterns. If Guastavino’s success depended on materials or brickwork designs, those interiors might be suspect, but they can sustain a floor load over three times the library’s current demands.
“Overall, the Guastavino company really found good forms for compression that allow for significant long spans to be built,” says Ochsendorf. “And they developed this to the point where you scratch your head and say, ‘I’m not sure how that stands up.’”
Studying Guastavino structures is no idle fascination for Ochsendorf, who teaches classes on masonry construction and has built Guastavino-influenced structures. These include South Africa’s award-winning Mapungubwe National Park Interpretive Center, a sprawling structure with domes made from local soil tiles. In this vein, the Guastavino buildings “form a living tradition,” he says, inspiring architects and engineers to incorporate locally available, low-cost materials.
“It’s part of our responsibility as engineers to study our own history,” says Ochsendorf. “To appreciate where we are as a profession today, we need to understand who our heroes are and why their works are great.”When President-elect Abraham Lincoln slipped into Washington’s Baltimore & Ohio station at dawn on February 23, 1861, he looked up at the first bare bones of the new Capitol dome. It was an apt illustration of the nation’s capital at that historic moment—a city of grand ambitions, more than of finished stone and mortar. Many months of bureaucratic infighting and wartime shortages would pass before the magnificent dome rose complete above the city.
Far down the Mall, past the brick castle of the Smithsonian Institution, the Washington Monument was a 156-foot stub, its construction halted by politics and scandal. Employees of the Treasury and the Patent Office worked in quarters still being built. State, War and Navy departments closely flanked the president’s mansion. Between the executive and legislative poles of government, cattle and pigs roamed streets that were dusty in summer and muddy in winter. Only Pennsylvania Avenue itself and the nearby stretch of Seventh Street were paved, with broken cobblestones. Urban sophisticates from farther north made jokes about Washington as a rustic backwater.
In a nation of 33 states and some 32 million Americans, only 75,000 lived within the District of Columbia, only 61,000 of these in Washington City proper. Nearly 9,000 were in Georgetown, still a separate town within the District, and more than 5,000 in the rural reaches beyond Boundary Street, which ran along today’s Florida Avenue. The Virginia portion of the original 10-mile-square District was ceded back to the state in 1847, but by breeding and culture, the city was still deeply southern. In 1860, 77 percent of the District’s population had roots in Maryland or Virginia; in Georgetown, less than ten percent originated north of the Mason-Dixon line. And to better understand the monumental dynamics of this city in transistion, a new exhibition, "How the Civil War Changed Washington," at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum, examines the burgeoning capital's infrastructure, social imperatives and daily life. The show delves into the lives of such prominent individuals as Clarina Howard Nichols, a feminist and advocate for African American women and friend to Mary Todd Lincoln, and Solomon Brown, an African American poet, scientific lecturer and a Smithsonian employee, among others. The exhibition also explores the city's legacy with a fascinating array of artifacts of the era.
When Lincoln first arrived in 1847 as a freshman congressman, human beings were bought and sold at markets within blocks of the Capitol. Although the slave trade was outlawed in the District in 1850, possession of slaves remained legal, and across the Potomac in Alexandria, business continued as before. About a fifth of the District’s population was African-American. Some 3,000 were slaves, mostly household servants, and about 11,000 free, many of them skilled artisans, some respected entrepreneurs like James T. Wormley, who was General in Chief Winfield Scott’s landlord. Slave or free, they were still governed by the Maryland “black code” left over from creation of the District in 1791. That meant strict punishment if they assembled without permission, walked the streets after 10 p.m. or violated other arbitrary rules that limited their daily lives. Free blacks risked sale back into slavery if caught without their residence permits. Whatever their status, they were essential in building the city and making it work.
At loftier levels of society, in business and politics, in the tiny diplomatic colony and among senior military and naval families, crinolined hostesses strived to match the style of Charleston or Philadelphia. Social life was busiest when Congress was in session, which in those pre-air conditioning days was in winter and spring; business picked up then in hotels and saloons along Pennsylvania Avenue. But in early 1861, visitors from afar could agree with the British journalist who said the capital of the young nation was still “In the District of Columbia and the State of the Future.”
In April, the nation plunged into that future.
After the first cannon fired at Fort Sumter, Virginia joined the Confederacy and blockaded the Potomac downriver. In Baltimore, street mobs attacked Union troops headed to Washington, and Maryland burned railway bridges to block more troops from passing, leaving Lincoln pleading, “Why don’t they come?” Fear of invasion rose to near panic in some quarters. Detectives arrested citizens on mere suspicion of disloyalty. General Scott fortified the Treasury, the Capitol and City Hall to be last strongholds. Then when reinforcements did come, by the many thousands, they sprawled into every corner, including the very Capitol, where they defiled halls and chambers as if camping outdoors.
Washington became an occupied city. Hundreds of families fled north, as more had already headed south, among them ranking army officers and officeholders. As fast as they left, swarms of profiteers descended, seeking government contracts for the logistical needs of war. Vast deals would be consummated amid cigars and bourbon at Willard’s Hotel. Plain and fancy prostitutes preyed on ignorant soldiers. Everyone had to sleep somewhere, and strangers commonly shared beds in hotels and boarding houses. After the Union army was rudely turned back at Bull Run that summer, the first wounded soldiers jammed the city’s only hospital. Thousands more would follow, overflowing into homes and government buildings across the city. Working men and women came from cities and farms to construct hospitals, shuffle government papers, and produce munitions at the arsenal at Greenleaf Point, site of modern Fort McNair. Laboring beside slaves and soldiers, they started building a ring of forts to defend the city,
Debate over the root cause of the war was overwhelmed in those early months by the hubbub of secession and mobilization, but neither Lincoln nor the antislavery crusaders of the North could ignore it. Slavery still existed within the Union, in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, and in the national capital. Although the president opposed it, he had gone to war to save the Union itself, and resisted any diversion from that cause. But under pressure from abolitionists in Congress, in 1862 he proposed to liberate slaves in Washington, and to make it more politically acceptable by compensating owners for each person freed.
On April 16, 1862, Lincoln signed the bill that forever ended slavery in the nation’s capital and set off jubilant celebration in the city’s black neighborhoods. But carrying out the new law took weeks. Sitting at City Hall on Judiciary Square, a three-man commission had first to assure the loyalty of owners seeking compensation, then to set a dollar figure for each man, woman or child being freed. By midsummer, a total of 2,989 slaves were liberated at an average of $300 each, thus staying within the $1 million allotted by Congress.
This success energized abolitionists who pressed for broader action against slavery, but Lincoln held back, hoping for good news from the front. When it came from Antietam, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January, 1863. With that stroke, the Union took the moral high ground, strengthening its position in the war and in world opinion. Yet every high point seemed followed by a lower point, month after month.
After Antietam came defeat at Fredericksburg, and then Chancellorsville. The dead and wounded arrived by road, rail and boat, packing makeshift hospitals like that in the Patent Office building, where patients lay surrounded by gadgets sent in by ambitious inventors. On nights when the president stayed at the Soldiers Home to escape heat and annoying visitors at the White House, he was painfully conscious that the national cemetery nearby was rapidly filling with fallen soldiers. The great Union victory at Gettysburg meant still more thousands of casualties. But somehow this time it also signaled a shift of momentum, a feeling that the Union would survive.
On December 2, 1863, the shining symbol of that hope rose atop the Capitol as the statue of Freedom was lifted onto the completed dome with Old Glory flying above, visible across the city and in the outlying camps. Cheers rose from all directions and cannon boomed in the surrounding forts. But the worst was yet to come.
The next twelve months were the costliest of the war. Under U.S. Grant, the army ground its way toward Richmond in one fierce battle after another—the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor. So many casualties flooded into Washington that a vast new cemetery was started on what had been Robert E. Lee’s plantation at Arlington. Lincoln told a gathering in Philadelphia that “the heavens are hung in black”—and returned to find the gloom deepened by news that an explosion had killed 23 young women making cartridges at the Washington arsenal. He admitted that he was unsure whether to run for re-election.
The capital seemed secure behind the 37-mile circle of defenses built on both sides of the Potomac—miles of trees and houses were cleared to build 68 forts with places for 1,500 cannon, linked by trenches, outposts and 32 miles of military roads. That July, Confederate general Jubal Early swung 15,000 troops through western Maryland to give those defenses their only serious test. Thrusting through Silver Spring into the District, Early halted in front of Fort Stevens, less than five miles north of the White House. Thousands of defenders swarmed into the works from the Navy yard, the Marine Barracks and offices all over the capital. As the Confederates organized to attack, Lincoln himself rode out and witnessed a sharp exchange of gunfire. But the next morning, when Early saw the first reinforcements rushed from Grant’s army filing into the defensive works, he withdrew his army back across the Potomac.
UPDATE 2/26/2015: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Clarina Howard Nichols as an African American.
Boosted by the Union army’s capture of Atlanta in September, Lincoln not only ran for re-election, but won convncingly, and from there it was downhill to Appomattox. When news of Lee’s surrender arrived, a 500-gun salute rattled the windows of Washington. Young and old rushed into the rainy streets singing and shouting, surrounding the White House and calling for the president to speak. For five days there was euphoria, and then on April 14, at Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street, a flashy actor named Booth assassinated the great man who had led the nation through mortal trauma.
More than five weeks passed before the soldiers who had won the war lifted the capital out of mourning. For two days in late May, the victorious armies of the Union paraded along the Avenue with battle-stained flags flying. Above them gleamed the Capitol dome, holding aloft the statue that signified Freedom, looking out upon a city that was no longer rustic backwater, but capital of a powerful and unified nation, respected throughout the world.
"How the Civil War Changed Washington" is on view February 2, 2015 through November 15, 2015 at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum, 1901 Fort Place, SE. Organized into nine sections covering before, during and after the war and featuring 18 artifacts, the exhibition examines the social and spatial impact of the Civil War, which resulted in dramatic changes in the city.In his first year as the Jaguars’ offensive coordinator in 2007, Koetter’s unit finished sixth in the league in points scored and seventh among NFL teams in yards. After his first year in Atlanta in 2012, the Falcons finished seventh in yards and eighth in points scored.
2. The Buccaneers are the 11th coaching stop of his career.
Koetter has been with three NFL teams (Buccaneers, Falcons, Jaguars) and seven college programs (Arizona State, Oregon, Boston College, Boise State, Missouri, UTEP, San Francisco State), and one high school team. He served as head coach at Boise State and Arizona State and was an offensive coordinator at the rest of his collegiate stops, as well as in the pros.
*3. Coaching is in his blood. *
Koetter's father, Jim, was also a football coach. "I'm the son of a high school coach, so I grew up talking ball," Koetter told ESPN in 2010. "He's still as good a football coach as I've been around, and I've been around a whole lot of football coaches."
4. He is Mr. Idaho.
Koetter played for Highland High School in Pocatello, Idaho, home of the 10-time state champion Rams. Pocatello is considered to have one of the best football programs in the state. Highland High School's rivalry with cross-town Pocatello High School was named Idaho’s best by ESPN in 2009. Upon the completion of his playing career at Idaho State, Koetter returned to Highland as a coach and led the team to the 1984 state title. He later coached at Boise State.Busted Open satellite radio show with Triple H
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HHH on CM Punk's promo: "Punk said something about doofus, but he called John Laurinitis douchebag, which is way worse, right? The joke in the back was "at least I'm just a doofus, you're a douchebag." If you look at it from that standpoint, he called me a doofus, Stephanie an idiot and Johnny a douchebag, and everyone said "Oh my God!" He tore the roof off the place! He ripped the veil off! And it was like the most crazy promo of all time!" 5 years ago, no one would have blinked. That would have been a tame segment. Everyone would have looked at that promo and said "So what?" he didn't say anything. In order for that to get the reaction that it did, we had to go where it had to go.
"I think sometimes, people think we bumble through this. Especially, and I don't mean this disparagingly, the internet fan I think sometimes thinks that we throw darts at the wall and fumble around to see what we can come up with next. I mean there is actually a plan to a lot of this stuff, but things change. It's live television, and people react certain ways and things don't happen the way you expect them too, and you have to make changes. But there is a plan to a lot of this."
HHH on Mid Card Wrestlers possibly being affected by the rebranding: "Well I don't think the end of the brands is here at all. I think it's for a period of time, it's trying to give the best shows that we can. If I was a mid-card guy or lower end, certainly I would look at that and go "Oh man, the spot that could have been mine is now Randy Orton's". To me, I'm a big believer, You know everyone thinks we make the stars. The guys make themselves. We follow what the fans want. Make yourself relevant. Go out and make yourself relevant. If you have been doing the same thing for years, and you have been getting the same reaction, and you're in the same spot, change. We tell the guys that all the time and yet they don't do it. We try to help them.
"There is just a different mentality, guys have to be willing and I think a lot of them think that they do, but they have to be willing to go out there and take it. They got to be willing to step on toes. They got to be willing to jump ahead. It's a business. Be willing to step up and not take no for an answer. I have been a big believer that if you're good enough, the cream rises to the top and you will get the spot."
HHH on the PG product: "We had pushed the envelope so far and you get to a point that after a while, its like, Vince will always use this expression, even though it was completely irrelevant from a timeframe standpoint, but we had "Chainsaw Charlie |
to India and would in fact treat India and Pakistan as equals. So basically, the country that was indirectly responsible for the deaths of 15,000 Soviet lives during the Afghanistan War was preferred by him over friendly India.
Deepa Ollapally of George Washington University writes in the paper ‘Indo-Russian Strategic Relations: New Choices and Constraints’, “Kozyrev relegated India to a secondary role. During this initial phase, which was to last until 1996, India was forced to take the initiative to try to build new bridges to the Duma and utilise earlier Soviet lobbies. India was able to exploit lobbies against Kozyrev's tilt which had formed in the Russian Federation presidential apparatus. It was aided by such figures such as Vladimir Lukin who called for greater attention to be paid to old allies.”
“However, then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao had no choice but to diversify India's security links as its most crucial erstwhile ally continued to labour in confusion and anxiety over its economic and political status, with no clear signal regarding its foreign policy preferences.”
Kozyrev currently lives in Miami where he has acquired money and a nice tan. He slams Putin to the delight of his American backers. The thing India and Russia must do is sidestep or sideline such actors and keep the phone lines open. For, just as there are a few Indian leaders wanting closer ties with the West at Moscow’s expense, there are some Russian leaders who cannot see the importance of having India on their side.
According to Ryabkov, increasing military cooperation between Islamabad and Moscow would not negatively impact Russia's ties with India. His statements would vindicate Rao’s decision to wean India away from over-dependence on Russia. Compared with Rao, current Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs to the right leaning RSS, which is pro-American. He is unlikely to treat such an issue lightly.
All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.India’s Rise is Shackled by its Neighborhood
Self-inflicted wounds – which come in the form of poor domestic governance, decrepit infrastructure, a hostile business climate, and the absence of a unified national market – continue to hobble India’s ambitions in Asia and on the larger world stage. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s forthcoming budget offers a good chance to make some progress here. But New Delhi is also held back by its tumultuous neighborhood and, as recent events demonstrate, the prospects for headway on this front are far less promising. This, in turn, creates a striking paradox: India yearns for a place in the first ranks of world power – Modi has proclaimed that he wants “to make the 21st century India’s century” – and yet it remains unable to purposefully shape events in its immediate environs.
The most prominent case in point is the long-running India-Pakistan rivalry, which saps precious Indian resources — including the armed forces — and diverts the energy of those leaders who prefer to look to bigger arenas. As a consequence, India has missed out on the important economic gains that would accrue if normal trade ties were allowed to take hold between South Asia’s largest economies. According to a slew of recent studies (good examples here, here and here), a more liberalized trade regime would increase bilateral exchange as much as 20 times above current figures, along with boosting general prosperity in both countries. A 2012 report by the Confederation of Indian Industries, for instance, found that cross-border trade could easily quadruple in just a few years if both governments moved to increase economic linkages.
T he vexatious relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad also means that, despite the common civilizational and historical links permeating South Asia, India has been unable to integrate the region in the same way that China has economically stitched together the much more culturally diverse and geographically disperse East Asian area. Indeed, South Asian remains one of the world’s least integrated areas, with intraregional trade amounting to less than two percent of aggregate GDP compared to over 20 percent in East Asia. Likewise, Indian access to the markets and valuable energy resources in Central Asia are further blocked by Pakistan, creating a geopolitical and economic opening that China is quickly filling (here and here).
As Islamabad’s obstructionism at a regional summit last November illustrates, New Delhi’s efforts at promoting cross-border economic cooperation via the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) – a forum largely created by India – remain blocked. In fact, Beijing rather than New Delhi has a more powerful claim to being the engine of South Asian economic integration (see here and here).
In the face of Pakistani recalcitrance, Modi has signaled that he is willing to go outside the SAARC framework and cut bilateral arrangements with more cooperative neighbors. But this strategy is also problematic. For instance, New Delhi has ambitious plans to connect with Southeast Asia’s markets via major infrastructure corridors that run through Myanmar and Thailand. But much of these efforts are impeded by the rocky relationship with Bangladesh, which controls the most viable land routes eastward. The Indian prime minister is making a concerted attempt to build a better equation, but the current political instability in Dhaka (see here and here for background) makes that more difficult.
As a result, India is forced is to use its much neglected northeastern region, a geographic and economic cul de sac that is tenuously connected to the rest of the country, as a “gateway of Southeast Asia in future” as Modi put it a few months ago. Yet this initiative is likewise burdened by a concatenation of factors, including the lack of robust infrastructure linking the northeast with the rest of India as well as the rugged terrain and presence of ethnic insurgencies in both the northeast and Myanmar. Thus, ballyhooed connectivity projects like the Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan multimodal transit transportation project, initially slated for completion in 2013, have fallen drastically behind schedule. Despite Modi’s recent pledge, New Delhi has once again quietly pushed back the deadline for completing these projects to 2019, a clear indication according to a report this month that “despite tall claims it just cannot deliver on the ground.”
The failure to normalize Indian relations with Bangladesh, a country whose creation four decades ago was due almost entirely to New Delhi’s support, has also imposed significant domestic economic costs. The subcontinent’s partition in 1947 cut off West Bengal and the northeastern region from their traditional commercial links with what is now Bangladesh. Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) was once India’s leading city as well as the headquarters of the British East India Company, one of the mightiest agents for economic globalization in world history. Yet over the past six decades it has become a relative backwater not only in the global economy but also the Indian economy. As The Economist noted a few years back, “Kolkata evokes Havana, beautiful but shabby, the last city to remain largely untouched by India’s 20-year boom.”
Along the Himalayan frontier, political instability in Nepal has constrained long-standing joint plans to leverage that country’s vast hydropower potential to alleviate India’s acute energy security problems. Prime Minister Modi’s trip to Nepal last August kicked these plans into higher gear but renewed political turmoil there (here and here) have once again put them in limbo. The turbulence also opens the door to greater Chinese influence at India’s expense.
New Delhi will need to climb out of its South Asian box if it is to achieve global power status. But that’s much harder to do when the local environs keep hemming it in. The contrast with China – whose more stable neighbors desire vibrant economic engagement even if they are wary of its strategic intentions – is striking.
This commentary is cross-posted on Chanakya’s Notebook. I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the demolition of the homes of the two terrorists who carried out Tuesday's attack in Har Nof, the most significant operational step taken in the immediate aftermath of the murders.
The directive came at an emergency security consultation Netanyahu convened in his office with Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, Israel Security Agency head Yoram Cohen, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and other top security officials.
In addition to ordering the demolition of the homes of the terrorists who carried out Tuesday's attack, he also gave orders to move forward with the demolition of the homes of terrorists who carried out recent attacks.Netanyahu also ordered significantly ratcheting up law enforcement against those guilty of incitement.Earlier on Tuesday, Aharonovitch ordered a probe to examine easing the restrictions on firearms possession, in particular for Jerusalem residents, in addition to a series of other security measures in the wake of the deadly terror attack on worshippers at a synagogue in the capital hours earlier.The other measures include deploying four more companies of Border Patrol officers, reinforcing police patrols across the country with civil guard and police volunteers, setting up more checkpoints in Arab villages and ordering that Tuesday’s attackers be buried outside of Jerusalem. He also ordered an exam of the use of administrative detentions, the arrest without due process of terror suspects.A spokesperson for Aharonovitch said the minister meant that they would examine easing the restrictions with an emphasis on security personnel and ex-IDF officers, but did not say it could not potentially apply to the wider public.Currently, to receive a firearm permit you must be over 21, an Israeli resident for more than three years, have passed a mental and physical health exam, background checks by the Public Security Ministry and shooting exams and courses at a licensed gun range. The permit holder is then allowed to order a single firearm with a one-time supply of 50 bullets from a licensed dealer. They must then retake the licensing exam and undergo testing at a gun range every three years. There is also a stipulation requiring that any gun owner prove they have a safe at home to store the firearm.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>“Many men think that women are just nagging,” he said. “But it’s because of their physiology.”
Physiology and clothing. The authors also note that the model is not always calibrated accurately for women’s summer wardrobes. Dr. van Hoof, who wrote a commentary about the study, observed that many men still wear suits and ties in the summer but many women wear skirts, sandals and other lighter, more skin-baring clothes.
“The cleavage is closer to the core of the body, so the temperature difference between the air temperature and the body temperature there is higher when it’s cold,” he said.
So for the planet’s sake, men should “stop complaining,” Dr. Kingma said. “If it is too warm, the behavior thing you can do is take off a piece of clothing, but you can only do that so much. You could also say let’s keep it a very cold building and women should just wear more clothes.”
But his study offers another solution: Change the formula.
The researchers tested 16 women, students in their 20s, doing seated work wearing light clothes in rooms called respiration chambers, which track oxygen inhaled and carbon dioxide exhaled. Skin temperature was measured on hands, the abdomen and elsewhere. A thermometer pill the women swallowed reported internal body temperature.
Researchers found the women’s average metabolic rate was 20 to 32 percent lower than rates in the standard chart used to set building temperature. So they propose adjusting the model to include actual metabolic rates of women and men, plus factors like body tissue insulation, not just clothing. For example, people who weigh more get warmer faster, and older people have slower metabolic rates, the study reported.India's longest serving defence minister, A K Antony, will leave a spotty record when he demits office next year, a departure that seems imminent after Sunday's election results. His regrettable penchant for avoiding difficult decisions is offset by his admirable integrity, which he has tried to enforce in the ministry of defence (MoD). But now Mr Antony will irretrievably sully his legacy by scuttling an operationally crucial appointment that the army, navy, and strategic analysts almost without exception agree upon - a permanent chairman for the chiefs of staff committee (COSC).
In October, the Task Force on national security recommended to the prime minister that this four-star post be created immediately to handle the jurisdiction where two or more service interests overlap. The three service chiefs, who were in full agreement, sent an appointment proposal to the The NSC Secretariat has referred this decision to the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), which will rule on the matter shortly.
But Mr Antony has put a spoke in the wheel. On Dec 6, he let defence journalists know that he would oppose the proposal in the CCS. The reason, he explained, was that such an important appointment needed "political consensus", which would take time to obtain. Without Mr Antony's concurrence, the proposal will be dead on arrival at the CCS.
Why does the need a permanent chairman? Firstly, as the military chiefs agree, the three services must coordinate closely to generate decisive power on the modern day battlefield. An unit, fighting on an isolated mountaintop, would often rely on fire support when their own artillery is beyond range. A naval fleet might require air support from fighters flying from shore-based bases. An amphibious landing requires tight operational planning between all three services. A permanent Chairman would enable such cooperation.
Secondly, tri-service autonomy causes wasteful expenditure with capabilities, organisations and equipment being duplicated and even triplicated. Rather than running redundant facilities, all three services could combine functions like strategic communications, medical services, military policing, legal services and logistics. A permanent chairman of the would integrate these functions, saving money for modernisation and human resource development.
Thirdly, the government should not have to discuss military issues with three service chiefs, often getting contradictory advice. A tri-service chief would be a single point-of-contact that offers integrated military solutions after taking all service viewpoints into consideration. This is even more imperative for an emerging power whose nuclear doctrine is based on a triad of land, sea and air-based delivery systems.
For these reasons, the Kargil Review Committee recommended in 1999 the creation of a The CDS was envisaged as a five-star general, admiral or air marshal, directly overseeing the four-star service chiefs of the army, and air force. But the prospect of a powerful new military chief apparently set off alarm bells. The National Democratic Alliance accepted all the GoM's recommendations except the appointment of a CDS. On that, the NDA ruled "that the recommendation in respect of the institution of the (CDS) be considered later, after Government is able to consult various political parties."
Instead of the CDS, the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) was set up in 2001 in a token nod to jointmanship, an organisation with numerous responsibilities and few powers. Several three-star officers run the IDS, providing the army, and air force chiefs with handy professional cul-de-sacs into which they can shunt inconvenient generals. Yet the IDS can be strengthened and transformed into an effective tri-service headquarters under a five-star CDS, or a four-star permanent chairman COSC.
But now that seems unlikely. The NDA's failure to act was followed by a United Progressive Alliance that uses the same threadbare excuses. On Jun 13, 2005, then defence minister Pranab Mukherjee declared that the CDS "would require a broad political consensus among parties, both in office and in opposition." Eight years on, incredibly, Mr Antony has deployed this excuse to block even a four-star permanent chairman COSC, a post far less threatening than a five-star CDS.
The military deeply resents this humiliating lack of trust. A top Congress leader is known to have told both UPA defence ministers that appointing a CDS might invite a coup. Mr Antony is nothing if not a loyalist; he has assumed that appointing a permanent chairman COSC would be as risky as appointing a CDS, even though the Task Force suggested the former specifically as a way of bypassing the pitfalls of the latter. Now the MoD says that a permanent chairman COSC would be "a first step towards a CDS."
Does Mr Antony really believe that it is acceptable to stall action in 2013 with exactly the same excuses of 2001 and 2005? Financial honesty, many in the military believe, must go hand in hand with intellectual honesty.RICHARD GRIFFIN: This interview is about changes. Changes in you, changes in the system, changes in your team.
Before heading out to cover Team Canada in Phoenix I sat down with Jays’ GM Alex Anthopoulos in Dunedin for a far-reaching interview that is becoming an annual spring tradition. Following is the full transcript.
RG: Let’s start with you. What do you do now in relating to players, GMs, agents, your own staff that you didn’t do three years ago that you’ve learned to improve?
There was a lot of other directions we could have gone but there were still dominoes that had to fall, things that had to happen. In the past I may have really gone after it and pursued it. Maybe with some luck we would have got something done but it’s hard enough to make trades without chasing some that don’t have a likelihood to happen. Being more focused on things that have a chance to happen, that’s one. And then I’d say from a management standpoint I think I’m getting better—it’s a fine line. When you’re an (assistant GM) you give your opinion and you’re not worried. You’re not collecting everyone else’s opinion. You’re just giving yours. This is how you feel. As a GM I’m very cognizant of being inclusive making sure you respect your staff and your employees. You give them a voice. Sometimes now I’ve reflected to the point where I almost didn’t include my own opinion.
AA: I think you approach the job in a different way. You learn to work smarter, manage your time better. The examples I used are from a trade standpoint having fewer balls in the air. In the past there may have been 10 trade opportunities or 10 potential leads for trades. Back then I’d sit back and you figure, OK, I’m going to take a shot. You’re not going to give up on any of them but now... maybe focus 90 per cent of your time on the one or two that you feel have a really good chance of happening and focus all your efforts... and that’s what I think we did with the Marlins deal.
RG: Originally?
AA: Just over the past few years. I look back and it felt like I was so much more opinionated and decisive as an AGM. As weird as that sounds I’m making sure I’m collecting everyone else’s opinion. I want everyone to feel part of it. You’re trying to figure out what makes a good leader. And now I’ve learned at the end of the day I have to make the decision. I always did make the decision but my opinion has to count.
RG: Do you end every meeting with your opinion because it sounds like you would walk out of a room not having expressed your opinion and then do what you thought. And that might surprise the people who had been in that room with you, or is that not important?
AA: No, I would always give my opinion but Paul (Beeston, Jays president) always jokes and it sounds arrogant to say this but it’s not the intent. When Paul has a meeting — he’d joke about it but I understand now. He’d say OK let’s have a vote or let’s talk about it. He’d remind everybody not every vote counts the same. I know it sounds incredibly arrogant to say it but it’s true. And obviously there has to be someone accountable at the end, so I think what I’ve learned, especially this off-season, is I’m not going to make a decision, even if I’ve got consensus, if my instincts aren’t there and I don’t believe in it.
It’s not for lack of respect for my staff because I’m wrong plenty. But I take it much harder when my instincts were already reluctant and I still went with consensus or outside sources. And ultimately I made that decision.
RG: But it didn’t work out.
AA: It didn’t work out. When I make the decision and it didn’t work out I’ll just beat myself up. And that’s fine. I’ll sleep better. I feel better. The ones that bother you are when your instincts were leaning in a certain direction and you went against them because of the group or other information even though your instincts were telling you something.
So the biggest thing I’ve learned is I still solicit everyone’s opinion I still want to know what they think but I comfortably tell everybody this is what I’m going to do. That’s why when we did (Jose) Bautista’s deal I remember we had a split camp so it was easy. I made the final decision. I remember the people that were against it. I called them in after and I said hey — and this was my second year as a GM — I remember calling them in and saying I just want you to know even though I went with this decision I still value your opinion, your process was great, what you’re saying makes complete sense and it was a coin-flip. Obviously I have to make a decision and this is the decision I’m going with but I don’t want you to think I ignored what you said. I heard it. I understand it and I could go in that direction but...
RG: Was it split on the Marlins deal, too?
AA: Yeah I’d say it was split. But it was my decision.
RG: When you talk to agents or other GMs now do you detect a different vibe than when you were starting out? Do they know where you’re coming from before you even come from there?
AA: I never thought about it that way. Over time you get to know them better and they get to know me better. So, from a working relationship standpoint it’s better that way. I think having dealt with (Marlins GM) Larry Beinfest trying to get Dan Uggla three years ago made it that much easier having to deal with him now. I find (I’m) not wasting as much time. I won’t say I’m more direct but I find when you’re an AGM in a weird way you have more time on your hands even though you’re juggling a lot more things. I think that as a GM you just have to make a decision and get to the point.
RG: When you say as an AGM you have more time on your hands...
AA: No but you’re handling (fewer) administrative things.
RG: Isn’t the difference that you didn’t have any children yet.
AA: Yeah you’re right. That’s true.
RG: That’s what changes the whole thing.
AA: Yeah that’s true. You have to manage your time a little bit more. So even if we’re doing a contract with someone you may have 10 steps to the contract and as an AGM you start with Step 1. I probably start at Step 8 now. Let’s have two or three conversations. This is getting done or it isn’t and let’s move on. Because your time is more valuable.
RG: Is there anything that as an AGM you looked at and said if I ever had that job or if I was ever a GM I would make this change, this change, this change and then found out when you took over that it was impossible and why you couldn’t.
AA: Good question. You always have thoughts of what you would do, wouldn’t do, and we implemented a lot of the things. I think that’s just everybody’s style. Every GM will have his own style. It has to be a reflection of you. But something specifically where I was really adamant then I changed it. I do think you reflect and you evolve and you keep making changes.
The biggest thing that I still feel like we’re trying to get to greater success is the draft. You’re constantly looking at that, constantly, constantly, constantly. Why were we light on this person? I’d like to find out the black and white. Players that do “x” well we’re not going to consider them. And it doesn’t work that way but you’re always looking for some reason to either like a player or not like a player to eliminate, to make your evaluation better.
RG: It seems in the past 12 months that you’ve made fewer front-office personnel changes. Is that a sign that you’ve evolved to a situation where you’re comfortable with all the people who now surround you or is that just a perception that you haven’t announced the changes.
AA: No I think it’s that we finally have some stability and just like anything else each year we have more and more stability scouting-wise. We expanded the development staff. The first time you take over we needed some changes and then, over time, the people in positions of leadership wait a year and make some tweaks and changes. Now it’s three years in, we’re now to the point where we have some stability in the front office, on the field, player development, scouting. That should happen over time with a change in leadership. You always have some turnover but it has been significantly less each year.
RG: You obviously study the background of the people who work with you because Mark DeRosa said that Perry Minasian was a big part of his coming here. You also took Perry to Nashville for R.A. (Dickey). You’ve used other guys for their strengths. Is that something that you sort of evolve over time where you know more over time who they’re connected with?
AA: Yeah that’s a great point. You know it’s funny because you don’t get to work with all your employees all the time but sometimes you get small snapshots and you may come across and say “You know what? We may do better in this role.” Then all of a sudden rather than just make a change and let the employee go, because they have a lot of strengths all of a sudden you put someone in the right role... and then you think, wow, these guys are going to (make an) impact now that we do have them in the right role. So you realize just how much you value the employee when you have them in the right role.
RG: It’s not the Peter Principle it’s the Alex Principle.
AA: Well I don’t look at it that way. I think anyone would do that. I guess if you’re a bad employee you won’t be here.
RG: There are parallel positions in every organization and everyone likes to move up but if you move someone parallel and find a perfect spot for him then you’ve done a better job than just promoting.
AA: That’s true. And ultimately he’s reached his highest point. I understand the principle. I guess it’s that we try — everyone tries to treat their employees well. I can only think of one person, a new employee, (who worked only) a year here. Someone has a rough year they’ll be told by the director but we can at least give them a second year. Then after a second year you can finally make the decision, well OK, this isn’t going to work. But you’re right there are people who are talented that ultimately you just say they’re not in the right role but they have talent, they have ability. You may try to move them into a role and it still might not work but there are a few times that we’ve done it where all of a sudden they went from being average to, wow, I hope we don’t lose that employee which is great.
RG: I’m thinking of guys in your scouting like Andrew Tinnish and those guys where sometimes it looks like a parallel move and then it ends up being perfect for you and the organization.
AA: I think for Andrew I needed something specific. Perry and Tony (LaCava) don’t live in Toronto. They’re evaluators first and foremost. Their strength is evaluation. Obviously Tony’s got the development side, too. But I have them in Toronto. I have Jay Sartori who’s an administrator. He’s not going to go tell you he’s going to go be a scout and so on. I felt I needed somebody else that was in the office with me every day that combined both administrative abilities with evaluation abilities.
If we’re talking about a player internally I can call Tony or Perry up and say pull up your hard drive and pull up the video, but Andrew and I can be sitting in the office and I can tell Jay, hey, work up some arbitration or some salary components, but I can’t say, hey, go watch this swing. With Andrew I can go, hey, go break down the swing look at some of these things.
I’ll give you a great example. We had our meeting in spring training to go through the roster. There are some things statistically on our players that point to a certain thing and Joe Sheehy in our office can break down the numbers and Jay can certainly do that too, he’s very good at it. But then I want to correlate the video with it. Andrew, this guy’s groundball rate went up. This guy’s strikeout rate, this guy’s walk rate went up. He’ll pore through some video. Do you see something from a mechanical standpoint? Do you notice anything delivery-wise, that and that. It’s great to have somebody in the office. At the same time, Andrew, he’s done salary arbitration he can do statistics he can do the math. It’s an extension of me that combines both. Whereas Perry and Tony are more baseball only.
RG: Did you guys know already about Ricky Romero abandoning his sinker that Brandon Morrow pointed out to him.
AA: Yeah sure.
RG: So it wasn’t like these two got together and trumped you guys.
AA: No. There are a lot of things we pulled up. We noticed some delivery things. I can give you a great example. I remember there’s something we did a year ago. We were looking at Luis Perez. This was before last season. We started breaking down what Luis Perez was throwing. The right-handers just murdered him. It was over a.900 OPS. When you’re looking at Luis’s stuff he’s got a pretty good changeup. Good sinker, slider that can be good. We started saying OK who profiles like Luis Perez, what lefty? We started looking through and we start thinking about Marc Rzepczynski—sinkerball lefty like Luis. Not exactly the same but similar.
Then we started looking at the percentage of what he’s using. What’s he throwing to right-hand hitters. And Luis was fastball, slider, no changeups. So we’re looking up Marc Rzepczynski. The use of the changeup to a righty was so much greater. We tried to find some other parallels and it was like we might have something here. Luis’s not throwing his changeup nearly enough to keep right-handers honest, so we talked to Bruce Walton about it and to John about it. It made some sense. It was our spring training meeting we said to Luis “We noticed some things. We’re not saying this is going to be the panacea and this is all solved. But you know what? You’re out of options. Throw your changeup. Throw it a lot.” He started throwing his changeup a lot and he had some success. Every time I’d see him I’d say “Changeup, yeah. Changeup, yeah.” And he would smile. But again that’s not to say that’s going to work every time but that’s where we can continue to try to get an edge.
RG: One thing that you haven’t changed in four years is the practice of sitting down with every player coming into camp and talking to them about personal expectations and what you guys see where they will be. I mean that can be pretty blunt at times.
AA: Very.
RG: An example to me is this year Anthony Gose. He’s talking sometimes like he’s pissed off because he already knows he’s going to Buffalo. To you guys can you really treat everybody the same like that? There are some guys that come to camp and no matter how young and how hopeless the cause of making the major-league team is they think “I can compete I can do it” you know.
AA: Yeah.
RG: Do you take that hope away from them when you treat everybody the same. Because you do.
AA: You do but you don’t. I guess I’d say you give everybody the time of day, you spend the same time with everybody, but the delivery (of the message) may not be the same. It’s just like anything else. The facts are the same. The truth is coming out either way, the way it’s delivered might be totally different.
Someone might need something a little bit more direct and blunt. Someone might need to be stroked a little bit more to soften it. Any minor-league free agent that was signed we told them. One thing we want to make sure is let’s reiterate what we promised you and your agent in the off-season when you walked in this door is this what you were told because the last thing you want is someone to say I was lied to. It’s not what I was told. I signed here under this. If it changed for extenuating circumstances, a trade and so on, it changed. But you want to make sure everyone has been communicated and told. But for a guy like Anthonty Gose he knows. It’s one thing when you have your meeting I can sit there and say OK you’ve got a chance to win a starting job. Well we’ve got Melky Cabrera on a guaranteed contract. We’ve got Colby Rasmus making over $4 million and we’ve got Bautista in right field. And we’ve got Raj Davis on a guaranteed contract so I’m not going to lie to Anthony Gose. He’s a smart enough kid that he sees the obvious.
Now again our conversation with Anthony would be “Look you do what you’re capable of doing and you play like you’re capable of playing and we’re going to find a spot for you. We want to win.” The other thing that he knows if somebody gets hurt, somebody doesn’t perform well, things change fast. Yes right now if the season was to start today we have our commitments. But we have a new manager here who hasn’t seen you yet. You have a whole new staff that hasn’t seen you. Go out and have a great camp. You have a new hitting coach from the minor leagues as well. So there are people that haven’t seen you and things do change. Guys get hurt guys get traded. Guys don’t perform so you’re a phone call away. I think ultimately he knows that things have to happen for him to be on this team. It’s not a pure competition but he knew that going in anyway. I don’t think we’re telling him anything that he didn’t know. And it’s certainly not impacting his play. He’s playing great.
I heard an interview that he did in Toronto. He does acknowledge he has some things to work on which is nice to hear him say. He knows defensively he could play up here right now. Offensively he can survive. But can Anthony hit better vs. left-handers? Yes. Can he cut down his strikeout rate, work on his bunting? Yes. He can do all those things.
2. CHANGES IN ATTRACTING FREE AGENTS, AND TRADES
RG: Another change is that for years this franchise—at least from 1993 on—has always used the excuse that it’s tough to get free agents, it’s tough to get players to be happy coming to Toronto.
AA: I don’t think I’ve ever said it.
RG: No, no. And then you’ve showed up and worked at it a different way. You go to Nashville and convince R.A. Dickey. You make a difficult Marlins deal and all of a sudden these players you know there are some issues and you talk to them and now they’re all on board. Was it always this easy or do you really have to work at what you’re doing right now as a salesman for this franchise?
AA: I don’t think it’s easy. I’d love to tell you we as a front office are doing a great job and I don’t believe it. I don’t think we’re doing a bad job but I think ultimately everything you pointed to was this off-season. When you look at the Blue Jays in the past they had their pick of free agents just as long as they paid. They were a winning team. All of a sudden— I love the fact R.A. wanted to be here and so on — but I bet you if you asked R.A. a winning team was a huge part of it. The Marlins players are going from a team that’s not winning.
RG: Melky wouldn’t have signed here without that deal.
AA: Sure, no doubt about it. It’s all part of the appeal … The Marlins, if they didn’t choose us we chose them and ultimately they knew if they were leaving they’re all leaving together. They came from a team that finished in last and they’re talented guys so they’re leaving that team and at least we know we had talent. I’m not trying to not give ourselves credit but I’m trying to be objective, too. Winning, it’s unbelievable the things that it cures, but we haven’t won anything yet. Having talent and the belief you can win opens a lot of doors.
RG: Could you in your opinion have built the team that’s down in that clubhouse now if the Marlins deal had taken place later, say in January.
AA: We wouldn’t have done the trade with the Mets (back then) so I don’t know if R.A. would have still been available.
RG: So you needed to do the Marlins deal first.
AA: Absolutely. And it’s nothing against R.A. I just don’t know that we weren’t one R.A. away from what we felt being that contending team. We’d get significantly better no doubt about it but we’d still have a lot of holes and a lot of work to do. So it was definitely a domino effect. I think the fact that the Marlins deal was done early helped us for the off-season.
RG: Did you know when you pulled the trigger on the Marlins deal that you needed to do further additions to make this a contender for this year because with that deal you were still...
AA: I was still uneasy. We were better. We were better no doubt. I still was uneasy with the rotation and it wasn’t about adding a No. 3 starter a No. 4 starter. It wasn’t about adding just one more guy with innings. It was about being able to add someone that would slot everybody down a peg and obviously adding someone like R.A. up at the top and now all of |
Joseph. The Faithful City – The Siege of Jerusalem 1948. Library of Congress number 60 10976.
Efraïm Karsh (2002). The Arab–Israeli Conflict – The Palestine War 1948. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84176-372-9.
Harry Levin (1997). Jerusalem Embattled – A Diary of the City under Siege. Cassels. ISBN 0-304-33765-X.
Benny Morris (2004). The Birth Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-00967-6.
Ilan Pappé (2000). La guerre de 1948 en Palestine. La fabrique éditions. ISBN 978-2-264-04036-7.
Eugène Rogan; Avi Shlaim; et al. (2002). La guerre de Palestine 1948: derrière le mythe. Autrement. ISBN 978-2-7467-0240-0.
Further readingRand Paul is in Iowa this weekend to speak at the Republican State Convention. Also making an appearance were former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.
Paul told the 1400 delegates that the GOP needs to nominate a different kind of Republican in order to win in 2016:
“You guys have a strong force here but frankly the president won Iowa twice so we can’t do the same old same old,” the Kentucky senator told the Iowa Republican state convention here. “The definition of insanity is thinking the same thing will get you different results.” Paul said he wants Republicans “to be the dominant party again,” and noted that he’s been spending time in African-American areas and on college campuses trying to broaden the base. He said talking about the drug war and his emphasis on privacy resonates. The likely 2016 candidate spent most of his 20-minute speech throwing red meat to the about 1,300 delegates at Hy-Vee Hall. “There are people who say we need to be more moderate,” he said. “I couldn’t disagree more.” “I think the core of our message: we can be even more bold,” he added. “When Ronald Reagan won a landslide, he ran unabashedly … that’s what we need … It isn’t about being tepid.”
In an interview with the Des Moines Register, Paul nixed the idea of sending ground troops to Iraq but said he wouldn't rule out airstrikes to assist the Iraqi government in fighting off the terrorists moving toward Baghdad:
Q. What do you think about the prospect of American ground troops invading Iraq again? A. I think it's a mistake to put ground troops into Iraq and the main reason is that people need to reason that the people that are taking over large swaths of Iraq are now allied with the people who we were helping in Syria. So in one war, the Syrian war, we're supporting Sunnis as well as Sunni radicals that are trying to overthrow Shiites. In Iraq, we're now supporting the Shiites against the same Sunnis that really are fighting on both sides of the border. ISIS is a group that's been involved in both countries. I think when we go to war, we should go to war as a last resort. We go to war when it's clear-cut enough that you're going to tell my son or your son that they know exactly what it is that we're fighting for. I think it's confusing to our GIs to ask them to be killing people in one country that they're aiding in another country. Q. Can you see a time when you would think it was a good idea for air strikes or to send in ground troops? A. Yeah, I'm mostly talking about ground troops. I think that we have aided the Iraqi government for a long time, I'm not opposed to continuing to help them with arms. I would not rule out air strikes. But I would say, after 10 years, it is appalling that they are stripping their uniforms off and running. And it concerns me that we would have to do their fighting for them because they won't fight for their own country, their own cities. I am thinking that it is time that they step up.
Paul thinks Hillary Clinton is going to have a tough time with the foreign policy issue, given her handling of Benghazi especially:
You know, I think what you'll find is that Hillary Clinton's going to have a lot of questions to answer. Not only about this but, her recent comments that the Taliban is not a danger to Americans, her handling of Benghazi or lack thereof, her telling me in committee that she didn't read any of the cable from the ambassador requesting more security. She has a lot of things that are really significant obstacles for her to really convince people that she can be commander in chief. … There's going to be a litany of foreign policy failures that she's going to have to overcome. I think the biggest thing for someone who wants to be commander in chief is that the American public needs to believe that you'll defend the country, you'll defend the troops, and you'll send reinforcements."
Paul has his own problems with mainstream Republicans about his foreign policy ideas, but appears to be making an effort to clarify his non-interventionist stance. Air strikes can by no means be considered "non-interventionist" so the fact that he would consider them in this situation suggests he's trying to mollify those in the party worried that he may be too much of an isolationist.
Paul has high favorables in Iowa, but it is perhaps indicative of the ideological tenor of the state that the two candidates that Iowa Republicans believe would do best against the Democrats in 2016 are New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.The demise of the proposal came amid a last-minute push to tie up loose ends before the close of the session, which is scheduled to conclude on Thursday. All legislative seats are on the ballot in the elections this year, and Republican senators have pointedly refused to take up several issues that are avidly sought by Democrats in the Assembly but that might upset conservatives, including the marijuana bill and a measure to raise the state’s minimum wage.
Mr. Cuomo unveiled his marijuana proposal two weeks ago, promoting it as a way to end the high number of arrests that result from the stop-and-frisk practice of the New York Police Department. He immediately won the backing of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as well as the department and prosecutors.
With the support of law enforcement, some Democrats and drug-policy advocates said they did not expect the Republican-controlled Senate to stand in the way.
“You have the governor of the state, the speaker of the Assembly, the mayor of the city, the police commissioner, all five D.A.’s from the city,” said Harry G. Levine, a sociologist at Queens College who has studied the city’s marijuana arrest practices. “It seemed like if this many powerful people said they wanted X, which wasn’t that big a deal, it should be possible to do it.”
But the collapse of the marijuana proposal illustrated an at-times awkward reality about the balance of power in Albany: Legislation eagerly sought by New York City can easily be torpedoed by lawmakers from upstate, even when the legislation largely affects only residents of the city.
The marijuana measure would have had an impact mostly on city residents because, of the more than 50,000 low-level marijuana arrests in New York State last year, 9 in 10 occurred in the city, according to state data.
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In private discussions about the marijuana bill, Senate Republicans raised concerns about the amount of marijuana that Mr. Cuomo’s bill would have allowed people to possess in public without being charged with a misdemeanor — 25 grams. By one calculation, that would produce 63 marijuana cigarettes — one for each member of the Senate next year, as a Republican senator joked at a discussion of the proposal.
The Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican, said Tuesday that it was possible the Senate would revisit the marijuana issue next year, and he denied that he felt political pressure to block the bill.
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“All I know is my son was thrilled to see me on ‘The Daily Show,’ ” Mr. Skelos said, referring to a television segment that lampooned his resistance to the measure.
But supporters of the marijuana proposal were not pleased. Assemblywoman Rhoda S. Jacobs, a Democrat who represents Flatbush, Brooklyn, said Republicans were blinded by ideology and ignoring the likelihood that their own constituents used marijuana. “Their posture and the way they are perceived is to be very law and order,” she said. “Everybody who’s got a college kid probably is turning a blind eye to the fact that kids are experimenting.”
Mr. Cuomo, who has at times been accused of not paying enough attention to the concerns of black and Latino lawmakers, won widespread applause for tackling the marijuana issue and, in doing so, giving more public attention to the growing criticism of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics.
But Assemblywoman Inez D. Barron, a Democrat representing East New York and parts of Canarsie and Brownsville in Brooklyn, said the governor had not pushed the issue vigorously enough in the past two weeks.
“It’s not a critical issue to him, but it is for our communities, and we understand it,” Ms. Barron said. “I believe that he’s playing a game of trying to enhance his political stature by not pushing the Republicans. He doesn’t want to expend a political favor by asking them to really come forth and support this bill.”
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo argued that his marijuana bill was the kind of proposal, like same-sex marriage, that would take time to persuade lawmakers to support.
“Many of the large issues, social issues, they don’t happen over a period of weeks,” he said. “It takes a period of months, sometimes a period of years.”The Fox News Channel has “addressed” a “mistake” made by one of its supposedly straight news anchors, who tweeted a birther blog site’s claim that the Obama campaign threatened mayhem in 2008 to keep its candidate’s secrets.
The anchor, Heather Childers, sent out a tweet, quickly discovered by the mediamatters.org watchdog site, which closely scrutinizes Fox’s distortions, conflicts of interest, half-truths and inaccuracies. The tweet asked:
“Thoughts? Did Obama campaign threaten Chelsea Clinton’s Life 2 Keep Parents Silent?”
The tweet was linked to godfatherpolitics.com, a right-wing web site peddling a conspiracy about the Obama campaign murdering and threatening murder to hide secrets about Obama’s eligibility to run for President.
It is still pushing the birther line, nearly 10 months after President Obama secured his long form birth certificate from Hawaiian authorities and released it. A typical godfatherpolitics.com headline: “World Media Picking Up Obama Birth Certificate Fraud While America’s Media Remains Silent.”
Medimatters.org asked Childers what in the world she was doing, and received a disconnected response: “I know MM strives 2b FACTUALLY correct so attach the article plz. I was asking 4 opinion.”
Later, mediamatters.org received the following response from Fox senior vice president Michael Clemente: “The tweets have been addressed with Heather and she understands there was a mistake.”
Childers can be seen weekends on “America’s News Headquarters” and on “Fox & Friends.”The spectator was taken from the Olympic stadium to a police station after the incident, which threatened to disrupt the highly anticipated race.
Dutch judo competitor Edith Bosch tweeted that she had punched the "drunken" culprit.
The sound of the bottle landing just behind athletes including eventual winner Usain Bolt could be heard on video footage just after the starter told the runners to “set”.
A security guard could also be seen making his way to the offender, who was not in shot.
One spectator wrote on Twitter: ”Man in front of me threw bottle onto track just at start! Had to be wrestled off...”
Another said: “So a drunk p---- actually threw a bottle onto the track as 100m started! He got punched by Dutch judo bronze medallist Edith Bosch tho.”
Bolt laughed when told about the incident, and Bosch's response, after the race. "I've just heard about it," he said. "I don't promote violence."
A Scotland Yard spokesman said no one was injured during the incident and that the event was not affected in any way.
“A man was arrested inside the Olympic Stadium on suspicion of causing a public nuisance on the evening of Sunday, 5 August,” he said.
“The man had been heard to shout abuse and then throw a plastic bottle on to the track immediately prior to the start of the men's 100m final.
“He remains in custody at an east London police station.”
A Locog spokesman said: “We are aware of the incident and are looking into it.”A traffic camera in Quebec captured striking images of a snowy owl in flight on Jan. 3. A series of frames were taken of the bird over Montreal’s Highway 40 and shared on Facebook by Robert Poëti, a Canadian politician, on Thursday. The pictures show the owl flying toward the camera and soaring past it. “Here are a couple of shots of this beautiful snowy owl,” Poëti captioned the post.
Un impressionnant voyageur a été capté en plein vol le matin du 3 janvier, par les caméras de surveillance du réseau… Posted by Robert Poëti on Thursday, January 7, 2016
The snowy owl is Quebec’s official bird, but sightings of the species in the wild are rare, according to FB Newswire.
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Read More: Owl vs. Man: Who Gives A Hoot?
See the full footage of the owl’s flight below.
Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com.Hernandez could complete West Ham transfer ‘in the next few hours’
West Ham United’s search for a striker could finally be over as reports in Italy suggest Javier Hernandez could complete a move within a few hours.
The former Manchester United hitman has spent two successful seasons playing for Bundesliga side Bayer Leverkusen after being sold by former United boss Louis van Gaal.
The Dutchmans replacement, Jose Mourinho, spoke effusively about Hernandez last season, claiming he would have scored in excess of 20 goals for the Red Devil’s last season, while his side struggled to hit the back of the net.
This prompted speculation that he could return to Old Trafford as a back up striker to Romelu Lukaku this summer, but it seems as though West Ham may be the club to secure the Mexicans signature.
Alfredo Pedulla claims that Hernandez, affectionately known as ‘Chicharito’, is now ‘very close’ to transferring to the London Stadium where he would expect to be the first choice striker. He also claims that the signature and announcement could happen ‘in the next few hours’.
The 29-year-old scored 27 goals in 50 games for the German club, and 59 in 157 appearances for Man Utd.
The deal is thought to be worth around £13million.Epidemiologic studies indicate that coffee consumption reduces the risk of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. To determine the factors involved, we examined the protective effects of coffee components. The test involved prevention of neurotoxicity to SH-SY5Y cells that was induced by lipopolysaccharide plus interferon-γ or interferon-γ released from activated microglia and astrocytes. We found that quercetin, flavones, chlorogenic acid, and caffeine protected SH-SY5Y cells from these toxins. They also reduced the release of tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-6 from the activated microglia and astrocytes and attenuated the activation of proteins from P38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and nuclear factor kappa light chain enhancer of activated B cells (NFκB). After exposure to toxin containing glial-stimulated conditioned medium, we also found that quercetin reduced oxidative/nitrative damage to DNA, as well as to the lipids and proteins of SH-SY5Y cells. There was a resultant increase in [GSH]i in SH-SY5Y cells. The data indicate that quercetin is the major neuroprotective component in coffee against Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Flooding in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, in December 2015
Major reform of the system for managing flood risk is needed, a Commons environment and rural affairs committee report has said.
There should be a UK floods supremo, new flooding and coastal boards and a rivers and coastal authority, it said.
MPs said floodwater should be stored on agricultural land, urged tougher rules on house builders and stricter standards on repairing flooded homes.
The government said it it saw no need for organisational change.
The MPs disagree. They are unhappy with the Environment Agency's recent performance over flooding and want to see it stripped of powers, which would be handed to the proposed new bodies.
This is the latest in a number of reports triggered by last winter's devastating floods in the north of England.
The government has published two reports on flood resilience, and the environmental audit committee has also reported - calling for more government long-term planning on flood defences, and better maintenance.
The Committee on Climate Change has warned that flooding has a domino effect on infrastructure.
The report from the Environment and Rural Affairs committee is by far the most drastic.
The MPs conclude that in the light of climate change and the increased risk of torrential rain, the current organisational framework for dealing with floods is unfit.
They think a new national floods commissioner is needed to co-ordinate flood-related policy across governmental departments, reporting to the Cabinet Office.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Flooding in Carlisle
The MPs also want new regional flood and coastal boards to organise regional delivery of national plans, in partnership with local groups and authorities.
They also urge the creation of a new English Rivers and Coastal Authority, taking on current Environment Agency roles.
Radical alternative
The committee's chairman, Neil Parish MP, said: "We propose a radical alternative to the current fragmented, inefficient and ineffective flood risk management arrangements.
"Our proposals will deliver a far more holistic approach to flooding and water supply management, looking at catchments as a whole. Flood management must include much wider use of natural measures such as leaky dams, tree planting and improved soil management. And some areas of farmland should be used to store floodwater."
Critics may wonder how the environment department Defra, already struggling under severe job cuts and wrestling with the seismic implications of Brexit on the countryside, could envisage such a massive organisational reform at this time.
Some of the MPs' recommendations, though, are less controversial. They support the fashionable idea of catching water in the uplands to prevent floods lower down the catchment, as demonstrated in Pickering in Yorkshire.
The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology cautioned about limited evidence that such natural schemes would mitigate flooding from very extreme events on a large catchment scale.
Image copyright PA Image caption People were evacuated from flooded properties in York in December after the River Ouse burst its banks
So the MPs want a large-catchment trial to test natural methods like upland bunds and leaky dams.
The MPs are critical of the Environment Agency for what they see as its over-reliance on traditional "hard" flood defences.
They are keen for farmers to be offered incentives to store floodwaters on their land. They note that the damage cost of flooding fields is far lower than for flooding towns.
Their report says: "Artificial land drainage, deforestation and urban development have increased the amount of water that runs off the land into rivers. Urban development has encroached upon floodplains, and river channels have been narrowed and straightened.
"Farming methods have had particular impact: currently around 70% of UK land is used for agriculture, and some farming practices can reduce soils' ability to store and drain water.
"Changing land management practices combined with increased rainfall mean that the likelihood of flooding is now at an all-time high and will continue to increase."
Brexit opportunity
The MPs see a chance for reform with Brexit, and want to ensure that any farm payments agreed under a new subsidy regime prioritise incentives to buffer flooding.
The MPs also want to tighten up rules for developers, who, they say, can walk away from flood problems they have caused. They want the right of any home to connect surface water run-off to a mains sewer to be discontinued. New developments should be landscaped in such a way that takes care of their own run-off, they say.
Another idea is for insurers to be allowed to upgrade properties when they are flooded so they don't get flooded again. Currently they are simply allowed to re-instate what's already there.
A Defra spokesperson said: "We take a long-term, strategic approach to protecting the nation from floods.
"A huge amount of work has been undertaken as a result of the National Flood Resilience Review, including £12.5m investment in new mobile defences, such as barriers and high volume pumps.
"This means homeowners will be better protected this winter than last, as will much of our critical infrastructure.
"This is part of the £2.5bn we are spending on building flood defence schemes across the country to better protect an additional 300,000 homes by 2021, bringing an end to year-on-year fluctuations in spend.
"We are already implementing many of the suggestions this report makes, such as managing watercourses across entire catchment areas."
Rachael Maskell, shadow secretary of state said: "The committee have highlighted many of the same concerns and solutions that Labour has been raising, including the Committee Chair's feeling that the Government's Flood Resilience Review offers limited solutions.
"There is still a lack of confidence in schemes to protect businesses and the £12.5m pledged to temporary flood barriers will not bring the long-term protection required."
Follow Roger on Twitter @rharrabinThe next series of Red Dwarf is currently in post-production. How do we know this? Why, because the show’s co-producer and composer have both been kind enough to share photographic evidence of the editing process on Twitter. First up, here’s Howard Goodall working on the music for the series.
As you can see, the image he’s looking at is captioned “VFX: Red Dwarf in space”. The timecode at the bottom of the screen reads 00:00:56:18. Could he be in the middle of composing or remixing the theme tune?
Now for Richard Naylor, who was apparently watching some footage of Cat looking particularly fabulous in red.
Episodes from the new series of Red Dwarf will air on Dave later this year, with Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn all returning for more extraterrestrial nonsense.
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None foundThe man in charge of Preston police has shot down claims there are Muslim areas of the city seen by officers as “off-limits”.
The Daily Mail has reported that a Lancashire Police officer said: “There are Muslim areas of Preston that, if we wish to patrol, we have to contact local Muslim community leaders to get their permission.”
Ali Amla
These claims were then repeated on Sky News, where it was also said officers had to take their uniforms off before going home, because of the fear of attacks.
But Chief Superintendent James Lee, South Division Commander for the force, said that the remarks were “absolute tosh”.
He said: “I’ve been here 10 years and this has never been the case.
“I very much doubt the person quoted by the Daily Mail was a Lancashire police officer, because it’s just not true.
I very much doubt the person quoted by the Daily Mail was a Lancashire police officer, because it’s just not true Chief Superintendent James Lee
“The police have a fantastic relationship with the Muslim community in Preston and we will carry out our work in the area as and when we need to without any problems.”
Regarding the uniform claims, Chf Sup Lee said: “It might be the case that some officers want to change before they go home, but it’s certainly not an official order.”
Ali Amla, the founder of Christian Muslim Encounters and Muslims Against Daesh, also slammed the claims as sensationalist and damaging to the city.
He said: “This is absolutely absurd. I speak to different members of the constabulary on a regular basis and it’s not the case at all.
Rachel Baines, Lancashire Police Federation
“I research radicalisation and I would be the first person to know if there was a problem or any ‘no go areas’.
“It’s very damaging to have these things in the national media because it portrays Preston as a hot bed for terrorism when it isn’t.
“As this trickles through it will be picked up by the likes of the English Defence League and the North West Infidels who will think there’s a problem in Preston and want to come back.
“We’ve been very lucky here that we’ve only had one EDL demo in 2010 and one this year from the North West Infidels and we don’t want them back.
“We need to put the story straight - we have one of the most cohesive communities in Lancashire, and I’m very proud of that.”
Rachel Baines, chairman of Lancashire Police Federation, said: “My feelings are the same as the force on this, there are no such things as ‘no go’ areas for police, certainly in Preston.
“I would like to know where this has come from, because I’ve had no officers contacting me with any concerns about it.”
She added: “As for the uniforms, that’s been advice since I joined the police 22 years ago. It’s about officer safety and people who are not happy about the law being enforced, but this is not specifically about the Muslim community.”
The Daily Mail was contacted for a comment, but did not respond.
The claims come after US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that areas of London were ‘no go zones’ for the police.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police slammed his remarks, saying he “could not be more wrong” when he claimed that parts of London were so radicalised the officers feared for their lives.David Thorpe: This is not an argument that Ingram will be better than Tatum. Only that he could be as good. They had almost exactly the same stats in their one season at Duke, and most experts would argue Ingram had the better overall season. And they’re both very young: Ingram’s first legal beer would have been during this year’s preseason. Tatum is six months and a day younger. Ingram might still be getting used to his height. He grew more than eight inches in high school and is still developing physically, with a reported 7-foot-4 wingspan and 9-foot-2 standing reach — dimensions more typical of an NBA center. I see a lot of Paul George in him (and for you old-timers, watch the video above and think about George “The Iceman” Gervin) — both were late bloomers physicallyAfter a stream of criticism, the author withdrew the warrantless search section of the bill, calling it a "mistake." Yet, as Bryan Preston points out, the warrantless search section -- word for word -- was included in bills by Kline in 2009 and 2005.
There is no need for a warrant; there is no probable cause requirement; and the Seattle Times columnist writing about this clearly unconstitutional law observes that the sponsors include “Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, a lawyer who typically is hyper-attuned to civil-liberties issues.”
Cut to Washington State: in this case, liberal Democrats in the legislature have introduced an assault weapon ban that includes annual inspections of the homes of people that already own assault weapons to make sure that they are being safely stored.
The national media would be discussing this gross violation of the Fourth Amendment incessantly, using it as an example of how fundamentally fascist the Republican Party is -- everywhere.
What makes this especially outrageous: not only are they ignoring the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee regarding warrantless searches and the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms, but also the Washington State Constitution’s guarantee of the right to bear arms.
Before liberals attempt to defend not only warrantless searches but also to claim that “assault weapons” are not protected: the Supreme Court of the State of Washington has recognized by name the AR-15 as a constitutionally protected arm.
The case was an ugly one: State v. Rupe (Washington, 1984). The defendant was convicted of murdering the two women who worked at a branch office of Tumwater State Bank. Rupe had left his bloodstained checkbook on the counter in the midst of the robbery, and was convicted on a combination of evidence including testimony of conspirators. No, Rupe did not use an AR-15; he used a revolver. So how did an AR-15 end up in this case?
Rupe was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Yet during the penalty phase of his trial, the prosecutor told the jury that Rupe owned a CAR-15 (the collapsible stock version of the AR-15) even though it had not been used in the crime. The reason: the prosecutor believed this constituted evidence that Rupe was a very bad man, because he owned guns “good for only one purpose -- killing others in combat.” (Rupe testified that he used the CAR-15 for varmint hunting, which is not an uncommon use of that rifle.)
Because this was a capital case, Rupe's attorney filed a long list of exceptions hoping that the Washington State Supreme Court would overturn his conviction or at least the death penalty. The Washington State Supreme Court generally went along with the lower court on everything except one item: the attempt to sway the jury by the introduction of Rupe's ownership of an assault weapon. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled that allowing Rupe's ownership of such weapons into evidence during the death penalty phase of the trial would have a chilling effect on a constitutionally protected right: “The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself.” After all, if the exercise of a constitutional right can be turned against you under those conditions, it discourages people from exercising that right for fear of what might happen in the future.The mathematician W. R. Ball reports the following legend: In a temple of Benares, there is a dome under which a plate of bronze marks the center of the world. On this plate, there are three vertical stems of one cubit height. During the creation of the world, God placed on one of the stems 64 discs of gold of different sizes, the largest at the basis, the others going decreasing. In top, the smallest disc. This accumulation is the tower of Brahma. Night and day, without stop, the priests relay to transfer the discs from a stem to another. Only one disc must be take at once and it is forbidden to place a disc on another of lower diameter. When the 64 discs will be transferred from the tower of Braham to an other stem, the temple and the Universe will crumble. This will be the end of the world.Autonomous vehicles are nothing new by now, but what two companies have teamed up to develop in this new-technology space is: a vehicle that combines driverless capability with a truck designed to improved safety in highway work zones.
Pennsylvania-based Royal Truck & Equipment and Florida-based Micro Systems have created an Autonomous Truck Mounted Attenuator (ATMA) vehicle. It makes use of Royal Truck’s attenuator safety feature, which mounts on the rear of a truck and cushions impact in the event of a vehicle crash there, and Micro Systems’ autonomous operation technology.
In addition to remote driving, the new truck uses what’s described as “leader-follower” technology, which allows it to follow another vehicle, mimicking the speed and turns of the lead vehicle.
This week Royal demonstrated its new ATMA truck in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and says it’s partnering with the Florida Department of Transportation in a pilot program to further develop the product for work zones. Testing could begin this December, according to a statement by company president Robert Roy in a LVB.com report.
“The pilot program will yield a significant amount of never-before captured data regarding the automation of road construction vehicles and the utilization of these vehicles in work zones,” Roy said in the report.
The plan is to add the autonomous technology to two trucks fitted with attenuators and test them in closed work zones, meaning little potential for traffic to collide with the test vehicles. Micro Systems also will be involved in the data collection
Royal Truck & Equipment uses Scorpion attenuators on its TMA vehicles and claims the new system is the first driverless truck mounted attenuator truck in the U.S.Recently we told you about the Deadrock Divide Kickstarter that is currently underway. Actually, I should probably qualify that “underway” by saying that it only has about three days left, so if you have been considering pledging for the game it is starting to get down to the wire. For this reason, time is of the essence for me to tell you about my experience with the game. Bootsnake Games was kind enough to give me access to a pre-alpha build of the game a couple of days ago, and I have managed to get a bit of Deadrock Divide pre-alpha hands-on time in amongst all of the other games I am testing these days (so many games, so little time).
I think I have said this before, but doing hands-on opinion articles regarding games that are pre-alpha or in an incomplete state, as is the case for many early access games these days, is always a bit tricky. We have to get a feel for the game, but at the same time we have to be cognizant of the fact that the game we are looking at is likely to change and improve heavily. We have to judge the potential of the game and where we think (or hope) the devs will take it in addition to what we see. And so it is for Deadrock Divide. The pre-alpha version I am playing is quite rough around the edges, but if Bootsnake Games continue to develop the game as they are promising to then it has some real potential.
As I said, time is of the essence for the Deadrock Divide Kickstarter, so I will try to be brief in this hands-on. Deadrock Divide is a sandbox space-faring RPG in which you command a ship and the associated crew as you try to carve out a living in The Divide. a region on the rim of the known galaxy where the precious Deadrock is mined. The Divide is being fought over by three main factions, which you can choose (or not) to join and fight for. Deadrock Divide will feature a complex economy which you can tap into with mining, production, and trading if you wish.There will be lots of upgrade options for both your crew and your ships at some point. Unfortunately many of these features are not yet in place. For example, the crew skill trees are visible but many of the skills are not yet functioning, and I didn’t see much in the way of an economy. No biggie…it is pre-alpha after all.
What is in place, and what represents the heart of the game, is an early version of the tactical combat gameplay. If I had to sum up Deadrock Divide, I would tell you to imagine a sandbox version of XCOM where you get to choose (for the most part) when and where and for what reason you fight. Attack and defend facilities and other ships as you see fit, although sometimes the baddies will bring the fight to you even if you aren’t really in the mood. If you enjoy tactical games like XCOM but would prefer to blaze your own trail rather than follow a set of missions, Deadrock Divide might be for you.
Anyway, back to the tactical combat. If you have played XCOM, you will feel right at home in Deadrock Divide’s combat. It is still at a basic level for now, but you can move your troops, take cover, use overwatch, deploy turrets, toss grenades, and take pot shots at your enemies. Combat maps use destructible terrain, so you can blast through walls if needed. I also like the idea of maps elements eventually being useable during combat (although I couldn’t get them to work properly when I tried them). Heal up at medbays or use mining terminals to use to collect crafting materials. Very cool. For the most part combat seems quite functional, and as it improves it should get even better. My only gripe is that the visuals are lacking, but the included documentation mentions that a lot of this is placeholder artwork so I am relatively unconcerned.
Outside of combat, The Divide is presented in what I can only describe a sort of retro grid-based Tron-like 3D-radar view. Like the rest of the game it needs some polish, but I rather like it for reasons that I can’t articulate. Movement is done through mouse clicking, and besides moving the only other things to do are to click on objects to examine and interact them or use your afterburners to speed up. Since fuel is a consideration you have to use the afterburners sparingly, but they are useful to outrun pirates if you don’t want to get boarded. As long as you keep your ship fueled up you are free to roam around The Divide as you like, exploring and picking up missions. You can even attack neutral ships if you feel like skirting the law. I tried boarding some neutral ships and taking their cargo. It worked well, although I didn’t notice any fallout from that action. Hopefully in the final game living life as a pirate will have its downsides.
On my second play through I skipped the included pre-alpha missions entirely and simply jetted off into The Divide. I was able to outfit my ship with some mining drills which I then used to set up a couple of iron mines on some asteroids, which ended up providing me with some decent short term income. Actually, the best source of income I found in the pre-alpha was to simply fly around and grab all of the floating scrap left behind after the pirates attacked the trading ships (strangely enough I noticed that the pirates were usually the ones getting destroyed…I guess you don’t need to be smart or skilled to be a pirate). Given that some parts of The Divide were teeming with ships (which was nice to see) there was quite a bit of scrap to be had!
Crafting is already in the game in a fashion (ammo, grenades, etc.), although I didn’t get a chance to try it because I lacked the required crystal materials, even though I did |
dairies, the subject of ARM surveillance videos, a fourth dairy, Davie Dairy, is under investigation, Stephen said.
The Sheriff’s Office has hundreds of hours of video to view in the ongoing investigation into alleged abuse at the four dairies, he said. “The way these videos were recorded are very problematic and make it an issue for us to investigate,” he said.
Another undercover video of animal rights violations at an Okeechobee County dairy farm has surfaced.The shocking footage, produced by Miami Beach-based Animal Recovery Mission, or ARM, shows employees of McArthur Dairy using a blowtorch and a sharpened steel rod, among other abuses, on the animals.McArthur Dairy is one of Florida's longest-running and largest milk producers. The arrests mark the third dairy farm in Okeechobee County to face accusations of abusing cows and calves since November.Following the release of a previous video, three McArthur Dairy employees were arrested on Wednesday for animal rights violations.From theMcArthur brand milk is sold at local grocery stores such as Walmart and Target. Publix recently canceled their dairy orders from the company.For more information on ARM, click hereWhen the bookmakers and the book writers are on the same page, it’s a safe bet that the Nobel Prize in Literature is about to be announced. So it is—and Ladbrokes, the venerable British gambling establishment, is giving odds on forty-six writers. At the top of the list right this minute is Ngugi wa Thiong’o, with Haruki Murakami a tight second. But the really sensational news about this year’s race, regardless of who wins, is the third-place candidate: Svetlana Alexievich. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard that Alexievich was on the list, and it could have been a very small downy feather when the word came that she was among the front-runners. Can you believe it? Alexievich? Don’t they know that she’s a reporter? Is it possible that the Nobel committee might finally reverse the ignoble treatment of what we call “nonfiction writing” and admit that it is literature?
It hasn't always been this bad. The second writer to win the Nobel, back in 1902, was Theodor Mommsen, the first of several historians and essayists to win the prize. Bertrand Russell was one; Winston Churchill was another. But it has been more than a half century since any such recognition—a half century that has seen an explosion of great documentary writing in all forms and lengths and styles, and yet there is a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world that wants to exclude nonfiction from the classification of literature—to suggest that somehow it lacks artistry, or imagination, or invention by comparison to fiction. The mentality is akin to the prejudice that long held photography at bay in the visual-art world. Gay Talese summed up the experience of such snubbing in an interview with The Paris Review (labelled “The Art of Nonfiction”) by saying, “Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can’t quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.” My colleague John McPhee, in his Paris Review interview (under the same rubric), said, “Nonfiction—what the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we’re having this morning. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Publishers and booksellers are complicit with other keepers of the canon in the philistine derogation of great documentary writing by reserving the label “literature” on book jackets and store shelves only for works of fancy. But deferring to categories and genres to adjudicate what is meaningful is antithetical to what the best literature does best, which is to respond to life and death with writing that—by its voice and its substance, its soul and its urgency, its truth and, above all, its wisdom—enlarges our understanding and experience of our world and our being.
Alexievich builds her narratives about Russian national traumas—the Soviet-Afghan war, for instance, or the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe—by interviewing those who lived them, and immersing herself deeply in their testimonies. But her voice is much more than the sum of their voices. The first time many English readers may have encountered her was in the quarterly Granta, under the editorship of Bill Buford, where a piece called “Boys in Zinc” appeared in 1990. (An eponymous book soon followed.) The title is a reference to the zinc coffins in which the Soviet military returned its Afghan war dead to their mothers, and the piece, told from the mothers’ point of view, made that war as all-encompassingly present and personal—as real—as any fictional account ever did for any other war, and with the same singularity and originality of style and passion, of political intelligence and tragic vision.
Every mode of expression has its formal demands. For writing that’s not fictive, that means fidelity to documentable reality; yet the best of it can only be done when the writer has an imagination as free as any novelist, playwright, or poet. So perhaps, given the favorable odds at Ladbrokes for Alexievich, we may, before long, see novels routinely praised as having all the power and scope of nonfiction, rather than the other way around. And, as soon as the Nobel’s nonfiction barrier is, at last, broken, the fact that it ever existed will come to seem absurd. Literature is just a fancy word for writing.Pavia, sgominata baby gang: in chat violenze come trofei
LA BANDA - Sgominata a Vigevano la baby gang delle stazioni ferroviarie: bulli 15enni violentavano e picchiavano. Quattro arresti e 6 denunce. La banda, che ha agito da vero branco, prendeva di mira i soggetti ritenuti piu' deboli incapaci di difendersi, scegliendoli tra compagni di classe o vicini di casa.
In particolare una di queste vittime, uno studente di 15 anni, "è stato oggetto di una vera e propria persecuzione giunta fino a violenze fisiche e umiliazioni, che venivano riprese con i telefonini per ridicolizzarlo con gli altri e aumentare il suo stato di prostrazione, fino a realizzare una vera e propria sudditanza dello stesso nei confronti del branco".
La gravita' delle violenze e della persecuzione hanno raggiunto il loro apice nei mesi di dicembre 2016 e gennaio 2017, quando i "bulli", dopo averlo braccato per strada lo hanno ubriacato a forza per poi costringerlo a tollerare di essere condotto in giro per la citta' legato ad una catena, prima al collo, poi legata attorno al busto, a mo' di cane al guinzaglio; ed in un'altra, la piu' brutale, quando lo hanno appeso per le gambe a testa in giu', sospeso sopra un ponte, costretto a subire atti sessuali, brutalizzato con una pigna e fotografato. La foto e' stata poi divulgata tramite app.
I Carabinieri di Vigevano, sono riusciti prima a convincere alcuni genitori, a presentare alcune denunce, poi hanno individuato il gruppo di ragazzi, che proprio per la gravita' dei reati non sono stati denunciati, ma arrestati per concorso in violenza sessuale, riduzione o mantenimento in schiavitu' o in servitu', pornografia minorile, violenza privata aggravata mediante lo stato di incapacita' procurato della vittima.
RAGAZZI DI "BUONA FAMIGLIA" - Il gruppo era composto da una decina di "ragazzi di buona famiglia, figli di professionisti, commercianti, impiegati, operai", tra cui anche un 13enne "non imputabile": sono stati rinchiusi nel carcere minorile 'Cesare Beccaria' di Milano, a disposizione del Tribunale per i minorenni del capoluogo lombardo, competente territorialmente.NAB's executive in charge of personal banking, Gavin Slater, pointed to the bank's move to raise $5.5 billion capital from shareholders earlier this year, which was partly in response to the tougher rules "There are a range of factors that come into consideration in interest rate decisions. The home loan market is dynamic, with multiple changes being seen across the industry," Mr Slater said. "Regulatory changes on capital requirements also increase the costs associated with providing home loans," he said. "Today's decision has not been easy, but we believe this is right decision for the long term. We know we have to balance the interests of our customers with the needs of our more than 550,000 shareholders."
For a customer with a $300,000 mortgage, NAB's move will increase the monthly repayments by $30.48, figures from Canstar show. The repayments on a $500,000 loan will increase by $50.80 a month. Treasurer Scott Morrison said banks' interest rate moves were "commercial decisions," but also highlighted the "handsome" returns banks make. "Banks will make their own commercial decisions about how they charge customers in relation to shifts in their cost base," he said.
"They do receive a handsome return on their equity, our banks, that's a good thing, haven't got an issue with that."
"We want our banks to be strong but equally businesses across the country have changes to their cost base all the time."
The Australian dollar dipped by about one fifth of a US cent immediately after NAB's move to below US72¢, but was only marginally lower at US72.09¢ by mid-morning. Traders are betting there is a growing chance the Reserve Bank of Australia may cut official interest rates to make up for the commercial banks' rate increases, though financial markets think the central bank is most likely to leave the cash rate unchanged when it next meets on November 3.
NAB is not increasing deposit interest rates or changing fixed mortgage rates. ANZ Bank is now the only major bank not to raise its home loan interest rates since Westpac kicked off this round of big bank rate increases last week, and analysts expect it will follow suit. A bank spokesman said ANZ did not comment on the future direction of interest rates. Chief executive Mike Smith this week left the door open to a rate increase, saying the bank would weigh its options, adding that extra capital was a cost that had to be borne by someone. Loading with Latika Bourke
More to comeTwo years into the economic recovery labor force participation has hit a new low.
The labor force participation rate, the share of Americans who are working or looking for jobs, declined to 63.9% in July from 64.1% a month earlier, the Labor Department said Friday. July’s numbers were a new low for the measure, which has dropped during the recession and slow recovery to its lowest percentage since the early 1980s.
The employment-population ratio, the share of the working-age population that is employed, showed a similar trend. It, ticked down to 58.1% from 58.2% in June, another new low for this downturn.
“July 1983–a time when American feminism was only halfway born–was the last time we saw an employment-to-population ratio this low,” Brad DeLong, a University of California, Berkeley, economist wrote Friday.
Declining participation carries a toll – both for the sidelined workers and for the entire economy.
When participation falls it’s an indication that Americans have grown discouraged about their chances of finding jobs and have given up looking. That’s a particular concern during this downturn when long-term unemployment has been prevalent.
Nearly 6.2 million Americans were out of work for more than six months in July and the median length of a spell of unemployment was 21.2 weeks. Those who have been out of the job market for long periods commonly cite problems with anxiety and depression and research has shown lasting spells of joblessness can reduce a worker’s lifespan.
A drop in participation is bad for the economy because the economy loses the productivity that would have come from those sidelined workers. Jobless Americans also tend turn to programs such as Social Security disability, and often end up remaining on it for the rest of their lives, which comes at a cost to the federal government.
Falling labor force participation does make the official unemployment rate fall: With fewer Americans searching for jobs, the rate can fall even amid slow job creation. A broader measure of unemployment, which includes those who want to work but have given up looking, stood at 16.1% in July.Irfan Pathan: "Before or after the World Cup, I am sure that I will soon be playing for team India" © AFP
India allrounder Irfan Pathan is confident of making a "comeback" to the national side, and has said he will focus on using the Ranji Trophy matches to make his presence felt. Irfan has not played for India since 2012 due to injury.
"Irfan will return very soon. For that my focus is on the forthcoming Ranji matches," Irfan said. "I will play all the Ranji Trophy matches and if you play four-day cricket, it would be easier to play one-day cricket.
"Before or after the World Cup, I am sure that I will soon be playing for team India."
Irfan, who represents Baroda in the Ranji Trophy, said: "I am very excited about Ranji Trophy matches. I will contribute towards bowling and batting as well. The experience that I have gained in so many years is an advantage. I will use that advantage and try my best to make a comeback."
When asked about the India's Test performance in England, he said: "It will not be proper to comment about it, but seeing the performance during the last one-day game, I hope the team will continue to perform like this." He also backed the out-of-form Virat Kohli. "I think Virat will definitely get his form back. He is an excellent and confident player. Neither we nor his fans should bother about Virat's performance during a particular season. I am very confident that what has been happening to him will make him a better player."
© PTIThese days it seems like whether you turn on the TV or venture out to the theatre, there is going to be a comic book superhero being brought to life to entertain audiences and make tons and tons (and tons) of money. Modern technology has made it possible for the super powered folks who were relegated to comic book pages to now be shown in all their glory doing all sorts of amazing feats (though I wish they would still turn the camera sideways to show a character climb a wall. That was movie magic!).
However, not all superheroes come from the funny books, some were written specifically for the big screen. Here’s a list of some of the highlights. All movies on this list are ranked in chronological order.
1. Mr. Freedom (1969)
William Klein’s avant garde (now why isn’t there a superhero called “The Avant Guard”?) superhero flick casts John Abbey as the titular character, an American, right-wing superhero who fights, murders and cheats to uphold (and force unto others) the good ole American way. This is Captain America with a Starship Troopers mentality.
Abbey is great as the cowboy hat wearing, stars and stripes clad, psychopathic hero. When he hears that France has fallen under communist influence (I think he puts it much differently), he goes over there to save them, even if it means destroying them altogether.
Mr. Freedom is far ahead of it’s time and would appeal to lots of folks who look at American politics with a critical eye. Also, it’s pop art aesthetic is very fun and inventive to this day. Granted, some might say it’s a one note film, but as Mr. Freedom might say, they probably can’t be trusted anyway.
2. Return of Captain Invincible (1983)
What the world needs now is a shining hero!
This superhero, comedy, musical is obviously inspired by “ready-made” cult films such as Rocky Horror Picture Show. Directed by Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf helmer, Philippe Mora, this is the story of a washed up superhero (think Hancock played by Alan Arkin. Awesome, huh?) who has to sober up long enough to save the world from the evil Mr. Midnight, while singing songs and clearing his name which was slandered in a McCarthy like trial years back.
Unfortunately, Mora does not bring much to the table in terms of style and intriguing storytelling (this from the director of Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills? How is it possible!?). However, this movie remains endearing and entertaining due to it’s catchy, great music and wonderful performances from Alan Arkin as Captain Invincible and Christopher Lee as Mr. Midnight.
When Lee belts out a tune in full baritone tempting Captain Invincible to return to the bottle, chanting “Drink! Drink!” while his monster sidekick and sexy ladies dance along, it is really something to behold. This is a really fun flick and I defy anyone not to be singing the Bullshit song in their head after the credits roll.
3. Toxic Avenger (1984)
Well, it takes a special someone to make it seem like this list is taking a step down after discussing the works of the director of Werewolf Bitch, but I’m sure Lloyd Kaufman would happily oblige. Kaufman happily revels in all elements of exploitation, and his superhero parody, The Toxic Avenger, is the film that made the now infamous Troma Studios.
The film itself concerns super nerd, Melvin Junko, who falls into a vat of toxic waste and becomes the super violent hero, The Toxic Avenger. He takes on the duty as defender of Tromaville, bludgeoning and eviscerating anyone who continues to terrorize or take advantage of it’s citizens. Blood and Boobs (usually accompanied by the sound of a cowbell) ensue.
Toxic Avenger is trash, but very fun trash. The bad guys are really bad. Like, running over a child’s head with a car, bad. But the film is so cartoonish and silly that it is unlikely to offend anyone down to their core. And the parody of the modern superhero might be very on the nose (a bloody nose at that!), but Kaufman’s liberal views can be seen through all the carnage. Easily one of Troma’s best outings.
4. Robocop (1987)
Paul Verhoeven’s hilariously violent satire shows a future Detroit overrun with crime and corruption. An officer new to the force (Peter Weller) who is killed in the line of duty is brought back to life as the Toxic Av… I mean Robocop, a shoot a bunch of times and ask questions later half man, half machine. Verhoeven does not hold back when it comes to showing what the world will be like in the future; a violent and immoral playground for those willing to embrace it.
Just the kind of world that needs a hero who does not flinch at using extreme force. But Verhoeven also adds enough humour for the film to never seem too violent or dour. In fact, it’s a hoot! This is a must see for those who haven’t seen it. There must be some of those weirdos out there.
5. Darkman (1990)
Back in 1990 when comic book fan and director Sam Raimi was denied the opportunity to direct The Shadow (a decision that would seem insane today) he decided to take another route, and developed his own superhero for a big screen extravaganza. And what an extravaganza it is.
Darkman is pure comic book fun which, but like it’s title suggests, has a very dark side. Liam Neeson plays Peyton Westlake, a scientist who’s groundbreaking work on synthetic skin is nearing it’s completion. Enter Larry Drake and his thugs who, in their attempt to murder him, leave him with severe burns all over his body. The hospital that he is taken to uses an experimental treatment that essentially makes him immune to pain. With his scientific genius and new strength he goes into the night to seek revenge.
Raimi juggles the campy, horrific and dramatic elements perfectly and it’s not surprising at all that he’d soon be at the helm of one of the best actual comicbook superhero films of all time. Now where is the Spider-Man/Darkman team-up?
6. Heroic Trio (1993)
Watching a Johnnie To film today usually means you are going to see gangsters, probably with sunglasses on, either shooting at each other or bonding in some form or another. But back in 1993 To directed Heroic Trio, about 3 superheroines who have to team up to save the world from the dastardly Evil Master!
The plot is almost secondary though, compared to the high flying action, camp aesthetics, over the top sequences and hilarious moments. This is pure, silly fun, with it’s tongue planted squarely in cheek. The trio of heroes played by Michelle Yeoh (Invisible Girl), Anita Mui (Wonder Woman) and Maggie Cheung (Thief Catcher) aren’t only easy on the eyes, but pull off the difficult act of being funny and heroic at the same time. Plus, To regular, Anthony Wong is a blast as the Evil Master’s servant Kau.
7. Unbreakable (2000)
Probably the most serious and contemplative look at what being a superhero would be like in reality, M. Night Shymalan’s Unbreakable was more of a game changer in the superhero genre than it is given credit for.
Granted, most audience members had no idea they were in for a superhero origin story considering this was fresh off of The Sixth Sense, which also starred Bruce WIllis, and the advertising only hinted at the real plot. And speaking of plot, here it is!
David Dunn (Bruce WIllis) begins to suspect it is more than luck when he is the sole survivor of a train crash. With the help of comic book aficionado Elijah Price (Samuel Jackson) and his son (Spencer Treat Clark) he finally figures out his destiny.
Shymalan’s subdued pacing and earnestness in the storytelling cleverly tricks the audience into believing he is possibly telling a supernatural story again, so when the big reveal comes it is all the more rewarding. The characters seem real, and that sense of wonder usually found in supehero origin stories is replaced by confusion and glumness. A remarkable film that definitely stands out from the crowd.(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)
not
An intellectual.
Definition
Signs and symptoms
Causes
Risk factors
Receiving high academic education in science or engineering;
Working in academic, scientific, or engineering environments;
Being publicly recognized as an expert in a scientific or engineering discipline;
Episodes of bullying in childhood or adolescence;
Having a "nerdish" predisposition in childhood or adolescence;
Difficulties letting go of appearances or social posture (that is, a strong persona );
); Lack of appreciation or patience for art, poetry, and psychology;
Lack of appreciation or patience for myth and religion;
Lack of empathy and sensitivity.
Prevention and treatment
Intellectual fundamentalism is a dangerous condition that affects increasing and alarming numbers of people worldwide. Though its origins can be traced to the West (some think René Descartes was the index case ), modern means of communication and easy travel have allowed it to spread far and wide into the East as well. This essay is an attempt to raise awareness of this dangerous epidemic, so people can identify the early signs of the condition and take appropriate steps.Intellectual fundamentalism is characterized by a severe psychological imbalance: exaggerated focus on one specific psychic function – namely, the intellect – to the detriment of all others, including intuition, poetic imagination, emotional intelligence, artistic sensitivity, empathy, perceptual awareness, etc. Curiously, the intellect isn't always the patient's dominant psychic function: often, those whose intellects are relatively limited also fall victim.Patients tend to implicitly or explicitly deny the efficaciousness and reliability of all psychic functions except the intellect. They insist that the intellect is the only valid avenue for approaching reality, even though they are unable to coherently justify why. The condition blinds them to this obvious cognitive dissonance and causes them to arbitrarily consider their position self-evident. If, while in therapy, the patient is confronted with the fact that the human psyche is equipped with many other forms of cognition beyond the intellect, he will typically point at historical instances in which these other faculties have been unreliable, while ignoring all other historical instances in which they have been vital. Such tendency at selectively considering evidence is a hallmark of intellectual fundamentalism.In social interactions, the condition manifests itself clearly in the patient's approach to communication. A psychologically healthy individual, when conversing, tries to look past the particular logical and grammatical constructs used by his interlocutor, so to understand what the interlocutor is actually trying to say. In other words, a healthy individual is interested in what his interlocutor, as opposed to what his interlocutorA sufferer of intellectual fundamentalism, on the other hand, looses interest inand focuses, instead, on theof the logical and grammatical constructs used by his interlocutor. The patient will fixate obsessively on what is, losing sight of what isWhen a logical flaw is found in what is said, the patient will construe it as sure evidence that his interlocutor is unworthy and completely close himself up to the intended messageThis fixation on form above intended meaning is not only detrimental to the patient – who misses out on much of the subtlety and nuance of what others try to convey to him, particularly those who have most to contribute for seeing the world in a different way – but also to his interlocutors: it is frustrating for family, friends and acquaintances to interact with someone who insists in finding flaws in the finger pointing at the moon, instead of looking at the moon.Indeed, sufferers of intellectual fundamentalism derive great satisfaction from finding logical flaws, ambiguities and inaccuracies in the way others communicate. Since they see the intellect as the only valid psychic function, differentiating themselves from others on an intellectual basis provides them with powerful feelings of self-worth and adequacy, hiding whatever other unpleasant psychic issues might be present. This narrow field of awareness may seem naive and ridiculous to an external observer, but it is sincerely embraced by patients and has great importance in their value systems.Because patients are severely dissociated from most other segments of their own psyches, they become delusional in believing thatreality is amenable to intellectual modeling and apprehension, despite the complete lack of any rational reason for such belief. In other words, patients believe arbitrarily that all reality fits into the only psychic function they acknowledge as valid: the intellect. This delusion is a natural self-defense mechanism attendant upon the condition: were the patient to acknowledge otherwise, he would have to face the anxiety of great uncertainty. Moreover, he would also have to acknowledge the severe limitations of his own psychic state, with associated feelings of inferiority and shame. The delusion is, thus, the patient's effective way to avoid distress by losing contact with reality. For this reason, intellectual fundamentalism is considered a psychosis, as opposed to a neurosis Associated with this, sufferers of intellectual fundamentalism display a tendency to interpret everything. Since they are alienated from the cognitive faculties necessary to capture the deeper meaning of symbols, allegories, metaphors, and other indirect ways of conveying ineffable meaning, they have no alternative but to try and make sense of reality on a purely literal basis. Indeed, many patients deny even that anything at all exists that can't be described or conveyed in literal form. They then project their inability to see beyond literal appearances onto all other human beings, deeming others' attempts to communicate ineffable meaning to be drivel.Depending on the degree of advancement of the condition, the denial of all forms of cognition other than the intellect usually grows to become a fixation. At this point, if still left untreated, the condition can further evolve into a hero syndrome, which drives the patient to try and "save the world" by attempting to eradicate all human activities, views, and general outlooks that do not conform to intellectual value systems. If and when this happens, the patient may become a threat to the community. The condition is also particularly contagious at this advanced stage.The causes are not yet fully understood, but well-substantiated hypotheses have been put forward. Some speculate that attempts at self-affirmation during adolescence can evolve into intellectual fundamentalism in later years. A hypothesis is that children who are socially-impaired and have difficulties commanding the respect of their peers find self-worth, instead, in lonely intellectual pursuits. Other times, an individual might even be reasonably well integrated into his peer group, but eventually discovers that he has an intellectual edge over others, which he then attempts to profit from. The self-worth found in both cases is, naturally, directly proportional to the individual's belief that the intellect is superior to all other cognitive faculties: one needs to narrow the playing field to the particular segment where one has a perceived advantage. This way, there is significant psychological incentive for the individual to dissociate from the rest of his cognitive faculties, eventually leading to full-blown intellectual fundamentalism.The tendency displayed by sufferers to try and humiliate others during discussions arises from the need to increase this engineered perception of self-worth. Compensation for bullying suffered in early years is strongly believed to be a factor in this process, as well as the general psychological predisposition colloquially referred to as "nerdish."The cultivation of a rich variety of outlooks is essential for preventing intellectual fundamentalism. For instance, if one's professional life is highly specialized and focused on science or engineering, one can reduce one's risk by cultivating hobbies such as play-acting, reading poetry and the classics, volunteering for social work (particularly with senior citizens), cultivating a vegetable garden and other forms of interacting directly with nature, attending exotic religious rituals about which one hasn't developed early prejudices, cooking, painting, attending art exhibitions, meditating, going to silent retreats, etc. It is important that one insists in pursuits that one's first instinct is precisely to avoid.If intellectual fundamentalism has already taken hold, talk therapy with a qualified psychologist is recommended in addition to the steps above. With the guidance of the therapist, one can slowly bring up to awareness one's repressed psychic functions and cognitive faculties. In severe cases, confrontational therapy or medically-supervised journeys with legal and safe psychedelics can be last resorts.(This essay has been written by a recovering intellectual fundamentalist who still experiences occasional rebounds of the condition.)Variable geometry turbochargers are awfully clever bits of kit. Basically, the tech means the aspect of the turbine’s blades is continuously altered to suit the engine’s load, thus delivering a broader toque curve and hence better response.
VW says its new 1.5-litre TSI Evo marks the first time a VGT has been fitted to a mass-market petrol-powered engine (Porsche uses them a fair bit, though), and that compared to the old 1.4, peak torque arrives 35 per cent faster at 1,300rpm. This is good news.
Overall efficiency is up by something like 10 per cent too (although VW hasn’t released any official figures), thanks in part to the VTG, the high 12.5:1 compression ratio and active cylinder deactivation, which shuts down a couple of cylinders when the engine isn’t under too much stress.
To start with, the Miller cycle motor will be available in 129bhp and 148bhp configurations. We’ll see it in cars for the first time later this year. Want a VW? What with all the stigma surrounding diesels at the moment, this might be the way to go…San Diego State University is under scrutiny for its handling of a sexual assault investigation. In a lawsuit filed on April 8 in San Diego Superior Court, a now-expelled student is suing the college for failing to conduct a fair hearing and for not providing the accused student details of the charges nor allowing him to submit evidence in his defense.
The student, Francisco Sousa, was arrested by police on December 9, 2014, on charges of false imprisonment and forced copulation of a female student.
Three days later, director of San Diego State's Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities, Lee Mintz, sent a letter to Sousa asking to meet with him to review the charges. Sousa faced expulsion from the school on grounds that he violated the federal government's Title IX law that bans sexual discrimination from college campuses.
That same day he requested to review the allegations against him as well as the woman's statements. Mintz, however, refused to provide the information.
"Mintz replied to the December 18 request promising to produce the information within the time period mandated under California Information Practices Act on December 18, 2014, concluding with ‘...The information will be sent to you as quickly as possible.' On December 19, 2014, Mintz responded, without citing any legal authority, that "[d]ue to the ongoing investigation, I am unable to provide you with a copy of the information that was/is the basis for the Title IX, interim suspension and disciplinary proceedings."
During the following month, Sousa requested the information on three occasions. All were rejected by the school. Through his attorney, Sousa offered to provide text messages and social media communications between him and his accuser which showed that the alleged assault was consensual.
On February 11, the district attorney's office declined to press charges against Sousa. Despite that, Mintz refused to hear Sousa's side of the story. Mintz also rejected his request to hold a hearing on the Title IX violations.
"Lee Mintz urged Petitioner to submit ‘information’ to her, informed him that he would not be entitled to a hearing on the Title IX portion of the matter, he would not have the right to confront his accuser, he has no right to direct participation of counsel, she would make findings of fact and reach conclusions of law and mete out a sanction, and he would not be entitled to an appeal. Lee Mintz further informed Petitioner that she could reach a decision in the Title IX portion of the investigation at any point and without a hearing."
Sexual assaults on college campuses and the manner in which they are dealt with by universities has come under scrutiny in recent months. During the past month, the federal Department of Education has indicated that it is investigating 106 universities for mishandling Title IX complaints and failing to hold hearings on the allegations. In an April 9 U-T San Diego article, University of California at San Diego was also sued for similar allegations from a male student accused of sexual assault.
Title IX gives the colleges the authority to investigate and hold hearings on alleged assaults. The hearings are not criminal hearings, but school administrators do have the authority to expel students. According to a November 6, 2014, investigation by KPBS, San Diego State University has held only four Title IX hearings since 2009. Last year, in response to increased pressure, San Diego State announced it had obtained a $200,000 grant to hire a campus sexual assault advocate.
But Sousa's complaint strikes at the heart of San Diego State's failure to follow Title IX requirements as well as the intense pressure colleges face to handle assaults on campus.
"...[I]n the Fall of 2014, just before and after petitioner's arrest, [San Diego State] was rocked by campus-wide protests demanding the [San Diego State] take immediate action regarding sexual violence reported against students. Over 13 assaults involving [San Diego State] students were reported the Fall of 2014. Petitioner believes that his due process rights have been subverted by immense political pressures bearing upon the University and specifically the administrators responsible for [San Diego State University's] Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities, Lee Mintz and Jessica Rentto."Two months into the Arab revolution, one very fat lady has yet to sing. But the turn of Saudi Arabia - home to one-fifth of the world's oil reserves, and the United States' most important remaining Arab ally - may be coming soon.
Think there's no chance that this kingdom's restless youth - 60 percent of the population is under 18, and 28 percent of working-age youths are unemployed - will rise in revolt? King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz doesn't agree with you. On Wednesday, the ruler landed in Riyadh after a three-month absence abroad for medical treatment - and for an 87-year-old with a bad back, he looked like a man in a big hurry.
Before his plane even touched down, Abdullah had ordered up $36 billion in new welfare grants for his people - about $2,000 for every Saudi. There were loans for young Saudis to buy homes, get married and start a business, and a 15 percent pay raise for government workers. Next are a prisoner release and a cabinet reshuffle.
Meanwhile, waiting among the 50 or so white-robed men on the tarmac to meet Abdullah was the man who worries him most: King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa of the neighboring island nation of Bahrain. A week ago the Khalifa regime tried to put down the first popular uprising in an Arab emirate by force - the solution sought by Saudi Arabia. It failed, thanks in part to countervailing pressure from the United States, which keeps a fleet in Bahrain's port.
Thousands of protesters are camped in the center of Bahrain's capital, Manama. Their demands, from the Saudi perspective, are frightening: at the least, a constitutional monarchy that will empower the country's repressed Shiite majority - and maybe also the deposal of the al Khalifa family, which is Sunni. Watching closely are the 2 million Shiites of Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province, who are also a disadvantaged majority in their region and who are separated from Bahrain by a 16-mile causeway.
King Hamad probably has broken some bad news to King Abdullah: I no longer have the option of ending this by force. It won't work - and the Americans won't let me. That leaves the Saudi ruler with a couple of hard choices. He can order Saudi forces through the causeway to put down the Bahraini Shiites, in what would be an Arab version of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Or he can let the al-Khalifas bargain away their power, while hoping that the democratic infection doesn't spread.
The invasion is a real possibility: Saudi troops helped put down a Shiite rebellion in Bahrain in the 1990s. Earlier this week, the Saudi Council of Ministers issued a Brezhnev-like declaration: |
wrong side of the bed, or they fear young black males or they decide they just don’t like them.
If this level of killing of young white males were taking place in America, everything would stop. Everything would stop. But there is a tolerance level that has developed that allows people to say, “What a shame,” and go on with business as usual. People ask, “What did [victims] do to cause it?” Or they say: “They shouldn’t have talked back. They shouldn’t have asked any questions.” Americans who are not people of color have the right to ask questions. We try each and every day, but that’s where the intersectionality has not occurred.
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Q&A: Rep. Linda Sanchez gives you permission to run
Women are finally breaking into the top tier of megadonors
Where are all the high-ranking GOP women?NaturalNews is holding the continuation of this story until more research and fact checking can be completed
(NaturalNews) Rawesome Foods defendants James Stewart and Sharon Palmer were ambushed in California court yesterday when they appeared for a preliminary hearing about the multiple felony charges that have been ludicrously placed against them for engaging in. In court, they were ambushed with a $1 million arrest warrant (James) and a $2 million arrest warrant (Sharon), then handcuffed and marched away by agents of the corrupt state.This appears to all be part of California's open war on family farming and real food. Observers present at the hearing described the ambush as something "done out of pure unadulterated intimidation" by a rogue government that has abandoned all law.In our original announcement of this, we stated that by Sunday evening we would roll out documented evidence that James Stewart has been targeted by rogue shadow government agents who have infiltrated California's executive and judicial branches. Additional details are pouring in surrounding the arrest of James Stewart and Sharon Palmer, and until we can sort through all these details and fact-check the reports, we are holding our follow up story on this until sometime next week.Something nefarious is afoot with all this, I assure you. We aim to get to the bottom of it and bring you the updated breaking news here on NaturalNews.com.One thought that immediately comes to mind in the finance-related charges against Sharon Palmer is that first the state of California made it impossible for Sharon to repay her loans on the farm by fining her and terrorizing her business beginning in 2008. And then, we she was unable to repay those loans, they charged her with multiple counts of felony financial fraud for failing to repay the loans. Or at least that's the simplified version of what appears to be happening. It's quite complex and there are many players, including at least one person in Wisconsin who is an enemy of James Stewart. So there is definitely some in-fighting going on across this industry.By the way, yesterday I released a new InfoGraphic describing the differences between raw (fresh) milk and dead pasteurized milk. It's very enlightening and well worth sharing. You can view it here:Blu-ray + DVD
Interstellar Blu-ray Review
A journey beyond time and space.
Reviewed by Martin Liebman, March 17, 2015
To the unknown...and the known.
's ambitions are both clear and vague, complex and simple, powerful and poignant, purposeful and hopeful. The film evokes the style and structure of the best of Star Trek and Shyamalan with a substance comparable to that of 2001 and that drives as deep, if not sometimes more deeply, than Stanley Kubrick's legendary film. Director Christopher Nolan's (the Dark Knight trilogy)may not be quite so ahead of its time as Kubrick's masterwork was back in 1968 in terms of its technical merits but the film does strive to match, and sometimes overtakes, it in terms of its core narrative in which the fantastical gives way to the fantastically complex as it explores -- throughout space and both in a moment and over a number of years -- core ideas surrounding the true strength and bond of the human condition, a bond which the film says cannot be severed by either time or space, a bond which can overcome even the most impossibly complex scenario. Sometimes convoluted, sometimes impractical, sometimes too fast, occasionally too slow, consistently epic, ofttimes surreal, unfailingly mesmerizing, and always focused on a greater goal and always moving towards a simple yet evolved endgame dynamic,dazzles on multiple levels and leaves the audience in awe of its boldness, complexity, intelligence, and even entertainment value but at the same time questioning if it couldn't have been a little tighter, meant a little more, dug a little deeper, found a slightly more consistent rhythm, discovered an even better way to tell an important and meaningful yet complicated tale that echoes with a profound sense of purpose and the need to explore it further on more intimately personal emotional and intellectual levels.A near future world is covered in dust. Wheat and okra crops have been wiped out, leaving only corn to grow with any sort of healthy consistency. Life goes on, but not life exactly as it once was. There's no more military, no more wide acceptance into college, no more spending on expensive programs. Life is about survival, though certainly simple pleasures like baseball remain. It's a challenging life, not an impossible one. One day, a dust storm rolls through town. Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and her father Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) find a pattern in the dust as it lays on her bedroom floor, much like the pattern that she frequently finds on her bookshelf, which she calls the work of a "ghost." Cooper and Murph decipher the code and realize it's pointing them to a spot on the map. They soon discover that the point leads them to the last remnants of NASA, working in a secretive underground operation. NASA knows the planet is doomed and is preparing a space flight to follow up on previous leads about potential relocation sites in another galaxy that has been opened to them by way of a mysterious wormhole that has recently appeared within the solar system. Cooper is asked to pilot the mission; he's a former test pilot and the best chance the flight has of succeeding. He leaves for the stars and leaves behind his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet), his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), and a distraught Murph, who strongly believes the ghost is urging him to stay home. His crew consists of Brand (Anne Hathaway), Romilly (David Gyasi), Doyle, (Wes Bentley), and two robots, TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin) and CASE (voiced by Josh Stewart).manages to pack in a dense and fully realized yet fundamentally familiar future world in its opening minutes, sharing a good deal of information in relatively short order but, in these early moments, making every line and shot matter as it almost effortlessly builds towards the more fascinating realms of its core story. As the movie inches ever further away from its "Disaster movie" underpinnings and closer to its true narrative purposes that eschew typical genre convention, it opens up to explore a much more satisfying field of view that's not concerned with imminent destruction or the physical salvation of lives but instead a broader examination of the connection shared by humanity. There, the hero, or heroes, are defined not so much by their outward actions but by their inward essences and how they use that internal guide to not only reach point B from point A but also to bend their will and broaden their understanding of themselves, and everything around them, to accomplish their goals of togetherness, understanding, and yes, even salvation, though not necessarily in the traditional usage of the terms. In many ways, the film uses the idea of the wormhole and the simple demonstration of unrelated but overlapping points on a folded plane not so much to depict part of the science behind the film but rather to demonstrate the driving force that is its exploration of mankind through the prism of both the shared and disparate experiences of place and time between Cooper and his daughter Murphy. It's a complex narrative to be sure and one that's difficult to explore without spoiling the movie in its total, but needless to say there's a wonderful bit of storytelling and multifaceted detail that the audience will find both compelling and evolving with every watch.As with the "Disaster movie" underpinnings that carry the early part of the movie, much of its middle stretch -- and a little further back into the first act, and through parts of the third -- operate under the "what's out there?" pretext, that sense of awe and wonder at discovering the unknown. Yet the movie takes even these broader strokes and gradually manipulates them to mean something else, again on a more intimate level or, at least, concerning the collective structure of the human race. For example, salvation through death and destruction is a recurring theme. In one of the most interesting stretches in the film, it juxtaposes -- spoiler alert -- Matt Damon's Mann (and it's no coincidence he's named "Mann") on another world with Jessica Chastain's Murph on Earth. Both, simultaneously, engage in acts of destruction with the goal of their conception of a greater good in mind, though certainly with Mann the story runs a fair bit deeper. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful parallel that contextualizes a dueling philosophy on several levels, about finding a way to see a raw goal succeed but also contrasting a larger dynamic that runs through the film, particularly its "Plan A" and "Plan B" narrative driving force. This segment stretches to both ends of the human condition: the seemingly unending destruction that's marked mankind's history, the thematic idea of Newton's third law about moving forward only by leaving something behind, and the unquenchable thirst to live and move on at any cost, contrasting actions taken on behalf of the greater good and actions taken on behalf of oneself and how they can sometimes work in tandem and sometimes on disparate, incompatible levels.There's no doubt that the movie can get more than a little convoluted as it approaches, and works through, its third act and its final resolution of a core story that challenges man to understand the greater universe and, in turn, himself, on a plane of existence far beyond one's general perception and grasp of life and what it means to live under the broader, accepted conditions that has defined mankind since (presumably) its beginning.is presented in a way through which the process means more than the truth. Whatever science facts it gets right or wrong, no matter how far it stretches believability or the boundaries of known laws on multiple planes, doesn't really matter. What matters is that connection the movie makes, the more emotional and even spiritual themes it explores. It uses all the grandiose pieces that support it to get to the final resolution, the final truth, through a story made of grand visions of space and time but also the inward emotional turmoil, the tangible pain, the lingering doubt, the constant fear, the evolving perception, the need to connect and reconnect that defines characters, relationships, and and mankind itself, not to mention the truth that nothing -- not disaster, not certain death, not the distance of space, not the onward march of time -- can stop that pursuit of that connection and, ultimately, the connection itself.is also a broader technical marvel. Nolan has rightly chosen substance over style, practicality over flash, people over the power of an artificial epic scale. The movie feels large, involved, and detailed without sacrificing a tangible realism. The movie is more than comfortably familiar both on Earth and through the technology used to stretch beyond. Some of it is vague, but it all works together in a beautiful, harmonious relationship with the individuals and the ideas they, and their story, carry on through to the end where it's not rockets and gadgets and gizmos but rather the simplest -- yet also the most complicated -- concept of the human bond that comes to define the movie. Still, Nolan has spent the appropriate resources to make a beautiful, bold, and satisfying frame in which the more intimate journey unfolds. The film's physical scale effortlessly blends into its most intimately emotional bits and character details. The entire thing feels fully organic and effortless, save for Hans Zimmer's score that sometimes feels too drummed up, too invasive,and upsets the film's balance of precision and detail with an overpowering march that sometimes subtly sounds like klaxons blaring underneath the action and, elsewhere, like the music is trying to give an unnecessarily hard edge to a delicate moment in the movie and sometimes even devours dialogue and surrounding sonic details. That said, the movie is otherwise a technical masterpiece that's every bit as much fun to look at as the greater movie is to understand.Ultimately, and despite everything that's clearly good with the movie -- the many physical, emotional, and metaphysical areas it so complexly, and often gracefully, explores -- and some of the things that aren't quite clearly bad but do leave one questioning parts of the movie -- a sometimes wayward score, later scenes that feel a little out of touch, a general sense that there's justto explore,to grasp,it could have done to fully immerse the audience both in its greater universe and its most intimate corners alike -- it doesn't feel fully fair, or even completely right, to pen a review after a single viewing, or two in a single day, as was the case for the purpose of this review. Consider this review, then, an initial gut reaction, which is all one can really -- honestly -- give following a movie of this technical scope and, much more importantly, emotional and metaphysical scale. Even decades removed from release, movies likecontinue to thrive under the watchful eye of scrutiny, the hopeful vision of interpretation, the continued dissection, reassembly, and further dissection of its many moving and stationary parts alike.seems destined to follow suit, not only because of a shared bond of style and outer space setting but because of the complicated endeavors in which both undertake that extend well beyond the basic confines of question-and-answer and enter, and pursue, an entire realm of thought-provoking possibilities. Also then consider this review a peek inside the door, a brief overview of what's immediately noticeable inside and a quick reaction to what's been seen but that deserves a much deeper, more prolonged examination in the years to follow.Andrew Dampf, The Associated Press
BORMIO, Italy -- Canada's Erik Guay was heavily influenced by the Crazy Canucks during his formative years on the slopes.
Now he's breaking their records.
Guay won World Cup bronze in the downhill on Sunday for his 21st career podium appearance. That broke the Canadian record by Steve Podborski, a member of the Crazy Canucks team in the 1970s and 80s.
"Those are the racers I grew up watching and admiring," Guay said. "It's special."
Overall World Cup leader Aksel Lund Svindal mastered the fresh snow conditions on the Stelvio course to win a downhill for his fourth victory of the Olympic season.
The Norwegian clocked one minute 54.08 seconds to finish 0.39 seconds ahead of Hannes Reichelt of Austria. Guay was 0.51 seconds back in third, for a strong follow-up to his downhill victory in Val Gardena a week ago.
"On the top it was difficult to be precise because it was soft and you can't push too hard with the edges," Svindal said. "So I just tried to ski the top part really well and then from the San Pietro jump down that's usually where Bormio is decided and that was to my advantage down there."
Svindal trailed Guay at every checkpoint but then gained 0.65 seconds over the last few gates. Guay, from Mont-Tremblant, Que., made a slight but costly error, lifting up his left ski to regain his balance after cutting off a turn too sharply.
"Maybe I got a little bit greedy on the bottom section trying to cut line and I paid for it," Guay said.
Still, Guay has become Svindal's top challenger in the speed events.
"I'm really excited about my skiing at the moment," said Guay, who has had knee surgeries the past two off-seasons. "For the first time I know why I'm fast. It's not like it was a lucky shot in Val Gardena."
The start of the race was delayed for 40 minutes due to fog and low visibility, and overnight snow provided a much softer surface than during the two training sessions Friday and Saturday. It was also snowing on the top half of the course during the race for early starters.
Svindal extended his overall lead ahead of two-time defending champion Marcel Hirscher to 195 points. The Norwegian also leads the downhill standings and is shaping up as the top favourite for the speed events at the Sochi Olympics, which start in 40 days.
Svindal won a medal of each colour at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
Still, he had never won in Bormio and missed out on victory last season by 0.01 -- the smallest margin possible -- when Reichelt and Dominik Paris of Italy shared the victory.
Paris sat out this race as he recovers from a fall in Val Gardena.
"Maybe it wasn't as tough this year because it wasn't so icy but from the San Pietro jump down it was still fast and bumpy," Svindal said, referring to the course's biggest jump midway down. "This is a cool race to win."
Calgary's Jan Hudec was 14th, Manuel Osborne-Paradis of North Vancouver, B.C., was 21st and Conrad Pridy of Whistler, B.C., was 29th. Robbie Dixon of Whistler was 32nd, Benjamin Thomsen of Invermere, B.C., was 37th and Jeffrey Frisch of Mont-Tremblant was 41st.
The top American finisher was Travis Ganong of Squaw Valley, Calif., in 10th, while Bode Miller struggled with the conditions and finished 35th.
"When I went it was dumping snow until halfway down," said Miller, who started 10th. "I couldn't see anything.... I didn't really ski bad."
It was Svindal's 25th career World Cup win, moving him into sole possession of 11th place on the all-time list. One more victory and he'll pull even with Austrian great Franz Klammer for 10th place on the list, which is led by Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark with 86 wins.
"I don't really think about that," Svindal said. "It's just fun to be where I've been the last couple of years, every weekend fighting to win the race. I get to be nervous and excited every weekend."
Just as impressive, Svindal became the first skier from outside Austria or Switzerland to win 20 World Cup speed races -- joining a select group that includes Hermann Maier (39 speed wins), Klammer (25 -- all downhill), Stephan Eberharter (24), Peter Mueller (21) and Pirmin Zurbriggen (21).
Besides his win last year, Reichelt also won a super-G on the Stelvio in 2008.
"Here I know what I have to do to be fast," Reichelt said.
Bormio will also host the next men's race on Jan. 6, a Monday night slalom that was moved from Zagreb due to a lack of snow in Croatia.
A New Year's Day race in Munich was cancelled due to lack of snow.
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With files from The Canadian Press.Opening Day (non-Australian edition) is a mere week and a half away and all will be right with the world again, except the many questions surrounding the Oakland Athletics pitching staff. Oakland took a huge hit this past week when it was announced that projected opening day starter, Jarrod Parker, will miss the entire 2014 season as he is scheduled for Tommy John surgery for the 2nd time in his young career. Couple that with the fact that Scott Kazmir and A.J. Griffin may both start on the disabled list, and the two time defending American League West champs may be in for a bumpy start to the season. They do have some options available to them based on having a ton of depth in the system.
Oakland let Bartolo Colon walk in free agency over the off season and traded last year’s opening day starter, Brett Anderson to the Colorado Rockies. Anderson was often injured last year and was actually pitching out of the bullpen late in the season when he came back so perhaps Oakland wont miss him as much but Losing Colon is huge and may prove to be a fatal decision. Bartolo has transformed himself into a strike throwing, inning eating machine and complied a 3.9 WAR in 2013 while posting career best in ERA 2.65, and FIP 3.2. Like it or not, Colon was the Oakland Athletics best pitcher the past 2 years and now that the injuries are piling up, missing Colon is a huge loss.
All is not lost however, the Athletics have a plan to fill the voids left from Injuries and that plan includes bumping Jesse Chavez and perhaps Drew Pomeranz into the starting rotation, Average baseball fans should remember Drew Pomeranz from the multiple trades he has been involved in, He was part of the Ubaldo Jimenez deal when the Rockies shipped Ubaldo to Cleveland and he was later flipped from Colorado to Oakland for Brett Anderson. Chavez pitched at the big league level last year and has been traded 5 times in his career. Both will be relied upon heavily in the early parts of the season and perhaps in the long term.
Chavez seemed to find his groove last year in Oakland and has looked pretty sharp so far in spring training. Last year he came up and posted a 3.92 ERA alongside a 3.01 FIP. So far in spring training he has a 1.07 ERA over 15 innings pitched. Jesse will strike out nearly 7.5 batters per 9 innings and averages nearly 94 MPH with his fastball.
Most surrounding the Oakland team feel that Jesse will do fine in the rotation if needed but would like to see him return to the pivotal bullpen role he held last year. I think Chavez projects nicely into the Oakland rotation and will more than hold his own for however long he has to fill that starter role. I think with Chavez, he is a case of a pitcher bouncing around until he finds his niche with a certain organization.
Drew Pomeranz has been a different story so far in his young career. He has never really found enough consistency to have an impact at the big league level. In the 136.2 innings pitched at the big level, Drew has struggled while posting a 5.20 ERA alongside a 4.78 FIP. He does strike out 7.5 batters over 9 innings but his nearly 5 walks per 9 innings is something that has to improve very fast if he plans on having success with the Athletics this year. Drew is not going to blow anybody away with his fastball that averages a shade over 91 MPH however the lefty has struck out 14 hitters in just over nine innings and Oakland will be stretching his next few outings out in anticipation of a emergency move to the rotation.
The Oakland Athletics remind me a lot of the Tampa Bay Rays, They can pull and plug pitching that has failed elsewhere into their system and make it work. It is no secret that pitching is what has carried the Athletics the past two years en route to the American League West crown in back to back years but this year their pitching will be tested and tested early. I think it is one of the most intriguing story lines going into this year? Oakland is forced to have Sonny Gray be their opening day starter, which in my opinion is not a bad thing. Chavez and Pomeranz will have to fill the voids left by AJ Griffin and Scott Kazmir until they come back from injuries, but if the past had been any indication, Oakland will be just fine.
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Artifact 5 is a small independent game studio based out of Montreal making weird and surreal story-driven games. We’re a growing team looking for motivated individuals to complete our first game, Anamorphine, and help us create our next super-secret title.
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At Artifact 5 we strive to create game experiences that are unique and reflective of our own special breed of weird + awesome and we want to add new members to the team who can contribute to that! As a small studio, your input is valued in matters beyond your position in the company. Although this call for hire is for a specific position, we are looking for motivated individuals who can contribute in more ways than just their job description to help us grow Artifact 5. Your personality, professionalism, drive, and acumen are welcome and needed to make this family everything it can be.
Deadline for applications: Sunday, January 3, 2016. Start date: Early February.
Send your CV/Portfolio to info+jobs@artifact5.com to applyHelicopter Parents and the End of Childhood Freedom [Warden] I found this 2014 Atlantic article, The Overprotected Kid, and found myself nodding vigorously at the astonishing difference between my childhood and those that my kids are living. Admittedly, I was parented by insanely libertarian minded parents who figured that any day I didn't come home maimed was pretty much a win. Even for the standards of the 70's, my brother and I were given so much latitude that our parents were the black sheep of the neighborhood. Admittedly, I was parented by insanely libertarian minded parents who figured that any day I didn't come home maimed was pretty much a win. Even for the standards of the 70's, my brother and I were given so much latitude that our parents were the black sheep of the neighborhood. There are things I did that I'd never allow my kids to do. My parents were extreme, bordering on neglectful at times. For example, my mom never bothered buying us snow boots even though she could afford to. Nope, sneakers were fine for running around in the snow. Gloves and a hat were optional as well, even on subzero days. I never owned a scarf until my wife bought me one ten years ago. I remain baffled that anyone who doesn't work in life threateningly cold weather would think one a necessity. There are things I did that I'd never allow my kids to do. My parents were extreme, bordering on neglectful at times. For example, my mom never bothered buying us snow boots even though she could afford to. Nope, sneakers were fine for running around in the snow. Gloves and a hat were optional as well, even on subzero days. I never owned a scarf until my wife bought me one ten years ago. I remain baffled that anyone who doesn't work in life threateningly cold weather would think one a necessity. Despite this, I think my childhood was far more enjoyable, adventuresome and healthy than that of my children. And I feel guilty about this. I'm the parent, after all. On the other hand, our current culture makes it nearly impossible, legally, socially, and practically, to expose my kids to the same level of risk and freedom that I enjoyed. Despite this, I think my childhood was far more enjoyable, adventuresome and healthy than that of my children. And I feel guilty about this. I'm the parent, after all. On the other hand, our current culture makes it nearly impossible, legally, socially, and practically, to expose my kids to the same level of risk and freedom that I enjoyed. Looking back, my parents had it pretty damned easy. By the time I was 8 years old, I would ride my bike a mile and a half to the pool in the summer when it opened and not return until close to dinner. At least half of those evenings, I would rush outside to play with friends right after eating. Mom literally saw me for an hour or two a day. Looking back, my parents had it pretty damned easy. By the time I was 8 years old, I would ride my bike a mile and a half to the pool in the summer when it opened and not return until close to dinner. At least half of those evenings, I would rush outside to play with friends right after eating. Mom literally saw me for an hour or two a day. The sound of children was a constant in my old neighborhood. Kids were everywhere outside, playing sports, racing bikes, chasing each other through back yards. Today, in a suburban neighborhood packed with kids, you can't find a single one outside on most weekends. Even if I wanted to encourage my kids to disappear for a few hours, there's no one for them to run around with. The sound of children was a constant in my old neighborhood. Kids were everywhere outside, playing sports, racing bikes, chasing each other through back yards. Today, in a suburban neighborhood packed with kids, you can't find a single one outside on most weekends. Even if I wanted to encourage my kids to disappear for a few hours, there's no one for them to run around with. I'm both saddened and chagrined at the fact that neither of my boys, ages 5 and 10, have every climbed a tree, went creek walking or ran the neighborhood past dark. They've never played kick the can, toilet papered a house or swam in a pond. I'm both saddened and chagrined at the fact that neither of my boys, ages 5 and 10, have every climbed a tree, went creek walking or ran the neighborhood past dark. They've never played kick the can, toilet papered a house or swam in a pond. I'm sensitive to the damage a sheltered life can cause, and I do my best to foster independence where I can. For example, when I take my 5 year old to the supermarket, I let him roam about the store eating sample and searching the discount fruit bin for good deals while talking to employees and sometimes strangers. I'm sensitive to the damage a sheltered life can cause, and I do my best to foster independence where I can. For example, when I take my 5 year old to the supermarket, I let him roam about the store eating sample and searching the discount fruit bin for good deals while talking to employees and sometimes strangers. This never fails to cause some well-meaning adult to inform me that I've lost my kid. "No," I tell them. "he knows where to find me." I usually receive disapproving looks. I wonder what they'd think of my mom, who'd let my brother and I wander off into the toy aisle while she grocery shopped in peace, tasking us with the responsibility to catch up with her at the checkout line when she was finished. They'd likely call the cops on her today. This never fails to cause some well-meaning adult to inform me that I've lost my kid. "No," I tell them. "he knows where to find me." I usually receive disapproving looks. I wonder what they'd think of my mom, who'd let my brother and I wander off into the toy aisle while she grocery shopped in peace, tasking us with the responsibility to catch up with her at the checkout line when she was finished. They'd likely call the cops on her today. It seems that no matter what I do to give my kids more freedom, I'm stymied by other adults. I used to walk my little one into preschool, open the locked, coded door for him, then kiss him goodbye. It was then up to him to hang his coat, fish his folder out of his backpack, wash his hands and make his way into class. It seems that no matter what I do to give my kids more freedom, I'm stymied by other adults. I used to walk my little one into preschool, open the locked, coded door for him, then kiss him goodbye. It was then up to him to hang his coat, fish his folder out of his backpack, wash his hands and make his way into class. That is, it was up to him until a couple of months ago when one of his teachers got upset after finding him "wandering the hallway alone" and asked that I escort him into class. "Otherwise," she said, "we could get into trouble." That is, it was up to him until a couple of months ago when one of his teachers got upset after finding him "wandering the hallway alone" and asked that I escort him into class. "Otherwise," she said, "we could get into trouble." And so my 5 year old had even that small bit of freedom yanked from him. I'm annoyed, but I don't blame the preschool. Everyone is terrified of being sued. And so my 5 year old had even that small bit of freedom yanked from him. I'm annoyed, but I don't blame the preschool. Everyone is terrified of being sued. Even my wife got into the game this past week, freaking out that I left the two boys alone at laser tag for an hour while I went next door for a beer. It was deliberate. I could've gotten a beer inside the laser tag place if I'd wanted to, but I chose to get out of their space. My wife thought this was irresponsible. She's wrong. A 10 year old can look after a 5 year old for an hour in a public place. Even my wife got into the game this past week, freaking out that I left the two boys alone at laser tag for an hour while I went next door for a beer. It was deliberate. I could've gotten a beer inside the laser tag place if I'd wanted to, but I chose to get out of their space. My wife thought this was irresponsible. She's wrong. A 10 year old can look after a 5 year old for an hour in a public place. And so, I continue to fight a desperate and pathetic rear guard action against overwhelming cultural forces. I'll give my kids a few bucks at a sporting event and let them go find the concession stand (and their way back) on their own. I leave them alone at home while I run errands on the weekend. I have my older son cook breakfast for the younger one once or twice a week. And so, I continue to fight a desperate and pathetic rear guard action against overwhelming cultural forces. I'll give my kids a few bucks at a sporting event and let them go find the concession stand (and their way back) on their own. I leave them alone at home while I run errands on the weekend. I have my older son cook breakfast for the younger one once or twice a week. It all seems so inadequate. I can't win and we can't go back to a different time--one without smart phones, organized sports starting at 4 years old, and a pile of rules and regulations for ever conceivable situation. It makes me sad. It all seems so inadequate. I can't win and we can't go back to a different time--one without smart phones, organized sports starting at 4 years old, and a pile of rules and regulations for ever conceivable situation. It makes me sad. Perhaps I'm someone who just can't let go of things. I have dozens of childhood stories of adventure, mischief, recklessness, foolishness and bravery---hours of planning, exploring, competing, fighting, cooperating, exploring, failing and achieving-- all outside the oversight of our parents. I wonder... what childhood stories will my boys tell? Perhaps I'm someone who just can't let go of things. I have dozens of childhood stories of adventure, mischief, recklessness, foolishness and bravery---hours of planning, exploring, competing, fighting, cooperating, exploring, failing and achieving-- all outside the oversight of our parents. I wonder... what childhood stories will my boys tell? Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:55 PM
MuNuvians MeeNuvians Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest Hitjobs News/ChatThe South Korean government has announced that they will open the K-City in October this year. What's special about this 'city' is that it won't have any living citizens, but it will serve as the world's biggest test track for self-driving cars.
The K-City is currently under construction, and when finished, it will have bus-only lanes, expressways, and zones for autonomous parking. The entire area will occupy 360,000 square meters.
The project will cost around $9.7 million, and the self-driving cars can be tested there with or without the temporary operation permit from the government.
The government plans to open the expressway in the K-City in the second half of the year, while the official opening is scheduled for the first half of 2018.
The US already has a similar 'city' located in Michigan - M-City. The 'city' officially opened in July 2015, and in November of the same year, Ford announced that they would be the first car company to use the new facility.We checked out the Tron: Legacy "secret screening" today in Manhattan, along with about 100 other die-hard fans. Here's what we discovered.
The event was part of a viral marketing scheme for the film, which comes out in December. Fans had to sign up and create a profile on the site flynnlives.com and then request tickets at 4pm Friday to get the latest on Tron: Legacy. So all of us had put some effort into this. A motley crowd of mostly die-hard Tron fans was conducted through a gauntlet of security and received "Flynn Lives" t-shirts and 3D glasses. We waited in the IMAX movie theater for about ten minutes while excited discussions ranged all things Tron.
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A hundred or so people were in attendance, with a median age of 30 but outlying teenagers and seniors. At one point, a man announced, "Someone flew in from Toronto just for this!" and a ski-hatted Canadian raised his hand proudly. This prompted a shout-out of "Florida guy right here!" which was followed up by a rather weak "there's a guy here from the Alderaan system" that fell flat amongst the fans. "Did he make it in 12 parsecs or less?" someone finally obliged, but we were not here for Star Wars.
1982's virtual reality hacker/video game cult classic movie Tron, starring grand high cult pooh |
, they were no longer just BASE jumpers, they were friends who I had grown to care for. I was scared that this crazy climb could so easily become an awful tragedy. "I would like it if you came down with us," I said, and Espen just said, "OK." They left their BASE rigs at camp to eliminate the temptation to jump. And so, after a meal, we each set off 20 minutes apart up the fixed ropes. As we gained height the clouds began to clear, and I had one of those "Oh fuck" moments. They could have jumped. After a few hours I arrived at the final pitch, the others forming up one by one behind me as I led the last loose snow and rock up to the summit pyramid. True to the mountain, even the last few meters felt serious and bold. Rock lumps the size of footballs crumbled and fell away as I moved up without any pro. And then I was there: a summit with large fractured pinnacle. I looped the summit horn with the rope to stop me falling off and used my weight to anchor the others. Ulvetanna from the south. The team climbed this aspect in 27 pitches over two weeks, grading their route 5b E2 [5.10] and "AA1+." The "AA," Kirkpatrick explains, stands for "Antarctic Aid," a grade designation he made up to take Antarctica's particular brand of loose rock into account. [Photo] Ingeborg Jakobsen We stood there, atop a new route on what has been called "the hardest mountain in the world" (due mostly to its locality), and I think we all felt the same—flat and sad. If the guys had had their rigs they could have jumped. Conditions were perfect, and the exit was mind-blowing. I felt no sense of achievement. As with all summits, all I wanted was to get the hell out of there. Thirty-six hours after waking, I dragged myself into to base camp, so shattered by the retreat down the wall that, as I skied along, it took all my concentration not to fall over. The heavy swish of plastic on snow no longer seemed to come from the pulk I was pulling. It was the sound of cars, rivers, people talking. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that everyone had made it down alive (and with all their fingers and toes). Alpinist, our small editorial staff works hard to create in-depth stories that are thoughtfully edited, thoroughly fact-checked and beautifully designed. Please consider supporting our efforts by Here at, our small editorial staff works hard to create in-depth stories that are thoughtfully edited, thoroughly fact-checked and beautifully designed. Please consider supporting our efforts by subscribing
advertisement GET THE LATEST ISSUEBarnes” “football bible” has evolved over his 11 years as Sunderland”s match commentator
Behind every great football match is a great commentator, and in front of every commentator is a set of notes. BBC Radio Newcastle’s Nick Barnes and NBC Sports’ Arlo White have some of the best—and most unique—in the business.
In this extended issue 05 feature, we present a side of the commentary booth rarely seen. Check back tomorrow for part II, featuring Arlo White, exclusively on The Pitch.
All photographs by Henrik Knudsen for Eight by Eight.
Despite the hours that Barnes pours into each page, he uses his notes only sparingly during actual gameplay. “They are there purely as a crutch and a point of reference if need be,” he said. “If I was a newspaper online casino reporter, I could keep my match reports, but radio is transient, so my notebook is my personal record of the matches I cover.” Barnes creates a detailed two-page spread for each match he commentates for BBC Radio Newcastle. The notes are divided into two color-coded segments: The left-hand page contains background information on Sunderland’s opposition—the club’s starting XI from its last fixture, previous results, and stadium details—while the right-hand side is updated in real time as the action happens. Sometimes the action gets ahead of Barnes’s pen and paper. “There have been a couple of occasions when I’ve been writing something down during the match and there has been a goal or an incident,” he said. “Then I have to thank [Gary Bennett, Barnes’s co-commentator] for being beside me or the monitor which will hopefully replay it.”Youtube competitor Viuly is pleased to announce the airdrop of 458 000 000 tokens to over 960 000 Ethereum holders is now complete, with the decentralized blockchain video platform viuly.io scheduled to connect to the mainnet on December 15th.
Blockchain based video platform Viuly is excited to announce its airdrop of VIU tokens to over 960 000 Ethereum holders is now complete; the initiative is aimed at driving mass adoption of the decentralized video platform at viuly.io which is powered by the VIU token. Everyone who had some ETH in their Ethereum wallets when the snapshot was taken on November 5th can view their tokens in their wallet by using the following settings to add a custom token:
Address: 0x519475b31653E46D20cD09F9FdcF3B12BDAcB4f5
Name: VIU
Decimals: 18
The alpha of the video platform at viuly.io currently has over 40 000 registered members, and over 10 000 unique visitors daily, with over 2500 video channels created so far.
As soon as the decentralized video platform is connected to the mainnet on December 15th, advertisers will be able to buy VIU on exchanges and use them to advertise their video, pre-roll video ads, and banner ads on the platform. Content creators and video uploaders will also be able to withdraw their VIU token earnings and trade them on supported exchange platforms.
Viuly is currently trading for BTC and ETH on Bit-z: https://www.bit-z.com/trade/viu_btc and Etherdelta at: https://etherdelta.com/#VIU-ETH
More supported exchange platforms are coming soon.
The Viuly team is inviting advertisers to test out the video platform, as well as inviting youtubers to also upload their videos on Viuly’s decentralized video platform, to begin to earn more from their videos.
About Viuly
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Viuly is the source of this content. This press release is for informational purposes only and should not be viewed as an endorsement by CoinIdol. We take no responsibility and give no guarantees, warranties or representations, implied or otherwise, for the content or accuracy. Readers should do their own research before investing funds in any company.Theresa Mah spent the first part of her career studying history, but now she is on the cusp of making it. Mah will be running unopposed in this November’s general election to represent the 2nd District—which includes Chinatown, Bridgeport, and Pilsen—in the Illinois House of Representatives. If she wins, she will be the first-ever Asian American legislator in the Illinois General Assembly. In this interview, the McKinley Park resident shares her thoughts about where she has been and where she is headed.
You come from two generations of US immigrants: Your grandfather was a paper son [a Chinese-born immigrant who obtained citizenship by using fraudulent documents], and your parents immigrated to the U.S. and are small business owners. What lessons have you learned from this as you’ve made your way through your public service career?
The main thing I learned is that communities, especially those that are oppressed, have to form coalitions and come together and help each other. There has to be some kind of mutual assistance mechanism to fight for the community’s rights. The community that I come from in San Francisco was able to fight for survival and advocate for the things they needed when they came together, [through] networks of family and district and surname associations. Those were the organizations that were necessary in order to ensure immigrant survival. Especially [for] folks like my grandfather, who was a laborer and worked low-wage jobs. He was part of a wave of immigration that really wasn’t supposed to be in the United States. I grew up in that environment and saw my dad’s involvement [in these organizations], and that was a great example of civic engagement and community leadership from an early age. Learning about the immigrant experience was really important to me as well because, amazingly enough, here we are in 2016, and we’re still fighting for a lot of the same issues. The effort to ensure that people are able to live productive lives and earn a fair wage…and have an experience of justice and fairness—those are still things that we need to work on and fight about.
How do you think being Asian American today differs from being Asian American in previous generations?
I had the benefit of taking Asian American studies classes when I was at Berkeley, and so I know that we do have very different experiences today, compared to my grandfather’s days. Those were the days of outright racism, where people would get beaten and stoned on the streets. My dad would tell me about San Francisco’s Chinatown and how there were certain boundaries, like Broadway, where if the Chinese community ventured beyond those areas, there would be white ethnic gangs that would beat them up. [Asian Americans] don’t necessarily experience that on a widespread level today, but it’s important to understand that that was an experience that our forebears went through. There is perhaps a tendency in our community to embrace a model minority myth. But even though the racism against Asian Americans is not as blatant as [it was] a hundred years ago, it’s still there. There are all kinds of egregious examples of racial injustice perpetrated against African Americans. We have to have an understanding of that and be a part of the fight against it.
What have you seen or experienced in terms of race relations between the Asian American and the African American communities, and what are ways in which you plan to build solidarity in the neighborhoods that you represent?
Sometimes there are tensions, and there are fears and misunderstandings. But as I said before I think it’s important that we build relationships between the communities and make sure that we don’t do anything that exacerbates the racism that already exists. My hope is that we’re able to understand that we have more in common than we have differences. There has to be a unified approach to trying to address these structural problems in our society. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot, but it’s just not that easy to get people to understand how to move forward on it. The efforts that I’ve seen, for example, of Asian Americans writing letters to their parents about Black Lives Matter. That’s important. We need to support efforts like that to build understanding with the immigrant generation, or new immigrants who just arrived, and to get them to understand that there’s no way that being anti-black is going to get rid of racism.
How do you think you’ll be able to increase lines of communication in your role as a representative?
Recently, one of my supporters told me about an incident that happened to him in Chinatown, where some thieves broke into his car and stole a significant amount of money. It seemed like an organized effort, where these two guys drove into a parking lot, and one was serving as a lookout and the other broke into his car and stole two cell phones and a good amount of money. There happened to be surveillance video of that and it showed that it was two Chinese people. So I made a point of bringing that up to the Chinese media and at the Chinatown safety meeting—that our common assumption is that when there is criminal behavior, it’s always people outside of Chinatown coming in. And the assumption is that the criminals are always black. We should not hold on to those assumptions as closely as we do because we let our guard down and we actually decrease our awareness and our public safety when we make those assumptions because people who are involved in crime will come from all different backgrounds. I don’t think that I would necessarily have a problem speaking out about my support of immigration reform or supporting the black community and their efforts. Those are issues that the Chinese community doesn’t necessarily think of as relevant to them. But [they are], and I think that’s something that I can continue to remind them about whenever an opportunity arises.
You’ve really prided your campaign in being able to bring out voters who have never even thought about engaging in politics. What issues have galvanized first time voters to start getting involved, and generally how have you encouraged first-time voters and typically apolitical constituents to get involved in community issues beyond voting?
The Chinese American population in my district has been growing steadily over the last 10–20 years. When a community grows that dramatically, it becomes really clear when there’s no representation at any level in politics. People felt very strongly that they wanted somebody to represent them, to look like them, to understand their issues, the language. And that was a huge motivating factor for a lot of these first-time voters, who had become citizens but never saw the need to really vote because they didn’t’ have anybody who was like them. So I think just at a very simple level, having someone that they could relate to was really important for them.
And then over the years, I’ve been involved in community organizing efforts, [which were] really important too because it takes a lot to organize a community to push for something like a resource like a library and more recently the 31st Street bus [restored by the CTA for a pilot program this fall]. But when you finish with that or you have a successful campaign, there’s something there for you to show the community, and there’s a tangible accomplishment for them to look forward to. They can see the fruits of their own involvement.
Public education funding seems to be an issue that you care really deeply about. In the past you’ve talked about reforming the way that K–12 schools are funded and moving away from the property tax model. You also voice support for increasing MAP funding for public universities like Chicago State. How do you plan to push these issues forward in a political environment that is as fraught as that of the Illinois General Assembly?
The effort to redo the funding formula so that it relies less on property taxes is already something that is being worked on in the general assembly. There’s a bill by Senator Andy Manar that is trying to address those reforms. I will probably end up working with him on that. It’ll be a challenge…to come up with a formula that the majority of people can be satisfied with.
I’ll also be someone who is in support of changing our progressive tax structure so that working people don’t bear a disproportionate burden for bringing in the revenue that we need to support these programs and education. I think it’s time that we tried to work toward a more fair revenue system so that people who are wealthier pay their fair share. I talked a lot about that during the campaign, and it’s something that I will continue to push in the legislature. It’s something that we’re going to hear more about because we do need to come up with some structural changes and revenue is a top priority because right now, we don’t have enough. It’s a struggle to serve the people we need to serve and to maintain the programs that are necessary, so we’re going to have to have some of these challenging conversations about where we bring in the revenue and how we allocate the money that we have so that we can support public education.
Your dissertation at University of Chicago was on housing segregation. How has your academic research influenced your jump to doing public service? How have you thought about your platform and steps moving forward?
Studying housing segregation was an important lesson in understanding the power of public policy and how it literally shaped this time that we live in. When I was working in Chinatown as a community advocate, I was able to get something done, but it became really clear that there’s a limit to what one can get done and how much change you’re able to affect. And so that eventually convinced me that I have to take this leap and run for office so that I could legitimately have a seat at the table and have a say in the decisions that are being made that affect our communities. The funding formula for education [for example] is directly related to the history of housing segregation. The reason you have communities with low property values and very low revenue from property taxes is because you have this whole period of white flight from urban areas. People moved out to the suburbs and left the central cities with very little population and areas that were economically devastated and a public school system that serviced mostly black and brown students. The legacy of housing segregation and racial inequality in this country that we see reflected in unequal funding to education that continues and is reinforced through public policy. Because I have an awareness of that, I want to try and change it.
People look at me and they see a Chinese American, and then they fill in whatever idea they have about what it means to be Asian American. But I think that my personal background is pretty unusual, and I grew up with a range of multiracial and multiethnic influences that are not that apparent unless you learn more about me. I spent my childhood up until my teen years growing up in a black neighborhood and working in my family’s small business. That was the experience that led me to look more closely at racial segregation and housing segregation. I’ve always been really focused on or interested in understanding the effects of racial inequality in our country’s history. And I’m committed in various ways to dismantle that…[and] to achieve greater equality for everyone. For me, what it means to be Asian American is to be committed to working in solidarity with other racial and ethnic groups to address issues of racial inequality in this country that we all experience, and that we all have a responsibility to work on and improve.Breaking News: Trinidad Scorpion Moruga tests at over 2 million scoville units!
As of June 4 2011 the official Guinness World’s Record page has been updated and recognizes the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T” as the hottest pepper in the world.
Meet the Butch T Trinidad Scorpion chilli pepper:
Here’s a great ButchT TS taste test video(some foul language):
And another:
And another…
And one more…
These are the best Trinidad Scorpion Butch T pictures (taken by POTAWIE) I’ve seen:
Butch T Trinidad Scorpion Facts and Information
– The record setting Butch T Trinidad Scorpion tested at 1,463,700 SHU (SHU = scoville heat units). The current official Guinness record holder is the Naga Viper pepper which tested at 1,382,118 scoville heat units.
– The record setting Butch T Scorpion was grown in Australia by The Chilli Factory.
– The Hippy Seed Company supplied the seeds to the Chilli Factory that were used to grow the 1,463,700 SHU ButchT Trinidad Scorpions.
– The name ButchT or Butch T is after Butch Taylor. Butch is the owner of Zydeco Hot Sauce and person credited with originally discovering this strain. According to a post in this thread Butch was growing out the the Jonah strain, noticed a pod variation and saved the seed. He’s been sharing the seeds for a few years. When sending out seeds Butch would include his first name last initial (common when swapping seeds) on the seed package.
Photo by OMRI
– According to a comment in this post from Butch he originally acquired the seeds from a seed bank and they had been sent to that bank by ” “Mark” from New Jersey, he used to go by the username of Groovyone on the old gardenweb site”. Learn more about the origin of the Butch T seeds here – The Trail of the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T” Strain.
Trinidad Scorpion Butch T Seeds
If you’re in to hot peppers you will at some point want to grow this fireball. Here are a few places that may have the ButchT TS seeds for sale. No guarantees and important to note I have not personally ordered seeds from any of these suppliers unless otherwise noted.
– The Hippy Seed Company
– Refining Fire Chiles
– Super Hot Chiles
– Amazon
– Local Harvest
– Try my Ordering Pepper Seeds search engine.
– Check the list I maintain at thehotpepper.com
– Make a post in the buy/sell pepper seeds section at thehotpepper.com and see if anyone will hook you up.
If you sell ButchT Trinidad Scorpion Chilli seeds leave a comment with your info below and I’ll add you to this list.
Trinidad Scorpion Butch T Plants
Refining Fire Chiles
If you sell Trinidad Scorpion Butch T plants leave a comment with your info below and I’ll add you to this list
Trinidad Scorpion Butch T Discussions
– Butch T is the Hottest
– Trinidad Scorpion Butch T – Worlds Hottest Pepper
– New Record Broken Again!
– BeagleStorm vs. The Trinidad Scorpion Butch T Chile
– naganumbness eats the butch T scorpion
– ButchT Scorps
– ButchT Scorpion Sauce
– Trinidad Scorpion ButchT (video review)
– First Image of the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T”
– Special Presentation…The Hottest Chilli In The World the “ButchT Trinidad Scorpion”
– NEW worlds hottest chilli (registration required, page 7/8 is where ButchT discussion kicks in)
– Passow Eats The Trinidad Scorpion (2009 Post w/comments from Butch Taylor)
– News from Australia Trinidad Scorpion New Record 1,463,700 SHU’s
– Trinidad Scorpion the Newly Crowned King of Hot Peppers
– Butch T tops out 1.46 million
– Trinidad Scorpion Butch T and The Chilli Factory
– Trinidad Scorpion Butch T – The World’s Hottest Chile Pepper Coverage
– Trinidad Scorpion Butch T / Verified Hottest?
– Interview with Butch Taylor
– Trinidad Scorpion Official Guinness World Records Holder at 1,463,700 SHU
– Butch T it’s now official…Guinness official!!
– The Trail Of the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T” Strain
Lastly here’s a link to another post here at the ThePepperSeed, The Hottest Peppers in the World. While not specially about the ButchT TS it is mentioned in the list and there are links and other related info in the comments section.Image: Johan McCubbin
To pry money out of people online, you don't necessarily need to craft an emotional Kickstarter campaign or plead for them to donate to your Patreon. Sometimes, all you need to shake down a decent number of folks is a well-placed curiosity gap.
"How Many People Paid A Dollar To See How Many People Paid A Dollar?," a website created this spring by software developer Johan McCubbin, is very good at taking money using nothing but the aforementioned question and a PayPal link. That's all it is: You give your dollar, and in return, you find out how many other schmucks also forked over a buck.
"There's so many stupidly simple ideas out there that could potentially be lucrative," McCubbin told me in an email. He was inspired by the "Million Dollar Homepage" from 2005, which sold space for one dollar per pixel. "I find the concept of'selling nothing for something' really interesting."
He said he was hoping to just break even on the domain name and hosting fees, but the results have been much better than he expected.
"Sometimes it's quiet with no payments for a week or so, and then it gets shared somewhere on social media and goes boom!" Occasionally, someone will write to him and ask for a refund, which he'll give if there was a processing error or some similar glitch. "Otherwise, you get what you paid for and you paid for what was advertised," he said.
Trying this myself, I encountered an odd loop—for every dollar I gave, it asked for another. I gave this website three of my own hard-earned dollars before asking McCubbin, "Am I doing something wrong, or am I part of the experiment?" He tells me it's not meant to loop, and when another Motherboarder tested it, it worked as promised, revealing the number of people who'd given a dollar. I won't tell you the number so as not to spoil the experience, but it is more than anyone has any right to make off of a website running one line of text and a PayPal link.
I'll never get those three dollars, or my dignity, back again.Happy Haloday!
I had a bigger a pinu-up planned for today, but couldn't finish it on time :[ So I came with this sketch!
For the first time in my life I won't be able to play Halo right away, or any time soon. That's because my Xbox is no more. I mean, I never had a Xbox to call my own. My cousin did, and for a long time we kept a gentleman agreement: He would land me the console and I would buy all the cool games for him, basicaly Halo, ME and Gears. We honored our agreement 'till recently, when he moved. And I was left with nothing. No Xbox, no Halo games, no reason to live for...
I KID. Yet, I'm super duper sad. I'll have to wait to play Halo 4, and only the gods know for how long. But that doesn't mean I can't get all excited about, right?
Love you, Chief! ;d
Fly them Pelicans, you guys!Before we go on to explore this most recent and most extreme instance in a long string of record-shattering global temperatures, we should take a moment to credit our climate change denier ‘friends’ for what’s happening in the Earth System.
For decades now, a coalition of fossil fuel special interests, big money investors, related think tanks, and the vast majority of the republican party have fought stridently to prevent effective action to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. In their mad quest, they have attacked science, demonized leaders, gridlocked Congress, hobbled government, propped up failing fossil fuels, prevented or dismantled helpful regulation, turned the Supreme Court into a weapon against renewable energy solutions, and toppled industries that would have helped to reduce the damage.
Through these actions, they have been successful in preventing the necessary and rapid shift away from fossil fuel burning, halting a burgeoning American leadership in renewable energy, and in flooding the world with the low-cost coal, oil, and gas that is now so destructive to Earth System stability. Now, it appears that some of the more dangerous impacts of climate change are already locked in. So when history looks back and asks — why were we so stupid? We can honestly point our fingers to those ignoramuses and say ‘here were the infernal high priests who sacrificed a secure future and our children’s safety on the altar of their foolish pride.’
Worst Fears For Global Heating Realized
We knew there’d be trouble. We knew that human greenhouse gas emissions had loaded the world ocean up with heat. We knew that a record El Nino would blow a big chunk of that heat back into the atmosphere as it began to fade. And we knew that more global temperature records were on the way in late 2015 and early 2016. But I have to say that the early indications for February are just staggering.
(The GFS model shows temperatures averaged 1.01 C above the already significantly hotter than normal 1981-2010 baseline. Subsequent observations from separate sources have confirmed this dramatic February temperature spike. We await NASA, NOAA, and JMA observations for a final confirmation. But the trend in the data is amazingly clear. What we’re looking at is the hottest global temperatures since record keeping began by a long shot. Note that the highest temperature anomalies appear exactly where we don’t want them — the Arctic. Image source: GFS and M. J. Ventrice.)
Eric Holthaus and M. J. Ventrice on Monday were the first to give warning of an extreme spike in temperatures as recorded by the Global satellite record. A slew of media reports followed. But it wasn’t until today that we really began to get a clear look at the potential atmospheric damage.
Nick Stokes, a retired climate scientist and blogger over at Moyhu, published an analysis of the recently released preliminary data from NCAR and the indicator is just absolutely off the charts high. According to this analysis, February temperatures may have been as much as 1.44 C hotter than the 1951 to 1980 NASA baseline. Converting to departures from 1880s values, if these preliminary estimates prove correct, would put the GISS figure at an extreme 1.66 C hotter than 1880s levels for February. If GISS runs 0.1 C cooler than NCAR conversions, as it has over the past few months, then the 1880 to February 2016 temperature rise would be about 1.56 C. Both are insanely high jumps that hint 2016 could be quite a bit warmer than even 2015.
It’s worth noting that much of these record high global temperatures are centered on the Arctic — a region that is very sensitive to warming and one that has the potential to produce a number of dangerous amplifying feedbacks. So we could well characterize an impending record warm February as one in which much of the excess heat exploded into the Arctic. In other words — the global temperature anomaly graphs make it look like the world’s roof is on fire. That’s not literal. Much of the Arctic remains below freezing. But 10-12 C above average temperature anomalies for an entire month over large regions of the Arctic is a big deal. It means that large parts of the Arctic haven’t experienced anything approaching a real Arctic Winter this year.
Looks Like The 1.5 C Threshold Was Shattered in the Monthly Measure and We May Be Looking at 1.2 to 1.3 C+ Above 1880s For all of 2016
Putting these numbers into context, it looks like we may have already crossed the 1.5 C threshold above 1880s values in the monthly measure during February. This is entering a range of high risk for accelerating Arctic sea ice and snow melt, albedo loss, permafrost thaw and a number of other related amplifying feedbacks to a human-forced heating of our world. A set of changes that will likely add to the speed of an already rapid fossil fuel based warming. But we should be very clear that monthly departures are not annual departures and the yearly measure for 2016 is less likely to hit or exceed a 1.5 C departure. It’s fair to say, though, that 1.5 C annual departures are imminent and will likely appear within 5-20 years.
If we use the 1997-1998 El Nino year as a baseline, we find that global temperatures for that event peaked at around 1.1 C above 1880s averages during February. The year, however, came in at about 0.85 C above 1880s averages. Using a similar back of napkin analysis, and assuming 2016 will continue to see Equatorial sea surface temperatures continue to cool, we may be looking at a 1.2 to 1.3 C above 1880s average for this year.
(El Nino is cooling down. But will it continue to linger through 2016? Climate Prediction Center CFSv2 model ensembles seem to think so. The most recent run shows the current El Nino restrengthening through Fall of 2016. Such an event would tend to push global annual temperatures closer to the 1.5 C above 1880s threshold. It would also set in place the outside potential for another record warm year in 2017. It’s worth noting that the NOAA consensus is still for ENSO Neutral to weak La Nina conditions by Fall. Image source: NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.)
NOAA is currently predicting that El Nino will transition to ENSO neutral or a weak la Nina by year end. However, some model runs show that El Nino never really ends for 2016. Instead, these models predict a weak to moderate El Nino come Fall. In 1998, a strong La Nina began to form — which would have helped to suppress atmospheric temperatures by year-end. The 2016 forecast, however, does not seem to indicate quite as much atmospheric cooling assistance coming from the world ocean system. So end 2016 annual averages may push closer to 1.3 C (or a bit higher) above 1880s levels.
We’ve Had This Warming in the System for a While, It was Just Hiding Out in the Oceans
One other bit of context we should be very clear on is that the Earth System has been living with the atmospheric heat we’re now seeing for a while. The oceans began a very rapid accumulation of heat due to greenhouse gas emissions forcing during the 2000s. A rate of heat accumulation in the world’s waters that has accelerated through to this year. This excess heat has already impacted the climate system by speeding the destabilization of glaciers in the basal zone in Greenland and Antarctica. And it has also contributed to new record global sea ice losses and is a likely source of reports from the world’s continental shelf zones that small but troubling clathrate instabilities have been observed.
(Global ocean heat accumulation has been on a high ramp since the late 1990s with 50 percent of the total heat accumulation occurring in the 18 years from 1997 though 2015. Since more than 90 percent of the greenhouse gas heat forcing ends up in the world ocean system, this particular measure is probably the most accurate picture of a rapidly warming world. Such a swift accumulation of heat in the world’s oceans guaranteed that the atmosphere would eventually respond. The real question now is — how fast and far? Image source: Nature.)
But pushing up atmospheric heating will have numerous additional impacts. It will put pressure on the surface regions of global glaciers — adding to the basal melt pressure jump we’ve already seen. It will further amplify the hydrological cycle — increasing the rates of evaporation and precipitation around the world and amplifying extreme droughts, wildfires and floods. It will increase peak global surface temperatures — thereby increasing the incidence of heatwave mass casualty events. It will provide more latent heat energy for storms — continuing to push up the threshold of peak intensity for these events. And it will help to accelerate the pace of regional changes to climate systems such as weather instability in the North Atlantic and increasing drought tendency in the US (especially the US Southwest).
Entering the Climate Change Danger Zone
The 1-2 C above 1880s temperatures range we are now entering is one in which dangerous climate changes will tend to grow more rapid and apparent. Such atmospheric heat has not been experienced on Earth in at least 150,000 years and the world then was a much different place than what human beings were used to in the 20th Century. However, the speed at which global temperatures are rising is much more rapid than anything seen during any interglacial period for the last 3 million years and is probably even more rapid than the warming seen during hothouse extinction events like the PETM and the Permian. This velocity of warming will almost certainly have added effects outside of the paleoclimate context.
(Anyone looking at the temperature anomaly graph on the top of this post can see that a disproportionate amount of the global temperature anomaly is showing up in the Arctic. But the region of the High North above the 80 degree Latitude line is among the regions experiencing global peak anomalies. There, degree days below freezing are at the lowest levels ever recorded — now hitting a -800 anomaly in the Arctic record. In plain terms — the less degree days below freezing the High Arctic experiences, the closer it is to melting. Image source: CIRES/NOAA.)
One final point to be clear on is then worth repeating. We, by listening to climate change deniers and letting them gum up the political and economic works, have probably already locked in some of the bad effects of climate change that could have been prevented. The time for pandering to these very foolish people is over. The time for foot-dragging and half-measures is now at an end. We need a very rapid response. A response that, at this point, is still being delayed by the fossil fuel industry and the climate change deniers who have abetted their belligerence.
Links:
The Old Normal is Now Gone
NASA GISS
Hot, Hot, Hot
Michael J. Ventrice
No Winter for the Arctic in 2016
Big Jump in Surface and Satellite Temperature Measures
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center
Industrial Era Global Ocean Heat Uptake Doubles in Recent Decades
CIRES/NOAA
Republican Governors Sue to Stop Clean Power Plan
AdvertisementsFrom Left to Right: Keisha Howard, Fruzsina Eördögh, Margaret M. Ogarek and Adam M. Messinger. Howard answers a question during the "Game Over?" panel. (William Castro)
One hundred and fifty-five million Americans play video games, 44 percent of them are female, according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). Yet, female gamers are often the targets of brutal harassment and bullying and even excluded from the video game industry itself.
On Nov. 24, a group of experts on digital culture and justice studies discussed the roles gender and misogyny play in the video game industry and community at the “Game Over?” panel hosted in the Angelina Pedroso Center.
#Gamergate — as it is referred to — is a single smear campaign that brought a dark perspective that would highlight the degradation and alienation of one gender in the history of video games. Within the panel, instances of insulting posts and dark imagery were displayed about the treatment of women in video games through slides.
The event was organized by Adam Mess |
Mysterio in his own game: “He’s quick, fast,” Teague says. “A high-flyer, fun to watch.”
Cross-sport comparisons are tricky, but when it comes to sheer entertainment value, Teague’s got a point. While Mysterio makes his money flying around a wrestling ring smashing heads in, Teague makes his by flying around a basketball court breaking ankles en route to easy buckets.
If you were somehow still sleeping on JT’s talents, the 2014 NBA Playoffs were a convenient snooze button. After dropping a career Playoff-high 28 points to shock the East’s top-seeded Pacers in Game 1 of the first round, Teague helped Atlanta push Indiana to seven grueling games, averaging 19 ppg along the way. Ultimately, the Pacers fought back to win the series, but the way Teague carved up Indy’s much-lauded D had the national audience finally showing love. Regular season averages of 16.5 points, 6.7 assists and 2.6 boards per game hardly begin to illuminate what he means to the Hawks.
Last season, Teague’s first under new head coach Mike Budenholzer, the 6-2 point man took the kind of strides Atlanta hoped he might when the team matched a four-year, $32 million offer sheet dangled his way by Milwaukee last July. Now, Budenholzer is hoping to mold Teague into a leader like Tony Parker, with whom he worked for TP’s entire career in San Antonio. With the way he gets in the paint and sets up his teammates, while still leading his team in scoring many nights, it’s not hard to view Teague as a young Parker. Only one problem.
In June, Teague took to Twitter and typed, “Yo boy getting old.”
Wait, what?
He laughs. “I’m in there, in the gym today, and Dennis Schroeder and John Jenkins and them guys are in there, and I’m like, damn, these are the young guys,” explains Teague, who at just 26 years old is preparing for his sixth NBA season, all with the Hawks. “When Dennis Schroeder told me he was 19 last summer, I was like, OK, I’m the old guy. I was the young guy in the locker room not too long ago.”
The self-proclaimed old head speaks via cell phone from a barbershop in downtown Atlanta, where he’s getting his coif correct before heading out for Fourth of July weekend at Lake Lanier with the family. He thinks back to his formative years; Teague grew up quick on the basketball court. Coming up in Indianapolis, Jeff’s father Shawn would routinely drag him to men’s leagues games to face guys twice (sometimes three times) his age.
Besides his pops, who played point guard at Missouri and later Boston University—under a young head coach named Rick Pitino, and alongside Kyrie Irving’s father, Drederick—Teague says he didn’t model his game after any player in particular. But there was one who caught his eye.
“I liked Jason Williams, White Chocolate. That’s the only player I really was, like, in awe of when I got a chance to meet him, because that’s a guy I really liked to watch,” says Teague, who still has a vivid memory of matching up with JWill during his rookie season. “It was cool. I had to pressure him full court. He was a little older, playing for the Magic at the time, so he wasn’t as fast and as crafty with the ball as he was in his younger days. I was a little nervous, still.”
The nerves Teague felt matching up against Williams and his ball-on-a-string handle aren’t unlike the anxiety opponents undoubtedly feel checking the Hotlanta point guard these days. Or at least, they should. Just ask Teague’s little brother, Marquis, who fell victim to a killer crossover in the fourth quarter of an early April game in Brooklyn this past season, and was left crumpled on the floor near the free-throw line.
On a nightly basis, Teague is one of the League’s top candidates to shake a helpless defender right out of his shoes. Ironic, since he’s also one of the L’s biggest sneakerheads, once claiming to own upwards of 4,000 pairs of kicks.
“I’ve got shoes everywhere. At my mother’s house, I have a room full, a garage full. At my house here in Atlanta, there are shoes everywhere, I can’t lie—downstairs, upstairs,” Teague says. “When I had my first house here in Atlanta, I know I had close to 1,500 pairs. At my mom’s house, it’s bananas, I don’t know how many I have there.”
Since inking with the three stripes during the 2012-13 season, the majority of that collection has been transformed into adidas. Teague says he’s partial to the Mutombos, anything by Jeremy Scott, and old-school shell toes when it comes to off-court style. As for business attire, he’s already beaming about the Crazylight Boost’s incredible comfort.
“Everything is top notch, everything is A-1,” Teague says of his experience as an adidas athlete. “When I was growing up, I’d never see people with adidas. But now, it’s like the thing to wear. If you’ve got a fresh pair of adidas, you’re labeled as a poppin’ person. Now, everyone is wearing adidas.”
Even pro wrestlers.Your browser does not support iframes.
NEW YORK -- Metta World Peace joined the millions of New Yorkers taking the subway to work on Wednesday.
World Peace took the F train to Madison Square Garden for his Knicks debut. World Peace, who signed with the Knicks in the offseason, grew up in Queensbridge and played at St. John's.
"As a hard-working New Yorker," World Peace said of his ride. "You know how we do it."
World Peace took the F Train from the 21 St.-Queensbridge stop to the 34 St.-Herald Square stop in Manhattan, and then walked about five minutes to reach the Garden. World Peace said he wasn't really noticed by fellow passengers, joking that they wanted to get home and were listening to music.
"It was a focused ride. Had to get ready for the game, but it was cool," World Peace said. "First time for that. It was an experience. Something I always thought I would do."
The veteran says he may take the train to work again.
"Ya'll know it's easier to travel on the train. [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg has too many rules on the street," World Peace joked. "Can't even make a right turn."
Garden debut: Once at the Garden, World Peace was greeted with a nice ovation from the fans during pregame introductions, and he said teammates Amar'e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony asked him to speak to the crowd before the game. He kept his message brief, before finally getting to don a uniform that he had hoped to wear 14 years ago.
World Peace scored four points and grabbed four rebounds in the Knicks' season-opening 90-83 win over the Bucks.
"It was cool. It was a good experience," World Peace said of his debut. "We got first preseason game out the way, first regular season game out of the way, now all of the excitement out of the way, and now we can get down to play basketball."
Home, finally: In the 1999 Draft, the Knicks passed on World Peace, a St. John's product, for notorious bust Frederic Weis. World Peace, then known as Ron Artest, went to Chicago one pick later. The veteran remembers having on pink slippers and Knicks shorts underneath his suit on the day of the draft.
He said before the game he was not sure if he would have been able to handle playing in front of his hometown crowd back in 1999, but he feels he's now ready to help out the Knicks.
"I was still in this transition of figuring what this 19-year old was going to be, who he was going to be. That took a long time to figure out that," World Peace said. "I figured that out, OK, I'm ready to come home and play basketball. But it was tough coming out of St. John's going to Chicago."——————————————————-
23 February 2007
Why marriage can be a chore for women
PDF
Single women who are desperate to shed their Bridget Jones status are warned today of a major pitfall of finding their man. Research shows that getting married prompts a 50 per cent increase in housework.
I doubt it, most women don’t do housework and they have gadgets (invented by men) that take the load off. Even if this is true, they fail to mention marriage often means a 50% to 100% drop in proper work.
And what about men’s major increase in workload and massive drop in freedom and having money to spend on himself without asking for permission from ‘er indoors (not to mention a 50% to 100% drop in sex.)
Check out these comments from a couple of women:
I certainly agree with this report but I didn’t realise there was an upside to doing all the chores – next time I feel like moaning as I’m doing all the housework, I’ll just remember that I’m actually shortening his life and my golden years won’t have half as many chores! – Claire, Dorset, UK
The solution is simple but there are two rules: 1) Marry a man who works away during the week, thus he can get his dry cleaning and meals dealt with 2) Make sure he has a mother who loves ironing his shirts. She will be offended if she can’t continue to do so. Therefore your life has no extra domestic duties, you can go out on a Thursday night with friends and husband can come back to a stress free home on Friday (rugrats not included). I did this. Still divorced him three years later. – Diane, Harrogate,
That, my brothers, is how fucking cold-hearted most modern women are; they hope for their husbands to kick the bucket (and are happy to know they’re helping him along the way by nagging him into slaving away at work) and will divorce a husband for the fun of it even if he’s done nothing wrong.
The above attitudes are honestly common amongst most women. Many are just good at hiding it.
And manginas and feminists, stupid fucks that they are, honestly wonder why so many men now have such a contemptuous attitude towards women. It’s called Karma. Deal with it cunts.
posted by Duncan Idaho @ 7:26 PM
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At 3:22 AM, Anonymous said…
Look at all those pathetic, whiny cunts pissing and moaning and lamenting…
Haaaahahahahaha…..
If they even knew how to operate any type of household machinery they would be effing dangerous!
None of them can even lift a vacuum cleaner or attach the fucking hoses or attachments onto them. They just grunt and struggle. None of them can even rinse the dishes off before loading the dishwasher. ‘Tis truly comical to merely catch a glimpse of a femmie try to clean up.
Every single one of them washes clothing with the hottest water available, destroying the fabric after just a few washings. Every fabric need a certain washing temperature to preserve the strength of the fabric. Just look at the settings on a wash machine in a laundromat after a female has finished using it. All the settings slammed up to the max. The dryer heat is fully maxed out, shrinking the material to shit, causing the stitching to snap and unravel.
I’ve seen all this enough times to know that it’s true. The slightest common sense from a man doing any domestic chore will easily out-perform any female.
Check out the single bitch’s house or apartment, guys. They live like the same pigs they claim we are. Talk about projection….
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At 9:22 AM, HAWKEYE said…
tell me about it
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At 11:13 AM, Anonymous said…
I don’t expect the Daily Femail to post my comment as per the usual so I’m leaving it here as well.
This is what Suzy from Tewkesbury writes (emphasis mine): ‘….he has to vac the house before he is allowed (sic!) to go to the pub….’. And this is what she writes a few lines later: ‘Marriage is about sharing (sic!)…’ That’s her idea of “sharing”: do as you’re ***** told!! How self-deluded do you have to be to believe both at the same time? In case you’re still wondering why there is a Marriage Strike coming to a neighbourhood near you, Suzy has just given you the answer.
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At 5:02 PM, a feminist’s nightmare said…
well i am not surprised, i ve heard many women saying stuff like that they want wanted their husband to share their workload, but at the same time, they do shit.
and anon 3.22, you’re so right, they claim they always wash everything with hot water and stuff is cause it kills more germs! they haven’t realize yet, that germs are necessary to survival, i mean look at the increase of pour sick and allergic kids to everything! It is due to their stupid mother being scared of germs! they do not realize using antibacterial everything is worse for our health than those poor germs.
Feminazis are fucking stupid.
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At 8:25 PM, Lisa said…
I guess if women can’t value the lives of their unborn children (their own flesh and blood), it’s hard to get them to value the lives of their husbands. How disgustingly sad. So divorce benefits aren’t even enough anymore? The poor sap has to be dead now. Less messy that way, I guess. No haggling in courts and such. Gross, gross, gross.
And duh! Of course the amount of housework is going to go up with another person in the mix. Same is true for adding kids and pets. Then add in all of the crap so many people buy and the ridiculously large homes so many feel the need to live in now. Crap has to be dusted, washed, organized and put away. Huge homes have to be vacuumed, dusted and scrubbed. Heck ya it’s a lot of work. So much of it is a result of their own wants and desires. They want the perks without the added responsibility. My husband asked if me if I felt tempted to move to a larger home when our daughter was born. No way. I have just enough time to keep the space we have now clean and functional. Extra space would equal more work and would invite the potential to acquire more crap to fill the space. Women who want to live in mini mansions (which forces their husbands to work ridiculous hours to finance their surroundings) obviously have no intention of cleaning the house themselves.
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At 8:35 PM, VoodooJock said…
And they wonder why us “immature” men aren’t lining up to marry them and knock them up.
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At 9:48 PM, mfsob said…
Reading the comments after that story, some of them genuinely scared me. I mean, I have grown wise to the ways of the predatory female, but apparently that species in Great Britain is not only predatory, but lethal as well.
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At 12:41 AM, Candide said…
Obey the feminists and AVOID WOMEN. View them as a biohazard. Minimize the risk.
——————————————————-Over the years, whisky distilleries have established a fixed method for dealing with waste. Spent grains left after the malting process (draff) are converted into pellets and sold cheaply to farmers as protein-rich cattle feed.
Meanwhile, pot ale and spent lees, both by-products of distillation, are treated to remove any toxic levels of copper and other substances, then re-released into a body of water big enough, and sufficiently fast-flowing, to receive them without suffering any damage. Heat generated by this intense activity often dissipates into the air.
These days, though, whisky waste is finding new life through alternative uses.
A 2015 report by The Green Alliance estimated a potential £140m market in whisky waste by-products – and various companies, including whisky distilleries, are hard at work to leverage the opportunities.
Iain Gulland, chief executive of Stirling-based NGO (non-governmental organisation) Zero Waste Scotland, is optimistic. ‘Scotland’s whisky industry is world-renowned and accounts for a significant proportion of our exports, but it also generates around 4m tonnes of waste and by-products,’ he says.
‘We already know they’re useful – distillery by-products have been used as animal feed for decades – and research shows that by taking a more circular approach to waste from bio-economy industries like whisky, Scotland’s economy could benefit from an additional £595m-plus a year.
‘We’re working with industry to make the most of the by-products from some of Scotland’s successful exports, and we’re delighted with the progress being made.’
There is certainly no lack of raw materials to use. Every litre of spirit made and used by distilleries produces at least nine litres of pot ale. Zero Waste Scotland calculates that the industry produces 1.6bn litres of pot ale and 500,000 tonnes of draff a year.
In fact, a growing portion of this waste is now fuelling whisky distilleries. Many use draff, and in some cases pot ale, to power anaerobic digester (AD) plants, creating bio-gas that is then processed into steam energy.
Salmon farm: Pot ale is being used to feed salmon in Scotland (photo: Ben-Benjamin, Flickr)
For example, in its first 12 months since opening in 2015, Glendullan distillery’s AD plant generated 6,000 MW hours of thermal energy, reducing the distillery’s fossil fuel demand by 25%. Owned by Diageo, this is just one of multiple AD initiatives the company is implementing across its distillery sites in a £100m investment in renewable energy technology.
Others jumping on the AD bandwagon include William Grant & Sons (which owns Glenfiddich and Balvenie, among others) and Glenmorangie.
Heat created by distillation and mashing is also often re-used in distilleries, usually to warm or re-heat water that’s crucial throughout the whisky-making process. Diageo’s Roseisle distillery feeds its waste heat to two nearby malting facilities. On Islay, Bruichladdich distillery re-routes waste not only to heat water but also to heat its visitor centre, bottling hall and meeting rooms. At nearby Bowmore, heat from the distillery warms the community swimming pool next door.
Other businesses have been born with the aim of using both draff and pot ale to create products for use in very different industries.
Horizon Proteins, an enterprise spin-off from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, uses pot ale to create feed for Scottish salmon in fish farms. Pot ale proteins replace soy and fishmeal, products normally imported from South America. In 2014, the university was awarded £600,000 in funding from Scottish Enterprise through a programme to help new businesses.
An experimental facility to test production was built at Glendullan distillery in 2015, and the company recently announced plans to sell its product commercially within a year, with its processing facilities located in various larger distilleries. Eventually, Horizon Proteins aims to expand beyond salmon, and even use whisky waste to feed pigs, pets – and people.
Whisky waste is already also fuelling cars. Celtic Renewables, founded by Dr Martin Tangney, has successfully created petrol from pot ale and draff. Using an updated method of acetone production developed in the 1910s by Chaim Weizmann – the father of industrial chemistry and Israel’s first president – Celtic Renewables uses bacteria to synthesise draff and pot ale into a number of chemicals, especially biobutanol, which can be pumped directly into cars without adjustments to the engine.
Dr Martin Tangney: His company, Celtic Renewables, has found a way to use whisky waste as fuel for cars (photo: Celtic Renewables)
This process also creates acetone, a product vital for plastics, and bioethanol, an ingredient in cosmetics. The solid residue left from the processed pot ale and draff creates a type of ‘super draff’ high-grade animal feed, particularly nutritious for cattle. Raw supplies of pot ale and draff come from Tullibardine distillery, and a demonstration facility will open in Grangemouth in 2018.
The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), the whisky industry’s lobbying organization, enthusiastically supports this secondary industry, and both Horizon Proteins and Celtic Renewables feature in its latest Environmental Strategy document, which outlines the industry’s sustainability and reports how well it is meeting them.
‘The Scotch Whisky industry has a long-term commitment to sustainability,’ says Rosemary Gallagher, head of communications for the SWA. ‘Our Environmental Strategy is the only one in Scotland that covers an entire industry.’
The industry’s ambitions line up well with the Scottish Government’s goal to wipe out waste across the country, with a target to send only 5% of its waste to landfill by 2025.
This aspiration drove the decision to be the first government to join the Circular Economy 100, a group established by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a global leader in the field dedicated to creating secondary markets using waste by-products. The group counts some of the world’s largest corporations among its members, including Apple and Coca-Cola.
In the case of the whisky industry, collaborating with companies that help create a vibrant whisky by-product sector puts Scotch at the forefront in creating new business models where waste is another source of profit, pushing Scotland towards a sustainable, waste-free economy – and offering ‘the water of life’ yet another reason to make its native country proud.A newly planted tree has had its branch snapped at Wilson Park in Marton.
Vandals have struck out at newly planted trees in a Marton park.
Several trees have been planted in Wilson Park to increase shade near the playground, however, one has been snapped in half, leaving Rangitikei District Council staff scratching their heads.
Parks and reserves team leader Athol Sanson said the planting programme was designed to replace old, ailing trees and provide the community with shade in the future.
Rangitikei District Council A newly planted tree has died after its branch was snapped at Wilson Park in Marton.
"This is incredibly disappointing for us as these were planted for the community for long term shade.
"The current trees around the playground are safe but are in very poor condition. They will have to be removed in the next 10 years and the newly planted trees are their replacement."
The park is located in Marumaru St and was designed to cater for rugby league and soccer. It is also the home of the renowned Marton Country Music Festival.
It is popular among residents for its playground, located over Folly Stream on the eastern side. A row of trees separate it from the sports fields and it contains original play equipment from the 1970s - two slides, a set of swings, two swirly seesaws, an old rocking horse, and a large green concrete submarine.
A climbing frame has more recently been installed.
Sanson said the team had been working on Wilson Park to paint the playground and lay new bark.
It's a project the council undertook at all of Rangitikei's cemeteries, main parks, playgrounds, seats and tables over the summer.
It is one of Rangitikei's most historic parks, with the land originally owned by Bulls farmer and politician James Wilson in 1849.
In 1955, the Marton Borough offered his daughters, Nancy and Jean Wilson, £1300 for the purchase of the land, to create the Sir James Wilson Park.
The sisters instead gifted it to the Marton Borough and people of Marton and asked that the money be spent transforming the land into a park.
In 1996, the council gifted a portion of the land to Te Hau E Wha to build an urban marae for all Maori. It hasn't yet been built.A major transportation bill in the Georgia House is undergoing more changes as Republican leaders look to corral support from the more conservative members of their caucus.
Leaders had set out to raise at least a $1 billion to fix Georgia’s crumbling network of roads and bridges. The original version of the bill would have hiked the state excise tax on motor fuel from 7.5 cents per gallon to 29.2 cents per gallon, while phasing out other state and local taxes.
The latest version of the bill adjusts the proposed tax increase on motor fuel from 29.2 cents per gallon to 24 cents per gallon. According to House Majority Leader Larry O’Neal, each cent per gallon translates to roughly $60 million, meaning the change would subtract approximately $300 million from the bill.
Despite that, several rank-and-file Republicans remain concerned.
“My biggest problem with it right now? It’s still a $389 million tax increase on the consumer,” said Rep. David Stover, R-Newnan. “It’s absolutely a tax increase. I have the spreadsheet to show it.”
Republican leaders, however, insist the latest bill is revenue neutral.
“From what I understand it’s a wash right now. I don’t feel like it’s a tax increase,” said Rules Committee Chairman John Meadows. “What we’ve got to understand is our system is broke.”
Meadows believes leadership now has enough support to pass the bill.
The Rules Committee, which decides what bills make it to the House floor, approved the bill Wednesday. That means it could come up for a full House vote as early as Thursday.The Palestinian Authority's General Intelligence Services (GIS) found and arrested three Palestinians, allegedly planning an attack Saturday night against Israelis in an open area near a village north of Ramallah. The GIS confiscated an M-16 and nine millimeter hand gun from the young men.
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According to Palestinian security sources who spoke to Ynet, the three Palestinians, Basel Mahmoud Alaraj of al-Walaja, Mohammed Abdullah Harb of Jenin, and Haytham Sayaj of Hebron, had mysteriously disappeared from their shared apartment in Ramallah a week and a half ago.
Palestinian security forces, Photo: AP
Hamas condemned the arrest, writing on its official website that the arrest of the three boys "reflects a rise in the frequency of security cooperation between the PA security forces and the occupation to abort the Palestinian Intifada and target the Palestinian resistance."
Despite the recent round of violence and popular Palestinian support for it, the PA security forces have continued security cooperation with Israel. Majid Faraj, the chief of the Palestinian General Intelligence, told Defense News in December that his forces have foiled 200 attacks against Israelis, arrested 100 Palestinians, and confiscated weapons.Rangers top scorer Nicky Law has emerged as a £500,000 target for a trio of English Championship clubs.
Sportsmail understands Law's representatives have fielded calls from no fewer than ten English clubs.
But Brighton, Birmingham and Reading are showing the strongest interest in a player who also the target of January interest from Bolton boss Neil Lennon and Huddersfield Town.
Rangers Nicky Law (right) scores one of his two goals against Raith Rovers on Sunday
Law scored twice in Sunday's 4-0 rout of Raith Rovers to take his tally for the season to 12 and has been a rejuvenated figure under interim manager Stuart McCall, his former Motherwell boss.
McCall has been in charge for seven games, winning four, and would like to keep Law - but has yet to discover if he will be handed the Rangers job on a permanent basis.
Pushing for promotion to the Premiership via the play-offs the Ibrox club face Livingston tomorrow night with final decisions yet to be reached a dozen players out of contract in the summer.
Law (left) celebrates after scoring for Rangers in their 4-0 win against the Kirkcaldy club at Ibrox
Midfielder Ian Black is one of those likely to leave and is attracting interest from new Wigan boss Gary Caldwell.
Veteran striker Kenny Miller, in his third spell at the club, remains non-committal saying: 'I can only speak for myself but I have put talks about contracts and the likes on hold because it's more important we get back to where we belong – which is the Premiership.
'I'm not really worried or thinking about it too much because a big part of it will come down to whether or not we are successful.
'After that, if we've done that, then there is probably a better chance of people getting contracts.'
Rangers pair Ian Black (left) and Kris Boyd take part in a training session at Ibrox last week
Meanwhile, former Rangers starlet Lewis Macleod will almost certainly not kick a ball for Brentford this season after his £850,000 January move.
The Scotland Under 21 star was expected to make a big impact as the Griffin Park side battled for a shock place in the English Premier League for the first time.
Macleod suffered a hamstring injury in his final game for Rangers at Alloa's Indodrill Stadium in December.
He's suffered further setbacks at the London club and has so far only managed to play 45 minutes for Brentford reserves since his move.
Kenny Millar (right) challenges Raith Rovers' Martin Scott for the ball during the Championship clash
Now Brentford manager Mark Warburton - who is leaving the club at the end of the season - has admitted he doesn't want to risk the 20-year-old and may not even get to see the youngster play this season.
He explained: 'He's coming along. We have to be fair to the player. I want him to be involved.
'He's been out for three or four months and he's got to be comfortable that he can commit 100 per cent.
'The last thing you want to do is put a player on with a doubt in his mind with regards to a sprint, challenge, jump or tackle. He's very close but we have to be fair to the player.' Macleod missed most of last season too after taking an adverse reaction to a viral infection affected the muscles around his heart.Tremayne Durham still wants his money back.
Three years ago Durham killed one man and held another hostage in an unsuccessful attempt to get back $18,000 he thought he was due. He is now serving a life sentence in the Oregon State Penitentiary, but he hasn't given up trying to collect. Today, he's using the courts instead of a.357 magnum -- and so far, he's having more success.
Durham has filed suit in Multnomah County Circuit Court against Rob Chambers, whom he paid nearly $18,000 to build a soft-serve ice-cream truck in December 2005. Durham changed his mind a few months later and when he couldn't get a refund, killed one of Chambers' former employees. Later he showed up at Chambers' house and jabbed a gun in his stomach and held him hostage for two hours.
Durham was sent to prison last year. He filed his neatly handwritten suit in February, seeking money for the truck and an extra $20,000 to cover, among other things, the cost of traveling from his home state of New York to Oregon in his personal collection attempt.
In Multnomah County, civil suits under $50,000 are automatically sent to an arbitrator to resolve. The arbitrator assigned to this case issued a draft ruling earlier this month in Durham's favor because Chambers failed to respond to repeated letters requesting he participate in hearings.
Now, Chambers says he feels victimized all over again.
Chambers, who doesn't have the money to hire an attorney, says he never got the letters and thought the case had been dismissed.
"He's terrorizing me," said Chambers, 39. "...That's the good ol' American way: He can sue me. I'm just amazed that they would even see this case."
Arbitrator John G. Crawford told Chambers in a letter that he "will have an uphill battle in arbitration" because he admitted in writing that Durham paid him.
A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, to give Chambers one last chance to argue his case.
Chambers, who says he suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, says he doesn't have the money to pay Durham. Since he was held hostage, his fledgling business has failed. He said he's been fired from jobs because of he tends to blow up at others under stress. He's sold almost everything of value that he owns, including the truck he was building for Durham.
What's more, he doesn't think he should have to pay the man who held him hostage and killed his former employee, Adam Calbreath, 39. Chambers suspects that Durham killed Calbreath because Calbreath wouldn't tell the killer where to find him.
"How do I live with that guilt?" Chambers said, tears filling his eyes.
He says he jumps whenever he hears a doorbell, because it reminds him of the afternoon Durham showed up on his front porch, brandishing the same gun he used to kill Calbreath. Durham also brought along duct tape, handcuffs, gloves and a cloth bag big enough to cover someone's head.
"He's like, 'I've been robbing people and killing people to get to you. I just want my money!'" Chambers said.
Prosecutors would later praise Chambers for keeping calm and talking Durham into letting him leave the house. Chambers assured Durham that he wasn't trying to cheat him and showed him the ice cream truck, still under construction in his garage.
Chambers told Durham he was wrong not to have returned his money and promised to do so. Then he heated up a plate of ribs, and sat Durham down to watch a movie. Chambers gave Durham a long story about how he had to find parts to finish another customer's truck, in order to get paid and have money to pay him. Durham agreed.
Instead, Chambers immediately summoned police, who surrounded the home and took Durham into custody.
In response to Durham's $48,000 suit, Chambers has filed a handwritten counterclaim seeking $48,000 for battery, false imprisonment and the trauma he's suffered since Durham held him hostage.
The arbitrator denied Chambers' counterclaim in his draft ruling.
Durham's pursuit of cash from prison raised eyebrows in Multnomah County Circuit Court. But that's nothing new.
Last year, Durham agreed to plead guilty to aggravated murder and save the state from an expensive death-penalty trial if the judge agreed to let him feast on his favorite foods. The judge agreed, and Durham sat down to a smorgasbord of KFC chicken, Popeyes fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, carrot cake and Haagen-Dazs ice cream. Two weeks later, at his sentencing, he dined on calzones, pizza and lasagna.
The unusual deal made international headlines.
If the arbitrator rules in favor of Durham, Chambers can appeal and ask for a trial. Josh Lamborn, a former deputy district attorney who prosecuted Durham, thinks the convicted killer would be the one with the uphill battle before a jury.
"I don't think a jury is going to be very sympathetic," said Lamborn, who now works in private practice.
Although he was vaguely aware of why Durham was in prison, Crawford, the arbitrator, said he based his draft order on the court file before him: Durham claimed he never got a ice-cream truck or his money back. Chambers admitted in writing that Durham paid for the truck.
"All I had in front of me were those papers," Crawford said.
Chambers did not say that the truck was under construction and he intended to give it to Durham. And Durham did not mention that he was in jail on murder and kidnapping charges and could not take possession of the truck.
Crawford sent Chambers two certified letters notifying him that he must submit a statement and attend an arbitration hearing, but Chambers didn't respond.
Chambers, who was working temporarily as a long-haul trucker, said he wasn't home to receive the letters and didn't go to the post office to pick them up. Chambers said he thought the case was over when he received a letter notifying him that a judge had dismissed his now-defunct company from the suit in June. Chambers said he didn't realize that he was still listed as a plaintiff.
Then earlier this month he discovered he was wrong when he found the draft order in Durham's favor taped to his door.
He's upset about having to take part in arbitration Wednesday and listen to the man who once held him at gunpoint. Durham will attend the hearing by telephone from prison.
"I just start crying for no reason," Chambers said.
It's ironic that Durham is suing him now, said Chambers, reflecting on how differently things might have turned out if Durham had gone to court instead of coming to Oregon with a gun.
"Adam would still be alive," Chambers said. "He wouldn't be in prison. I wouldn't be tormented."Milwaukee-born short-seller Jim Chanos, founder and managing partner of New York-based Kynikos Associates, teaches University of Wisconsin and Yale business students about corporate fraud. During his life and career, he has witnessed seismic shifts in economic thinking and the relationship between labor and capital. Chanos shares his thoughts on the world emerging from the election of Donald Trump and the tumultuous political events of 2016.
Lynn Parramore: Leading up to the election of Trump, we had eight years of Obama, and before that, eight years of Bush. Before we get to the president-elect, how do you assess the records of those past presidents in terms of basic policing of markets and corporate fraud?
Jim Chanos: Bush was the MBA president who was going to be pro-business, cut taxes, and deregulate. Meanwhile, he had two recessions on his watch, less employment than when he started, and two bear markets in the stock market — probably the worst president for business since Herbert Hoover. The business guy!
Yet, he did tighten up the Justice Department and go after corporate crime. The Ashcroft Justice Department, as bad as it was in lots of other things, went after corporate fraud and accounting fraud, criminally. In 2002, we got Sarbanes-Oxley to curb fraud.
I don’t know that all this was Bush’s predilection — remember, his biggest supporter was Enron. But because of Enron and the other dot-com era scandals, he got backed into a corner to go hard on them. I’ve joked that the only person who put more corporate executives in jail than George W. Bush was his father during the Savings and Loan Crisis.
On these issues, I’d rather have Bush any day of the week than Obama. Both Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer of Obama’s Justice Department said in TV interviews and testimony that |
until 2014 means that he “could” have voted in Canada and ran for the Canadian Parliament at the same time he was in the U.S. Senate. This eligibility issue is showing a lack of integrity on the part of Cruz.
It was during this time that Cruz stated “that both he and Barack Obama were ineligible for the Oval Office”. After the revelation of his Canadian birth certificate, Cruz and his friends moved into “damage control” mode alleging he was a “dual-citizen” which puts us back to the previous paragraph.
It was his friends and Fox News that tried to clear Cruz’s path to the WH claiming now he was a “natural born citizen” based on his renouncing his Canadian birth.
So, here we go again – a freshman Senator who is a Harvard Lawyer, with Harvard law friends and no U.S. documentation to prove that he is a U.S. citizen of any type. A man with known foreign origins, and the son of a Father, Rafael Cruz Sr. who was at no time in his life a legal citizen of the United States until 35 years after Ted’s birth in Canada, when he renounced his Canadian citizenship and naturalized to the United States in 2005.
The problem is obvious for Cruz; he cannot or will not provide or even discuss his eligibility.
Now we have another large issue coming to the surface and that is where Cruz’s money is coming from and more importantly what he is using it for. It should be of great concerns to Americans what secret “BIG” money is behind these PAC’s supporting the candidates. A candidate must owe them something as they do with their dealings with the lobbyists.
As of this past July, 2015, Robert Mercer had provided the major source of funding ($37 million raised) by a quartet of unlimited-money super PACs supporting Cruz’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Cruz’s presidential campaign contracted with Cambridge Analytica to provide data services, and the company has had talks with at least one of those super PACs, according to sources.
Robert Mercer is the owner of Cambridge Analytica and the lead donor of the Cruz Campaign. Cambridge Analytica is connected to a British firm called the SCL Group which provides governments, political groups and companies around the world with services ranging from military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting.
The campaign “claims” most of these funds are coming from the “grassroots” energy, but it would appear that this is not the case. It’s not uncommon for political campaigns, parties and PACs to pay huge contracts for data and other services to companies affiliated with their consultants. But it’s less common for such contracts to go to firms affiliated with the donors funding the whole enterprise.
Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research and analytics, is using Cambridge Analytica to build models that identify and sort persuadable voters in early primary states by six key personality types, which will be used to target the campaign’s outreach.
This is beginning to sound more like a Political operation rather than a political campaign. This has been made possible partly by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which opened new avenues for unlimited political spending. This ruling opened unprecedented “cash cow” doors to secret funding of political campaigns. Americans knew this was going to end up being a dangerous decision, now it is beginning to become clear just who is operating campaigns and it’s not the people.
In case you are not aware the decision allows unions, corporations, and associations to spend unlimited amounts in elections provided that they don’t coordinate their efforts with a candidate themselves. This was one time Obama was right when he said this decision would “open the floodgates to special interests”, but you can rest assured he has made use of this decision himself. You see PAC – you are seeing big money!
Mercer is also a computer scientist and the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund. Mercer and Cruz share a distrust of the IRS and Climate Change. They also share a view that leads to the White House in 2016. Mercer began his career at I.B.M. and made his fortune by using computer patterns to outsmart the stock markets. He has become the main donor in the Cruz campaigns 4 super PAC’s.
What is a hedge fund? It is a limited partnership of investors that uses high risk methods, such as investing with borrowed money, in hopes of realizing large capital gains. Those capital gains can come in many forms. Financial control of who is sitting in the White House is a very dangerous one for the American people.
The problem is with what Cruz is doing with his campaign money and using it to build data bases regarding American voters without their knowledge is no different than what the Federal government is doing.
Cruz’s campaigns investment in Cambridge Analytica — and their campaign’s embrace of their product — the Mercers also have become competitors in an increasingly cutthroat conservative political data race. Some of the right’s most influential and well-funded players — including the Koch brothers’ operation and the Republican National Committee — are jockeying for a market share and 2016 prospects in a political sub-industry expected to consume a huge portion of the billions spent in the campaign. The result of the competition could go a long way toward determining the winner of the White House and the Republican Party’s direction after the election.
It has been revealed the Cruz campaign has also linked with the Breitbart Group and Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Surveillance program to track, monitor and target YOU!
Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users also, harvesting largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals.
What does this show you about these individuals integrity, especially Cruz? Are you going to make more excuses for Cruz America?
In November it was revealed that Breitbart.com was data-mining for the Ted Cruz campaign. America, don’t you feel invaded? I mean their attitude is “what are they going to do about it?” Or Hillary’s “what difference does it make?”
Ted Cruz using the firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users Exclusive: Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid a little known UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters. That little known company is Cambridge Analytica.
Another thing that stands out in front is the $500,000 Ted Cruz’s PAC Keep the Promise I made to Carly Fiorina’s PAC Carly for America back when she was still in the 2nd strong debates. Now why would one presidential candidate give another presidential candidate “half a million dollars”?
Having received $10M from Toby Neugebauer, and energy investor; $11M from Robert Mercer; and $15M from the Texas Wilkes family to his various PAC’s, this isn’t a large amount of campaign funds to have when running for president.
Mercer has also donated $750,000K to Club for Growth in support of their $1M advertisement campaign against Donald Trump. Club for Growth spokesman Doug Sachtleben stated, “Trump is the worst kind of politician. He’ll say anything to get elected, and then he’ll do just the opposite when he’s in office.
But Mr. Sachtleben – all politicians do that, even the ones you are supporting that is why they are referred to as politicians.
This is why you are afraid of Trump because he really isn’t a politician and he doesn’t need the party support, or their money and he is “telling it like it is”.
It is certainly unheard of for one candidate to donate to another who when they are running against each other and Cruz has refused to answer the question which leave a great deal to the imagination.
Cruz has even had a sit down with Henry Kissinger (he was also part of the NAU Task Force). Now why would Cruz want guidance from someone America has come to know as a traitor as he is a New World Order man?
Oh, on the TPA/TPP deal – Cruz maybe supposedly only one of few that went into that locked room to read the TPA (maybe he took a nap) but first he was for it and then against it but in this video Cruz states “he is for “fast tracking” trade agreements and supports Obama doing same. Apparently Cruz doesn’t care about Americans having jobs or the country’s sovereignty.
Cruz has also stated he does not support the Common Core Standards, but I have to ask the question “why does he support government intervention in the education of our children at all”. He recently presented along with Mike Lee legislation that would have targeted Home Schoolers and linked them under “Private Schools” to be attached to the recently passed Communist ESEA. Once again, “non-educator” politicians trying to federally control another aspect of education.
The surest way to see another Democrat seize the Oval Office in 2016 is to run a blatantly unconstitutional candidate for the GOP.
Even Mr. Cruz has made the statement, “people run as who they are” and I would guess in the back of his mind he is referring to himself as well.
You would be wise to also read this article on Cruz “Ted Cruz, Henry Kissinger and the Globalists” by Kelleigh Nelson
And http://www.newswithviews.com/JBWilliams/williams317.htmSan Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — They come in the middle of the night, sneaky and silent. They're up to no good, and their mischief puts public safety at risk and costs taxpayers thousands of dollars.
They paint fire hydrants. Artists to some, vandals to others, they've taken it upon themselves to spray-paint dozens of hydrants around the city. And while the average resident may see the silver, neon green and red hydrants as guerrilla art, officials say the actions are causing a dangerous problem.
San Francisco has two separate water systems: its domestic water system that we all drink from and its emergency supply, a high-pressure system used exclusively for firefighting, built after the 1906 earthquake and fire leveled much of the city.
There are also two types of hydrants. The approximately 1,600 in the emergency system pump bay water and are larger and sturdier, with color-coded tops. There are also 9,800 smaller low-pressure hydrants. Both types have identification numbers and tags stamped and painted on them to give firefighters information about water pressure, the water main the hydrant is connected to, and the distance to a shutoff valve.
When a fire breaks out or a car runs into a hydrant, first responders can lose precious time if that information isn't immediately available because someone painted over it, said Bill Gunn, a supervisor of the emergency water supply system unit at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
It also costs the city about $4,000 each to repair the hydrants — or about $140,000 over recent months, he said, when 35 to 40 have been painted.
"It's a big life safety issue.... It's hindering the operations of the Fire Department," he said. "If a firefighter rolls up and there is no information, they have to look at another hydrant or call it in. That's time wasted. and it's a lot of money."
Expensive operation
It's expensive because it's not as simple as just painting over the hydrant, Gunn said. To fix the smaller hydrants, SFPUC workers must shut off the water main, remove the hydrant and bring it back to their shop, where it is sanded down, restamped and repainted. A substitute hydrant is put in its place while the work is completed.
Sledgehammer work
The emergency-system hydrants are too big and control too much pressure to be removed, so the work must be done in place. Sometimes crews have to use a sledgehammer to get the color-coded caps off because the vandals' paint job causes them to stick.
A stuck cap also poses a safety problem, said fire Lt. Mindy Talmadge, if the SFPUC is unable to fix it before an emergency occurs.
"When that paint dries, it can make it difficult to get the caps off the outlet or open the hydrant gate, and that all delays us," she said. "We will get it off - if we have to bust it we will, but it definitely delays our operation."
Gunn said many hydrants have been painted around Dolores Park and in the Castro, but they've also showed up in Bernal Heights, Chinatown, Pacific Heights and, last week, some in the Financial District.
'Big advocate'
Supervisor Scott Wiener, whose district has been hardest hit, said he's a "big advocate" for public art and would like to see whoever is painting the hydrants channel the energy into city-approved projects. He recently proposed legislation that would require utilities such as AT&T to let murals be placed on utility boxes.
"I understand people are looking to do interesting artwork and make neighborhoods more beautiful, which is great except you need to work with the city if you are going to do that," he said.
The good news, said Talmadge: Most fire crews are "pretty familiar with the hydrants in their districts," so no public safety issues have come up.
"However, people who work in different areas aren't as familiar, and we don't memorize the water pressure or where the shutoff valves are," she said. "Everything about the hydrant and the numbers and arrows means something. It's all stuff we need to know when we get there."
'Public safety problem'
Wiener said it's possible that the hydrant painter or painters have no clue of the harm they are causing.
"I think the most important thing for the public to understand is that doing this may seem like a good idea," he said, "but it creates a significant public safety problem, and whoever is doing it needs to stop."
Copyright 2014 San Francisco Chronicle
All Rights ReservedWhite House press secretary Sean Spicer apologized Tuesday for his remarks on the Holocaust, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that his comments during a White House press briefing were a “mistake.”
Discussing the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime on Tuesday, Spicer argued that Adolf Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” (That is false: The Nazis, under Hitler’s leadership, gassed millions of Jewish people in concentration camps.)
After attempting several times to clarify his remarks and facing intense backlash from lawmakers and organizations like the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Spicer appeared on Blitzer’s show to offer an apology.
“I was obviously trying to make a point about the heinous acts that Assad had made against his own people last week using chemical weapons and gas, and frankly, I mistakenly used an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which, frankly, there is no comparison. And for that I apologize. It was a mistake to do that,” he said.
Sean Spicer: I mistakenly used an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, there is no comparison https://t.co/6SwTJwLWJw — CNN (@CNN) April 11, 2017
“Did you not know, Sean, that there were gas chambers where the Nazis brought Jews and others... to slaughter them in these poison gas chambers at Birkenau near Auschwitz and other death camps?” Blitzer asked.
“Yes, clearly I’m aware of that,” Spicer replied. “Again, as I said initially, and there’s no attempt to clarify this, the point was to try to talk about the use of aircraft as a means by which Assad was using to gas his people, but it was a mistake to do that. And that’s why I should have just stayed on topic.”
When Blitzer asked Spicer if President Donald Trump had pressured him to apologize, the press secretary said the decision was his own.
“I realized that I had made a mistake and did not want to be a distraction to the president’s agenda and the actions he’s taken [in Syria],” he said.
Spicer didn’t acknowledge Democrats’ calls that he step down. Instead, he said he intends to “stay focused on Assad” in any further discussion of the Syrian conflict.
Spicer also personally apologized to GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, Politico reported. Adelson, who bankrolls the pro-Israel Republican Jewish Coalition, donated $25 million to a super PAC supporting Trump’s 2016 candidacy.
During an interview with Greta Van Susteren at the Newseum on Wednesday morning, Spicer again apologized for his remarks, saying it was “inexcusable, reprehensible” that he made those comments during Passover week.
“Of all weeks, this compounds that kind of mistake,” Spicer said.
Spicer said he still hasn’t spoken with Trump about the Holocaust remarks, but knows he “let the president down.”The Mississippi Legislature passed a bill on Tuesday that would allow individuals and businesses to legally discriminate on the basis of their religion.
The state House and Senate approved a conference report on SB 2681, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, despite previous indications from the House that its version of the bill was on hold based on objections about the implications for discrimination.
The bill was passed by a vote of 78-43 in the House and 38-14 in the Senate. Both are dominated by Republicans.
The bill’s fate is now up to Gov. Phil Bryant (R), who has not said whether he will sign the legislation. If he does, the bill will go into effect on July 1.
Mississippi law defines a “person” to include “all public and private corporations,” ThinkProgress noted. So if the bill becomes law, it would allow businesses in the state to discriminate for religious reasons.
Though the bill does not mention sexual orientation, “gay,” or gender identity, LGBT advocates see the legislation as an attempt to alienate non-straight communities.
“Before Mississippi has had the opportunity to robustly discuss the lived experiences of LGBT people, this bill would hollow out any non-discrimination protections at the local level or possible future state-wide protections,” Sarah Warbelow, Human Rights Campaign’s state legislative director, told the Washington Blade. “Just as we’ve seen in other states, this bill is bad for business, bad for the state’s reputation, and most of all, bad for Mississippians. Gov. Bryant must veto the measure.”
Mississippi does not have state or local nondiscrimination protections for LGBT persons. Human Rights Campaign said the bill could further complicate any effort at future state nondiscrimination laws, undermine licensing organizations that offer protections to LGBT individuals, and undercut public university nondiscrimination policies.
An attempt to pass a “religious liberty” bill in Arizona failed in February, when Republican Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a proposal passed by the state legislature. Similar bills in Georgia, Idaho, Maine, and Ohio have failed, though some are still pending in Missouri and Oklahoma.
Proponents of such bills said they do not promote discriminatory behavior, yet in their support, they have offered examples of wedding photographers and bakers that have refused service to same-sex couples around the country. Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins lauded the Mississippi Legislature’s moves on the bill, saying it would protect “a wedding vendor, whose orthodox Christian faith will not allow her to affirm same-sex ‘marriage.’”
Perkins said the law hews closely to the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, supported by Democrats and signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton.
“This is a victory for the First Amendment and the right to live and work according to one’s conscience,” Perkins said. “This commonsense measure was a no-brainer for freedom, and like the federal RFRA, it simply bars government discrimination against religious exercise. The legislature gave strong approval to a bill that declares that individuals do not have to trade their religious freedom for entrance into public commerce.”
Morgan Miller of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi said comparisons to RFRA are misguided.
“This bill still could open the door for someone who wants to use their religion to discriminate against others,” Miller said. “It exposes virtually every branch and office of the government to litigation; our state will have to spend taxpayer money to defend lawsuits. It’s unnecessary: the Mississippi legislature has been unable to articulate why this law is needed in our state.”By GottaLaff
Some liberals are beginning to suspect Bush loyalists in career government positions are doing their best to try to deflate and hinder President Obama's agenda.
the timing struck Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein as "
." The paper published its report just one day after President Obama ordered the prison closed.
en. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, asking him to "immediately review the circumstances behind the conversion of these positions and the hiring of any former Bush administration appointees
Allegations of improper 'burrowing' of political appointees to career positions are very troubling to me,
Stein is not the only media figure openly wondering whether Bush loyalists still in government would attempt to "send a signal," "undermine" or even "sabotage" President Obama.
Rachel Maddow wondered aloud if "Bush loyalists" who remain in government are trying to "undermine" President Obama.
I think we may see sabotage as well.Surveying the career of Basic Soul Unit (a.k.a. Stuart Li), it's hard not to wonder how the Toronto-based producer hasn't become a bigger sensation. That's not a knock on his reputation; without question, folks in the know place Li's output in the upper echelons of house and techno. It's just that he remains a sort of producer's producer, even after spending the last decade dropping records via a litany of highly respected imprints. Ostgut Ton, Crème Organization, Mule Electronic, Mathematics, Versatile, Nonplus—they've all released music by Basic Soul Unit over the years. Just recently though, Li made his boldest move yet, offering up his first full-length, Motional Response. While only time will tell if the record is the one that finally pushes Basic Soul Unit fully into the spotlight, it certainly caught our attention enough to prompt us to invite him to participate in the XLR8R podcast series. As expected, Li delivers the goods, assembling an exclusive mix of understated house and techno beats and slowly ratcheting up the energy level over the course of an hour. The podcast may be stuffed with new and unreleased tunes, but Li clearly reveres classic sounds, which is likely why so many stompy house cuts and acid-laced selections populate the tracklist. Much like Basic Soul Unit himself, there really isn't anything too flashy about the mix. It's simply solid all the way through, and that's more than enough.
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01 Graze "On Board (No Save Dub)" (New Kanada)
02 Innerspace Halflife "Metropolitan" (Episodes)
03 Pursuit Grooves "Mad Passion" (What Rules)
04 Basic Soul Unit "Untitled"
05 KEL "MKS" (Tanstaafl)
06 Kassem Mosse "Broken Patterns" (Nonplus+)
07 Kevin McPhee "Version 5" (3024)
08 Maxwell Church "Untitled"
09 Gingy & Bordello "Tremors"
10 Basic Soul Unit "Untoward" (Nonplus+)
11 Jared Wilson "Grave Stalking" (Skudge)
12 Obsolete Music Technology "Since the Accident" (Emphasis)
13 Basic Soul Unit "All Over Me" (Still Music)
14 Aybee "Rays" (Deepblak)
15 Basic Soul Unit "Let Go" (Still Music)
Download MP3
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XLR8R_Podcast_Basic_Soul_Unit_2013_01_22Although last season was a little lack luster in the snow department, we did our best to have a good time at our local ski hill "The Rock"... Tag along with us on this 7 part series as we #SkiTheRock!
Shredded Expectations
Emotions run high this time of year. And so do expectations. And whether it be because power goes out to the whole ski area on opening day, or it ends up raining to the top of the mountain on the very next, the love of skiing, and the convenience of being swept to the top on a floating chair creates the illusion that anything less is pretty much painful.
So when the power does go out after 3 glorious laps on opening day, and when the rain does reach the top of the mountain on the very next, it’s important to remember that this is just the start--just the warm up--to what can only be another amazing season on the snow…
Kings Season
The season is well under way at Panda's home mountain "The Rock"!
Join Panda High Council members Bo Ferro, Sander Hadley, TanSnowMan, and Kody Kirkland for some early season shredding on their home turf in SouthEast Idaho... #TribeUP "Kings Season"!
Meeting Of The Minds
The Panda High Council convenes at "The Rock" for a summit of the spirits and a Meeting of the Minds...
Join TanSnowMan, Oakley White-Allen, Sander Hadley, Bo Ferro, and Kody Kirkland, as they explore the reaches of Panda's home mountain...
Sheer Pandamondium
What do you get when you squeeze 30 wild snow savages onto one little cat track? This is "Sheer Pandamonium"!
Join Panda High Council members TanSnowMan, Ivan Marcinko, Sander Hadley, Bo Ferro, and Matt Tsakrios as they spread the stoke with the local community recently at "The Rock"...
Younger
The Panda build crew takes the afternoon off from building Panda Poles to get the sun on their face, the air in their lungs, and their feet on the snow... Because after all, we ain't gettin' any younger!
Cha Cha
With record low snowfall across much of the Western US this year, it is easier than ever to feel the potential threat of the diminishing habitat of the snow enthusiast. And with this apparent loss of habitat is a loss of morale. An overall loss of stoke.
A small group of individuals in SouthEast Idaho has set out to keep their stoke alive, and in doing so has created their own snow dance for the spirits. How do you say? Ah, yes... Cha Cha!
Sweet Revolution
Such as the chairs spin 'round the old, creeky bull wheel, the Earth spins 'round the Sun... Seasons change, cycles revolve, and the big wheel keeps on turnin'...
So keep that mojo movin', make sure your hips are groovin', 'cause it ain't nothin' but a Sweet Revolution!
Panda Poles Bamboo Ski Poles
@PandaPoles - #PandaPoles
Pebble Creek Ski Area
#SkiTheRockPalestinian activist Mahmoud abu Rahma was released from the hospital Wednesday after he was stabbed and critically wounded last week.
Rahma is the director of international relations at the Gaza Strip-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and is known for speaking out against Palestinian militants and leaders, The Los Angeles Times reported.
His masked attackers approached him on Friday night as he left his brother's home in Gaza, and stabbed him in the back, leg and shoulder. They remain unknown.
According to Al Mezan, Rahma was also attacked on Jan. 3 outside his own home, but he was not injured, The Jerusalem Post reported.
"Abu Rahma has received many threats on his mobile and email, including messages threatening his safety and life," Al Mezan Center said in a statement released Wednesday.
The attacks were most likely motivated by a recent article the activist penned for Maan News Agency, an independent Palestinian news source, titled "The Gap Between Resistance and Governance."
The piece criticized Palestinian government officials and resistance movements for silencing critics, detaining and torturing political opponents, and endangering civilians by placing military stations in residential neighborhoods, the Times reported.
More from GlobalPost: Blast strikes Gaza home of Popular Resistance Committee commander
As Rahma writes in the article,
"Facts on the ground indicate clear examples where Palestinian citizens in Gaza and the West Bank find themselves clashing with the government and/or resistance,'' he wrote. "One can only wonder in such cases: Who will protect citizens from the mighty resistance and the powerful government when one, or both, harm them?"
The human rights center told the Jerusalem Post it had filed complaints with the relevant authorities in the Gaza Strip and urged them to take action. Palestinian reporters in the Gaza Strip said they believed Hamas militiamen were behind the assaults, according to the Post.
"I hope he will overcome this problem," Hatem abu Rahma, a cousin of the activist, told the Times. "The only way to get him back to his normal life is to punish the criminals."
However, Rahma said the attack would not deter him.
"This will not stop me from performing my duty as an activist in human rights and to continue writing articles," he told the Times in a telephone interview from his home in Gaza, where he is recuperating.Over the last week, there's been some pretty intense media coverage of China's Dog Meat Festival, which has become something of a tradition over the last two decades. As the name suggests—and much to the dismay of all the people who see dogs as friends rather than food—tens of thousands of dogs are slaughtered and eaten each year at the event, which takes place in the city of Yulin, Guangxi province.
I was in Yulin on Saturday, when locals once again raised glasses loaded with lychee wine to the heavens and tucked into bowls full of freshly roasted, fried, or boiled dog.
Pet-lovers across China and the rest of the world have been quick to lament Yulin's apparently boundless appetite for puppy flesh, and several Chinese celebrities have made online pleas to bring the festival to a halt. However, locals are reluctant to give up their annual gathering. When I spoke to one female vendor in the downtown Dong Kou meat market, she told me she’d lost count of the number of dogs she’d sold in the last week but guessed it was well over a hundred a day—business has rarely been better.
Shandai, from the animal-protection group Guangdong Shoushan Volunteer Center, reckoned that previous estimations of 10,000 dogs being sacrificed for the festival are too low, claiming the figure is more like 40,000. (Plus 10,000 cats, in case you're not really a "dog person.")
Walking around the city, the presence of animal-rights protesters seemed to have resulted in an unapologetic backlash. Locals filling their baskets with freshly chopped paws and tails were defensive over their dog-eating customs, one woman in the market declaring indignantly, “I’m not forcing them to eat dog, so they can't force me to stop.”
“Even more people are eating dog this year," complained Pian Shan Kong, an animal activist from Guizhou who has been observing the festival for three years. "As outsiders come to protest, locals are spurred on to resist.” Kong is currently holding four rescued pups in his Yulin hotel room—the guy who sold him them reportedly got angry when he realized they weren't destined for the dinner plate, and threatened to slice all four open on the spot if Kong couldn't match his inflated asking price.
Dog lover Yang Xiaoyun took it one step further and purchased a total of 300 caged dogs, which she spent 11 hours ferrying back to her hometown in Tianjin. Despite her good intentions, the 90,000 RMB ($15,000) she spent buying them will no doubt continue to feed dog sellers across the region.
China’s dog-meat industry is a largely unregulated trade, with activists claiming that the animals are usually stolen pets or strays, posing a health risk to anyone chowing down. Dog dealers, however, insist that the dogs are "tu gou," a type of dog that are mostly bred on farms for their meat, and that the moral objections are therefore no different from when other cute animals, like lambs, are eaten.
An attempted demonstration by animal-rights activists took place on Saturday outside the Yulin city government building, culminating in a few banners being snatched and quickly torn to shreds. This was followed by an angry exchange of abuse between locals and protesters, before security guards were called on to disperse the crowd.
While the rest of China continues to debate the morality of putting dog meat on their plates, it’s clear that for Yulin residents no puppy-dog eyes are going to stop them having their banquet.
As one local proudly pointed out, “If you’re not talking about the World Cup, you’re talking about our festival—that can only be good for our reputation as having the best dog meat in China. In the future, Yulin will become even more famous!”
Follow Isobel Yeung on Twitter.Data source and sample
ALSPAC is a landmark longitudinal birth cohort study to understand the factors influencing child development into adulthood. The study began with the recruitment of 14 541 pregnant women resident in Avon, UK with expected dates of delivery 1 April 1991 to 31 December 1992. Methods have been described in detail elsewhere, but 85% of eligible births were captured in a population that is slightly more affluent than the general UK population.35 Over time, data were collected by hospital record, survey and clinical and laboratory examination.
From 14 541 pregnancies, 13 988 children were alive at the end of year one. Of these, we selected children born weighing 2500 g, to minimize the number of subjects likely to have had health or behavioral characteristics that could confound antibiotic–body mass relationships. We also excluded children for whom information on antibiotic exposure was missing for all three of the time windows. Our analytic sample included 11 532 children.
Measures
Exposures to antibiotics
Parents were asked about children’s exposures to antibiotics in three postal questionnaires that covered a range of topics. The questionnaires referred to exposures at less than 6 months of age (elicited at 6 months), between 6–14 months (elicited at 15 months) and between 15–23 months of age (elicited at 24 months). The question on the 6-month questionnaire was: ‘Children often have accidents or illnesses that need treatment. Please indicate whether antibiotics have been given to your child in the past 6 months’. The question on subsequent versions is identical, except with regard to the referenced time window. Information on type of antibiotic was asked but is of questionable reliability, and data on dosage is not available. Therefore, subjects were classified as either exposed or unexposed to antibiotics, for the relevant time window.
Outcomes related to body mass
Birth weight was obtained from the labor ward records and birth length was measured by an ALSPAC researcher. Body mass was assessed by ALSPAC study personnel (in a random 10% subsample) and abstracted from health visitor records (in the remainder) at ages 6–8 weeks, 38–44 weeks (mean 10 months), 77–106 weeks (mean 20 months) and 38 months. At 7 years, body mass was assessed by ALSPAC study personnel in clinic visits. In selecting a metric of body mass, we considered use of International Obesity Task Force thresholds for obese and overweight,36 World Health Organization (WHO) Child Health Growth Standards developed from the 1997–2003 Multicentre Growth Reference Study to derive Z-scores for BMI and weight-for-length,37 ponderal index (weight in kg divided by height/length in meters cubed),38 2000 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention norms to derive Z-scores for BMI beyond age 2 years,39, 40 and 1990 UK population norms for BMI.41 We opted to follow the approach used in the United Kingdom for assessing adiposity, applying WHO weight-for-length Z-score until age 2 years, and 1990 UK BMI Z-score thereafter.
We examined these outcomes: weight-for-length Z-score at 6 weeks, 10 months and 20 months; BMI Z-score at age 38 months and 7 years; and categorical overweight (BMI 85–94th percentile for age and gender) and obese (BMI 95th percentile for age and gender) at 38 months and 7 years. Our analyses excluded a small number of outliers (5 or −5 Z-score or s.d.), which were likely to reflect errors in data recording.
Potential confounders
We adopted a set of social, behavioral and biological early-life predictors of obesity in the ALSPAC cohort described by Reilly et al.,42 in selecting covariates for our analyses. These include maternal parity, race, social class (using the UK Office of Population Census and Survey classifications)43 and education as defined by the UK Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation.44 We also included parental BMI (mother pre-pregnancy overweight/obese, father overweight/obese and both overweight/obese), first trimester smoking, breastfeeding categorized as never/breastfed cessation before 6 months/continuous breastfeeding through 6 months and timing of introduction of complementary foods as covariates. From Reilly et al., we also drew on a set of childhood ‘lifestyle’ variables (time spent per day watching television, in car on weekdays, in car on weekends),42 and dietary pattern classifications, based on a food frequency questionnaire at 38 months, developed for the ALSPAC cohort,45 and duration of nighttime sleep at 7 years. All models also adjusted for birth weight.
Statistical analysis
We began by characterizing the sample in terms of the prevalence of key exposures and outcomes, and then examined the relationship between exposures and potential confounders, using a chi-square test of association.
Our analysis of the relationship between exposures and outcomes took advantage of repeated measures of body mass over time. We used mixed models with random effects for subjects, analyzing the impact of exposure in each of the three windows separately. Differences between exposed and unexposed subjects were tested at each of the five time points. In addition to these formal statistical tests, we looked for patterns of association that would be consistent with causality. For example, an increase in body mass at a time point (for example, 6 weeks) before the exposure window assessed (6–14 months) would be consistent with spurious association. Multivariable models included all of the potential confounders mentioned above. Linear models were used for continuous (Z-score) outcomes, and logistic models were used for dichotomous outcomes (overweight/obese). Regression models were tested for collinearity using the variance inflation factor (VIF) statistic.46 For the logistic models, we examined VIF for the corresponding linear probability model. The key antibiotic exposure variables showed no sign of multicollinearity (maximum VIF for exposure in any model 1.5). As there was moderate collinearity for some potential confounders, we tested the robustness of estimates of the impact of antibiotic exposure in a series of models by sequentially excluding individual potential confounders; estimates from those models were consistent with those reported here (data not shown). Stata 12 (College Station, TX, USA) was used for the analyses.
Interactions with maternal weight
The previous report on antibiotic exposure at <6 months33 showed increased odds of |
feel bad for her family. I feel like she was given wrong information or she was part of something that was much bigger," Jackson said. "One thing that I've noticed in all of her real [statements], she's saying she doesn't remember and she's saying she doesn't blame me, she blames the production. But at the same time, saying you don't remember... it's like a gray area. I get what she's doing. She's being very smart wording certain things.... But I don't know."
He added: "We're all pawns, we're all victims to certain degrees."Quarterback Derek Carr has started all 29 games since the Raiders picked him in the second round of the NFL draft in 2014. Credit: Jack Dempsey
By of the
Green Bay — Since the Green Bay Packers' return to contention in the early 1990s, they've played the Oakland Raiders only five times.
The Packers have won all five of the games, and only the 1999 meeting was competitive. The point differential has been plus-25.4, the yardage differential has been plus-137.8 and the turnover differential has been plus-9.
Probably the biggest reason why four of the games were routs has been the play of the quarterbacks. While Brett Favre (four games) and Aaron Rodgers (one) were combining for a passer rating of 105.7, the nine quarterbacks that played for the Raiders checked in at 48.1.
Starting the five games for Oakland were Jeff Hostetler (1993), Rich Gannon ('99), Rick Mirer ('03), Josh McCown ('07) and Carson Palmer ('11). Also playing were Vince Evans, Rob Johnson, Tee Martin and Andrew Walter.
For the first time since Kenny Stabler, the Raiders have a young quarterback to believe in. The Packers will get their first look at Derek Carr on Sunday as a three-point favorite at O.com Coliseum.
"Carr's a lot better than the guys they've had," an assistant coach on defense for a recent Raiders opponent said. "We really thought Carr was coming on. He's a pretty damn good quarterback."
Selected behind Blake Bortles, Johnny Manziel and Teddy Bridgewater in 2014, Carr (the 36th pick) has started all 29 games. The Raiders (6-7) overcame a 12-0 deficit Sunday in Denver to win, 15-12, although Carr passed for merely 135 yards.
"He's been in sort of a slump the last couple weeks," one personnel man said. "You go through that, I think, as a young player. But he's capable of scoring 35 points or having a stinker like last week."
The Raiders haven't had a winning season since they went 11-5 in 2002 and played in the Super Bowl. Since Tom Flores won a pair of Super Bowls from 1979-'87, the franchise has cycled through 13 coaches.
General Manager Reggie McKenzie, a longtime Packers' personnel director, hired Jack Del Rio in January.
"I think they're a very physical team," Vikings coach Mike Zimmer said in mid-November before a 30-14 victory in Oakland. "They're a tough-minded team. I think that's part of what Jack Del Rio is trying to preach to them.
"I wouldn't say we're intimidated, but they are a very aggressive football team, yes."
This week, a combination of five scouts and assistants all picked Green Bay to win. The scores were 24-23, 20-17, 31-21, 23-13 and 24-21.
"It's a solid offense and a good defense," said one scout. "They play the run strong and they'll get after the Packers.
"At the end of the day, the Packers have a better quarterback."
OFFENSE
Scheme
Bill Musgrave, a coordinator for the Eagles, Panthers, Jaguars and Vikings, rejoined coach Jack Del Rio to call plays this year. He has an extensive playbook that can confuse defenses. He likes empty sets and getting the ball out fast. He often uses two RBs and two TEs. His preference with Oakland is to pound the ball, but the run rate has dipped to 37.5% because the ground game has been so futile (67.2, 2.9) the last five weeks. The Raiders rank 15th in points (23.0), tied for 17th in giveaways (20) and 20th in yards (344.5).
Receivers
Last year, James Jones led the unit in catches (73) and snaps (720). This year, it's former 49er Michael Crabtree (70, 642) and rookie Amari Cooper (62, 764) leading the charge. Crabtree (6-1½, 215) has resurrected his career after two down seasons; last week, he signed a four-year extension ($16.5 million guaranteed). Crabtree, 28, runs tremendous routes and attacks the ball with sure, strong hands. Cooper (6-1, 210) not only runs 4.35 but already is a master of the double move. He is remarkably polished for age 21. Andre Holmes (6-4½, 210) and Rod Streater (6-2, 195) combined for 36 starts from 2012-'14 but can hardly get on the field because Seth Roberts (6-1½, 195), a second-year free agent from West Alabama, has been so impressive. He has 4.46 speed, good hands and five TDs. TE has become a weapon with the rise of rookie Clive Walford (6-4, 250), a third-round pick. A hamstring injury wiped out Walford's training camp, but in the last month he has been using his 4.75 speed to make tough catches deep down the seam. Mychal Rivera (6-3½, 245) isn't a blocker but has 123 catches in three seasons. Former Bill Lee Smith (6-5½, 265) can't run at all but is a rugged, nasty blocker.
Offensive line
The Raiders are in good shape with LG Gabe Jackson (6-3, 335), C Rodney Hudson (6-2½, 300) and LT Donald Penn (6-4, 315). Jackson, a third-round pick in '14, is no better than an average athlete (5.51 speed). However, he's sound in protection and can get movement for the run. Musgrave features Jackson's pulling ability. Hudson was given $20M guaranteed to depart Kansas City in March. Size hurts him in certain matchups, but he's an excellent technician with good feet, strength and intelligence. Penn started at LT for Tampa Bay from 2006-'13 before arriving in Oakland for $4.2M guaranteed. He's one of those bad-body guys that plays substantially better than he looks. It's possible the Raiders lost their best blocker when RT Menelik Watson blew out his Achilles in August. Thus, RG Austin Howard (6-7½, 330), a former Jet, moved to RT and former Bear-Viking LT J'Marcus Webb (6-7½, 330) became the starter at RG. Howard and Webb are like having "two houses" on that side, according to one assistant. Other than size, they have few redeeming qualities. If Howard (knee) can't play, Khalif Barnes (6-5½, 320) would make the 121st start of an 11-year career. He's near the end.
Quarterbacks
Derek Carr (6-2½, 215) ranks 10th in passer rating (96.5), vast improvement from a 30th-place finish as a rookie (76.6). He has a rapid release, outstanding arm strength, the speed (4.69) to run or avoid and a soft touch. His scores on the Wonderlic intelligence test were 20 and 23. He needs to take better care of the ball in the pocket and react better to blitzes up the middle. Matt McGloin (6-1, 210) went 1-5 as a starter in '13 (76.1 rating).
Running backs
Latavius Murray (6-2½, 230), a sixth-round pick in '13, has hit the skids the last five games (49.6, 2.99). Even taller than James Starks, one scout said he was faster (4.39) but not as physical as the Packer. He does have very good hands and doesn't back off against the blitz. He's a bit of a long strider with a fumbling issue. Jamize Olawale (6-1, 240) and Marcel Reece (6-1, 250) also play. Olawale is a terrific talent and a better blocker than Reece, who has been a useful receiver-rusher since '10.
DEFENSE
Scheme
Ken Norton, the LB coach in Seattle from 2010-'14, is a first-time coordinator. His play sheet blends ideas from coach Jack Del Rio and Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. Based on the foe, Norton employs both 4-3 "under" and 3-4 looks. Norton seems to prefer man coverage. The Raiders rank 13th in takeaways (20), tied for 23rd in points (25.1) and 25th in yards (372.5).
Defensive line
RE Mario Edwards (6-2½, 280), a second-round (No. 35) pick, is winning with size and athleticism in a strong rookie season. On passing downs, he moves inside and might be the team's second best rusher. LE Denico Autry (6-4½, 280) agreed to a free-agent deal with Green Bay shortly after the '14 draft but apparently failed his physical before signing with Oakland a few days later. Autry is slow (5.07), but with long arms (345/8 inches), gigantic hands (115/8 inches) and a relentless approach he has impressed. NT Justin Ellis (6-1½, 335), a fourth-round pick in '14, provides ballast. Three-technique Dan Williams (6-2, 330), a big-money ($15.2M guaranteed) signee from Arizona in March, is lighter on his feet than Ellis but basically fills the same run-stopping role. Talented DT Leon Orr (6-5, 320), a rookie free agent, debuted Sunday from the practice squad and made the most of 26 snaps. DE Benson Mayowa (6-3, 240) is OK outside in sub. DE Shelby Harris (6-1½, 290), who played at Homestead and briefly for the Badgers, has been on the 53 since Nov. 19 but hasn't played.
Linebackers
SLB Khalil Mack (6-2½, 255) was compared by one scout to Kansas City's Justin Houston. Another said he was like a young Clay Matthews. The NFL's leader in sacks (14), he uses power and speed (4.57), a disciplined approach and big energy for a complete game. He shows first-step quickness, explosive bull rush and exceptional instincts. His vertical jump was 40 inches. MLB Curtis Lofton (6-0, 245), a highly productive starter for the Falcons and Saints from 2008-'14, signed in March for $10M guaranteed to provide stability. He's a great tackler and heavy hitter, but his role has been reduced because a decline in speed leaves him vulnerable against the pass. Former Seahawk WLB Malcolm Smith (6-0, 225) plays every down, has the speed to walk out in coverage and is adequate. Replacing Lofton in nickel for about a month has been rookie Ben Heeney (6-0, 230), a fifth-round pick. He's a gung-ho type with 4.58 speed, a nose for the ball and enough smarts and athleticism to start at some point.
Secondary
Starters David Amerson (6-1, 205) and TJ Carrie (5-11½, 205), nickel back Neiko Thorpe (6-1, 200) and dime back DJ Hayden (5-11, 190) share the cornerbacks' common bond of size and physicality. Denver's receivers dropped passes Sunday after being bodied by the Raiders all afternoon. Amerson, the Redskins' second-round pick in '13, fell out of favor with the new regime after two years as a starter and was cut Sept. 21. Since being claimed, he has been the best cover man in Oakland. He runs 4.42 and is a ballhawk, but in the past has taken excessive risk. Carrie, a seventh-round pick in '14, looks the part with 4.49 speed and a 41-inch vertical. He and Thorpe, a free agent in '12 with 4.45 speed, are competitive players. Hayden has terrific ability but seems to lack confidence and resorts to holding and grabbing. Former Packer SS Charles Woodson (6-1, 210) tries to hold the group together as he plays through a shoulder injury that has affected his tackling. With former Eagle FS Nate Allen (6-0½, 210) iffy (knee), it'll probably be well-traveled Taylor Mays (6-3, 235) deep in base and possibly Carrie in sub. Mays hits but is a liability in coverage.
SPECIAL TEAMS
P Marquette King is outstanding. K Sebastian Janikowski, 37, is starting to slip. Long snapper is up in the air because Jon Condo suffered a dislocated shoulder Sunday. Former Packer-Lion-Raven Jeremy Ross was added to the roster Nov. 25 and was the dual returner for Games 11-13. RB Taiwan Jones is the top performer for first-year coach Brad Seely.
GAME-BREAKER
When it came time for Raiders GM Reggie McKenzie to exercise the fourth selection in the 2015 draft, among the players on the board were DT Leonard Williams, WR Kevin White and RB Todd Gurley. McKenzie went with WR Amari Cooper. With 920 yards, he's set to become the team's first 1,000-yard receiver since Randy Moss (1,005) in 2005; Minnesota's Stefon Diggs (638) ranks second in yards among rookies. Of the Raiders' 12 longest receptions, Cooper has six. On Sunday in Denver, he was shut out despite being targeted eight times.
WEAKEST LINK
CB David Amerson, the best cover man, started the season in Washington before being cut and claimed on waivers Sept. 22. The fact Amerson became a starter Oct. 4 speaks volumes about the group of cornerbacks that he joined. Oft-injured DJ Hayden, the 12th player selected in 2013, started the first 10 games before being benched in favor of TJ Carrie. Amerson leads the club in passes defensed with 20, or 10 more than the runner-up, Carrie. Oakland ranks 28th in passing yards allowed (271.5).
McGINN'S VIEW
When the Packers played in Denver on Nov. 1, the Broncos started the same five offensive linemen as they did Sunday against the Raiders at Sports Authority Field.
The Packers' pass rush could hardly have been any less effective against what was regarded by scouts as the Broncos's suspect offensive line. Green Bay had no sacks, three knockdowns and one hurry in its 29-10 defeat.
Oakland upset Denver, 15-12, largely because of its one-man pass rush. OLB Khalil Mack had seven of the team's eight quarterback hits, and five were sacks.
Four of the sacks came when Mack beat RT Michael Schofield playing left end in a nickel defense. The fifth came when he switched sides and beat LT Ryan Harris.
On the first, Mack dipped under Schofield and sacked Brock Osweiler in 2.6 seconds.
On the second, he slipped past Schofield off the edge and sacked Osweiler in 3.3. He fumbled, and the ball was recovered by Denver for a safety.
On the third, he worked up the field against Schofield, knocked him off-balance with a right-handed shove to the upper chest and sacked Osweiler in 2.8.
On the fourth, the Broncos positioned a running back just outside Harris to chip on Mack. Instead, Mack surprised Harris with a bull rush that deposited him on his back and led to a sack in 2.6.
On the fifth, the Raiders rushed only three so RG Louis Vasquez slid toward Schofield to deny Mack the inside. This time, Mack raced wide of Schofield and registered the sack in 3.3.
Mack tied the team record of five sacks set by Howie Long in 1983. He also became the first player to get five sacks and one forced fumble in a game since the 49ers' Aldon Smith in 2012.
Mack, the fifth player selected in 2014, leads the NFL in sacks with 14, one-half more than Detroit's Ziggy Ansah and Houston's J.J. Watt.
Even though Mack played in the Mid-American Conference for Buffalo, most scouts loved him. They voted him the best outside linebacker for a 3-4 defense in that draft ahead of Jadeveon Clowney.
The Texans, who made Clowney the first pick two years ago, would surely take Mack hands-down (or Odell Beckham) if they could do it over again.It is difficult not to be intemperate in the face of nine murdered journalists, two murdered policemen and a janitor, lying in pools of blood in Paris, the City of Lights: the cold, calculated killing spree a response to journalism that was displeasing. The magazine Charlie Hebdo was firebombed in 2011. Though it regularly heaved dung across and beyond the political spectrum and satirized many religious figures and religions including the Pope, Jews, Christians et al, it was Charlie’s caricatures of Islam that brought on the bombs and murders. Not surprising, in our time when virtually all terrorism of the last few decades—whether in Russia, China, Germany, the killing fields of Syria and the Middle East, New York or Boston—has been carried out in the name of Islam.
There is really no point in fatuities about Islam being just as tolerant as all other religions, which was uttered endlessly by commentators covering the Paris horror. The public face of Islam has been hijacked by Islamist fundamentalists with a zero-tolerance policy. Though I really wish we had more than the occasional imam declaring this act to be barbaric, I can understand why Western Muslims—the majority of whom I expect and hope despise this carnage—aren’t taking to the streets to decry what is being done in the name of their faith. When hundreds of girls are kidnapped, enslaved or murdered in Pakistan or Nigeria for attending school (when even in Canada a Muslim women may run a risk of being killed for not upholding the family honour in a forced marriage), when Canadian-born youths are training as jihadists or fighting in Syria, fear takes over. Why endanger your own family or relatives abroad?
“Senseless killings,” said NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair in condemning the latest violence. Not senseless at all. Terror works. You can see how Islamic terrorism has gripped a culture when even those who may be mentally ill, possibly like Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the lone Parliament Hill gunman, seem to carry out their deranged acts in the name of Islam. They don’t kill in the name of vegetarianism or Napoleon. Their targets aren’t electricians or acrobats but the people symbolic of Western values—those standing guard over its memorials or working in its parliament.
On the CBC some commentators tried out the notion that Canada didn’t have the same problem as France because our multiculturalism was so much more successful than (failed) French attempts to assimilate its Muslim immigrants. This showed a rather scanty knowledge of recent history. Algeria was until 1962 a “department” (province) of France and its residents held French citizenship. After a bloody war for its independence causing about a million casualties (figures are difficult to verify), about 1.8 million Algerians moved into France with some economic help from the French government. About 800,000 were Arabs or nomads and the other million were the pieds-noirs—Europeans who had lived in Algeria. If Canada found itself with such high numbers of Muslim immigrants—many of whom were unskilled, if not illiterate—our multicultural approach would probably succumb to ghettoes with better living conditions than those faced by the displaced in France but certainly not without serious problems.
For my money, the reason we don’t have a slaughter like the one at Charlie Hebdo is because no such magazine would ever be allowed in Canada. We save our Kalashnikovs for murdering free speech. First we had the human rights commissions who literally jackbooted freedom of expression. The case against Maclean’s centred largely on an article of Mark Steyn’s. The Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like his piece on Islam and filed complaints with the federal as well as two provincial human rights commissions. Steyn’s work was vigorously defended by Maclean’s and Rogers Communications. Maclean’s and Steyn won. But the cost was high. I speak from experience. When in 2011 I had the one and only column of my 37 years of writing for Maclean’s spiked, it was on Dutch anti-Muslim immigration politician Geert Wilders. I thought it was pretty milquetoast writing since I was automatically self-censoring and pulling my punches but I really couldn’t blame Maclean’s. They were suffering from battle fatigue: nothing is more enervating and time-consuming than filling out the endless details and forms that human-rights complaints require. Not to mention the legal fees. “You’d win,” said one of my editors. “We know that. But we just can’t go there again.” In my view there is no media outlet in Canada brave enough to allow a full and proper discussion of Islam.
After the imbroglio with Steyn, Prime Minister Harper gutted the HRC ability to monitor free speech. The issue went by default to the Supreme Court—an inhospitable terrain for freedom. The jurists took on a case involving flyers written about a cow almost as sacred as Islam, namely homosexuality. The flyers written by “Christian Trust Activist” William Whatcott wanted to bring “sodomites” to Christ for redemption but not into classrooms as teachers on human sexuality. The unanimous judgment of Canada’s Supreme Court (overturning the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal that had allowed the flyers) should have been reprinted in its entirety in a Canadian satirical magazine with cartoons of our jurists were such a magazine allowed in Canada, which, according to the Supremes’ decision, it would not. Yes, we have free speech, said the Supremes citing the Charter of Rights but that doesn’t mean we can say anything we like because free speech may be hate speech or at least hateful to some group. But a guarantee of free speech is not divisible. You can’t guarantee “some free speech” any more than you can be “a little bit” pregnant.
“Everyone has their red buttons,” said one listener to a Toronto radio show on the Paris murders. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour—while condemning the killings in the strongest terms—remarked that Charlie Hebdo did go “over the top.” More than the God-awful (and I use His name advisedly) Broadway hit production Book of Mormon? And where are the red buttons among Christians when thousands of their fellow worshippers are being slaughtered by Muslims in Africa and the Middle East and tortured by communists in China, North Korea and Cuba?
Terror can backfire in the sense that some people finally dislike being scared and react by doing whatever terror is discouraging. This is generally a temporary response. As George Jonas pointed out in a 2013 column, human beings find a way of rationalizing their behaviour so that they can claim they are refraining from publishing or saying something not out of fear but because they don’t wish to offend. They convert the base notion of being scared into a noble weapon of seeing someone else’s point of view. In fact, this is one of the most insidious aspects of terrorism: we wash our brains and convert our fear into understanding. Example: the awful spot CBC put news host Evan Solomon in when reporting the Paris murders. He was given the job of reading CBC’s rationalization to explain why, although the motive for the Paris murders were Charlie’s cartoons of Muhammad and Islamists, the CBC would not show the cartoons in reporting the story. I didn’t tape his explanation, fascinated as I was by its maze of clauses, but the phrase “not to offend” made a cameo appearance.
The West has been ready to give up on itself for some time now. We have no idea of what we stand for and seem to have no faith other than lip-service in the superiority of our institutions. If 9/11 can somehow be made to feel like partly the fault of America, then change foreign policy or administrations and the problem will go away. If young Islamic terrorists are created by feelings of “alienation” then the problem will be solved by getting them to like us. It’s so comforting. Fundamentalist Islam is on the march and all we can do is worry about giving offence. When the blood of journalists can only be expunged by denying other journalists the right to say or show what they died for, we are hemorrhaging freedom. I have no children but some coming generation will pay the price for their parents’ cowardice.SEOUL (Reuters) - A “serial” North Korean defector has given a substantial U.S. and South Korean military presence the slip, stealing a 9-tonne fishing trawler to return to the impoverished North, the Yonhap news agency reported on Thursday.
South Korea’s Yonhap described the 28-year-old crab fisherman, identified only as Lee, as a “serial” defector who had made what appeared to be his fourth dash to the North.
It gave no explanation how he had managed to defect so many times, let alone how he had been able to avoid imprisonment in North Korea, which has ratcheted up tension on the peninsula with increasingly strident rhetoric in recent weeks.
South Korean military officials said the boat commandeered by Lee had been spotted too late to be intercepted.
“The fishing boat had managed to enter a blind spot on our radar,” Yonhap quoted an unidentified South Korean military official as saying.
He evaded detection despite being based on the island of Yeongpyeong, a hotspot on the border between the North and South that was shelled by North Korea in 2010. He had been living in the South since 2007, Yonhap said.
The United States has deployed state-of-the-art military assets to the region in response to Pyongyang’s threats to launch a nuclear strike and stage all-out war.
There are more than 20,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea. Some have returned home to a hero’s welcome and subsequently denounced the South.
Pyongyang parades returnees in an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of its social system, despite external reports from bodies like the United Nations that show many of its 24 million people face regular food shortages.In the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who, regeneration is a biological ability exhibited by the Time Lords, a race of fictional humanoids originating on the planet Gallifrey. This process allows a Time Lord to undergo a transformation into a new physical form and a somewhat different personality after instances which would normally result in death. Regeneration has been used twelve times throughout the history of the franchise as a device for introducing a new actor for the lead role of its main character, the Doctor. Other Time Lords and similar characters have also regenerated, usually for narrative, rather than casting, reasons.
The current incarnation of the Doctor is played by Jodie Whittaker, following the regeneration of the Twelfth Doctor (portrayed by Peter Capaldi) during the 2017 Christmas special "Twice Upon a Time".
Conceptual history [ edit ]
Inspiration [ edit ]
The concept of regeneration was created in 1966 by the writers of Doctor Who as a method of replacing the leading actor. The role of the Doctor had been played by William Hartnell since the programme began in 1963 but, by 1966, it was increasingly apparent that Hartnell's health was deteriorating and he was becoming more difficult to work with. Producer John Wiles had, following several clashes with Hartnell, intended to have the actor replaced in The Celestial Toymaker; during two episodes of that serial, the Doctor is invisible (owing to Hartnell being on holiday during the recording). Wiles' plan was for the character to reappear played by a new actor. This proposal was vetoed by Gerald Savory, the BBC's Head of Serials (and Wiles' superior), which led to Wiles leaving before The Celestial Toymaker was produced.[1] However, it was apparent that it would not be possible for Hartnell to continue for much longer.
On 29 July 1966, production concluded on the final episode of The Smugglers, the last serial recorded in the third production block.[citation needed] During production, Hartnell and producer Innes Lloyd had reached an agreement that he should leave the role, having starred in one more serial that would see a handover to a new actor, which would be the first one produced as part of Season 4. Script editor Gerry Davis proposed that, since the Doctor had already been established as an alien, the character could die and return in a new body. Lloyd took this further by suggesting that the Doctor could do this "renewal" regularly, transforming from an older man to a younger one; this would allow for the convenient recasting of the role when necessary.[citation needed] The process itself was modelled on LSD trips, with the experience being like the "hell and dank horror" of taking the drug.[2]
At the conclusion of The Tenth Planet, the First Doctor collapses from apparent old age and exhaustion, having commented earlier that his body was "wearing a bit thin". Then, before the eyes of his companions Ben and Polly, and of the viewing audience, his features shift into that of the Second Doctor, played by Patrick Troughton. In The Power of the Daleks, the Second Doctor's first story, the Doctor draws an analogy between the renewal and a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.[3]
Developing the concept [ edit ]
It was not clear initially whether the renewal was a natural ability of the Doctor's as opposed to a process initiated by technology. In Power of the Daleks, the Second Doctor describes his renewal as a function of his TARDIS time machine, stating that "without it, [he] couldn't survive."[3]
When Troughton left the series in 1969, the Doctor was renewed again, but this time the change was forced on him by the Time Lords at the conclusion of The War Games, where it is referred to as a "change of appearance". As with the first change, this language suggested only a superficial physical change, not one of personality, although Jon Pertwee's portrayal of the Third Doctor also differed quite substantially from Troughton's. Unlike the previous change, this one is treated as a punishment rather than a natural process: in The War Games the Doctor protests, "You can't just change what I look like without consulting me!"
As the series continued, more aspects of the regenerative process were introduced, but the basic concepts of regeneration as accepted by fans of the series today were only firmly established in the final scene of Planet of the Spiders (1974), when Pertwee's Third Doctor turns into Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor. In this scene, the change is called "regeneration" for the first time, and is explained as a biological process that occurs when a Time Lord's body is dying. It is also stated that following the regeneration the Doctor's brain cells would be shaken up and his behaviour would be "erratic" for a time, something that would be evident for most subsequent regenerations.
In the About Time reference series Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood note that the officially licensed magazine, Doctor Who Monthly, stated in a "Matrix Data-Bank" column in 1982 that its readers should not confuse the "regenerations" of later incarnations with the "rejuvenation" of Hartnell into Troughton.[4] However, dialogue within the series itself explicitly includes the First-to-Second "rejuvenation" when enumerating the Doctor's regenerations (for example in Mawdryn Undead (1983)).
Transitions [ edit ]
Logopolis, 1981, and Castrovalva, 1982) The Fourth Doctor regenerates into the Fifth Doctor (from, 1981, and, 1982)
The regeneration "effect" was accomplished during the series' original run from 1963–1989 primarily through the use of video mixing. Originally, the plan was to have Hartnell collapse at the end of The Tenth Planet with his cloak over his face, which would then be pulled back to reveal Troughton in the next serial. However, vision mixer Shirley Coward discovered and took advantage of a malfunction in the mixing desk which allowed Hartnell's image to be overexposed to the point of almost whiting out the screen, then fading back in to reveal Troughton's face. This also meant that the regeneration scene could take place with both actors at the conclusion of The Tenth Planet, and Troughton was accordingly signed up to participate.[citation needed]
Subsequent regenerations retained essentially the same method, with or without additional video or make-up effects. The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Doctor used an additional make-up effect representing a transitional form known as the Watcher, but aside from this, other regenerations in the original series run simply mixed the image of the incoming actor on top of the outgoing one. The transition from the Seventh to the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 television movie took advantage of the higher budget and modern computer animation technology to "morph" the features of Sylvester McCoy into those of Paul McGann.
With the exception of the transitions from the Second to Third, each regeneration was shown on-screen, with the previous incumbent in the role symbolically "handing off" the character to the next. The Second Doctor was never seen to actually change into the Third, simply fading off into darkness at the end of The War Games and then stumbling out of the TARDIS, already regenerated, at the start of Spearhead from Space (1970).
The regeneration of the Sixth Doctor into the Seventh is the only time that a single actor took on the roles of two incarnations of the Doctor. Colin Baker declined the invitation to film the regeneration sequence at the start of Time and the Rani (1987) due to the circumstances in which the BBC dismissed him from the role.[citation needed] As a result, Sylvester McCoy had to don his predecessor's costume and a blond curly wig, lying face down, with the mixing effect to the Doctor's "new" features occurring as he was turned over.
The 2005 series, which revived the programme after its cancellation 16 years earlier, began with the Ninth Doctor already regenerated and no explanation given as to the circumstances behind the change (although a scene in the debut episode "Rose" when the Doctor commented on his appearance in a mirror indicated that the change had recently occurred). In the documentary series Doctor Who Confidential, producer Russell T Davies explained his reasoning that, after such a long hiatus, a regeneration in the first episode would be not only confusing for new viewers but also lacking in dramatic impact, as there would have been no emotional investment in the character being replaced.[5] The regeneration into the Ninth Doctor was later seen and explained in "The Day of the Doctor" (2013). In this episode, the War Doctor automatically begins a regeneration due to old age at the end of the Last Great Time War. However, the full transition is not seen with only the start of the regeneration being shown.
The regeneration of the Ninth Doctor into the Tenth at the end of "The Parting of the Ways" (2005) used computer effects to morph Christopher Eccleston into David Tennant. In the episode of Doctor Who Confidential accompanying the episode "Utopia" (2007), where the same effect is used for the Master's regeneration, it is stated that the production team decided that this would be a common effect for all future Time Lord regenerations, rather than each regeneration being designed uniquely at the whim of the individual director. This style of transition is seen again in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" (2008) both when the Doctor undergoes an aborted regeneration, and when his hand spawns a clone in the second part; in The End of Time (2010) during which Matt Smith took over the role as the Eleventh Doctor; in "The Impossible Astronaut" when the Doctor is shot twice and seemingly killed; in "Day of the Moon" when a young girl regenerates; and in "Let's Kill Hitler" when Mels (Nina Toussaint-White) is shot and regenerates into River Song (Alex Kingston). "The Night of the Doctor" and "The Day of the Doctor" subsequently use the effect to show the Eighth Doctor and War Doctor's regenerations respectively. The Eighth Doctor's regeneration into the War Doctor uses steady beams of light as opposed to the flame effect used for other revived series regenerations. In the Series 10 episode "The Lie of the Land", the Twelfth Doctor fakes a regeneration as part of a plan to test if Bill still has free will. The effect used is consistent with the one used in the modern series, with the Doctor's hands glowing and emitting regeneration energy before he enters full regeneration. However, as the regeneration was not real, it did not use up a regeneration and the Doctor did not change bodies.
The regeneration from the Eleventh to the Twelfth Doctor slightly differs from other regenerations from the revived series. During "The Time of the Doctor", the Eleventh Doctor reveals that he has used all his regenerations and is in fact in his thirteen and final body, leading to his aged appearance during the events of the episode. At the conclusion, the Time Lords grant him a new regeneration cycle, and he begins his thirteenth regeneration in the explosive manner that has become tradition (so explosive that it destroys invading Dalek forces including a ship and the village of Christmas in the process). However, as this regeneration is the first in a new cycle, it initially only "resets" his current body back to its youthful appearance (the Doctor referring to this as the cycle "breaking in"), and the eventual transition to the Twelfth Doctor happens with a flash and the actor suddenly lurching back, standing back up to reveal the new Doctor.
In the 2017 Christmas |
ated on the fourth line with center Andrew Desjardins and forward Mike Brown.
Hamilton has played 11 games for the Sharks this season. He has no points and 13 shots on goal. His most recent NHL game was Jan. 7 against the Nashville Predators.
"It's been a while since we've seen him," McLellan said. "The NHL game has changed a little bit. It's gotten a little more intense, a little quicker, a little harder. He's going back into the testing field, if you will. If he does play, he'll get that opportunity and then we'll get a read on where he's at. I don't want him to get into the game with a whole bunch of clutter in his head. I want him to do what he's been doing [in the AHL] and we'll adjust as it goes."
The Sharks have 103 points after their 5-2 victory against the Oilers, and they lead the Anaheim Ducks by two points in the Pacific Division, but the Ducks have played two fewer games.
Winnipeg top-line forward Andrew Ladd will return to the lineup after missing the Jets' game Monday against the Dallas Stars to be with his wife and newborn baby girl.
"It's nice to get back with the guys and see them and have a game [Thursday] and just get back in the swing of things," Ladd said.
Former Sharks forward Devin Setoguchi will be a healthy scratch Thursday. He has no points in eight career games against San Jose.
"Coach's decision," Jets coach Paul Maurice said of Setoguchi.
Matt Halischuk will move up to take Setoguchi's spot on a line with center Eric O'Dell and forward Evander Kane.
"He's got a real good sense of the defensive part of the game," Maurice said of Halischuk. "There's no quit in it. He'll get pucks deep, he'll get on the forecheck and there's quite a bit of quickness in his game. When on that line that can help the other two."
Here are the projected lineups:
JETS
Andrew Ladd - Bryan Little - Michael Frolik
Evander Kane - Eric O'Dell - Matt Halischuk
Dustin Byfuglien - Olli Jokinen - Blake Wheeler
Eric Tangradi - Jim Slater - Anthony Peluso
Mark Stuart - Jacob Trouba
Tobias Enstrom - Keaton Ellerby
Adam Pardy - Paul Postma
Al Montoya
Michael Hutchinson
Scratched: Patrice Cormier, Devin Setoguchi
Injured: Zach Bogosian (upper body), Ondrej Pavelec (lower body), Mark Scheifele (knee), James Wright (ankle), Chris Thorburn (ankle), Grant Clitsome (back)
SHARKS
Joe Pavelski - Joe Thornton - Brent Burns
Matt Nieto - Patrick Marleau - Tyler Kennedy
Marty Havlat - James Sheppard - Tommy Wingels
Freddie Hamilton - Andrew Desjardins - Mike Brown
Marc-Edouard Vlasic - Jason Demers
Brad Stuart - Justin Braun
Matt Irwin - Dan Boyle
Antti Niemi
Alex Stalock
Scratched: Scott Hannan, Raffi Torres
Injured: Tomas Hertl (knee), Adam Burish (hand), Logan Couture (foot)In style and methodology, Ms. Mazzeo’s new book is an academic wheezer, a retooled dissertation perhaps, but it’s also smart and insightful, and points out that 18th-century writers took a certain amount of borrowing for granted. What mattered was whether you were sneaky about it and, even more important, whether you improved upon what you took, by weaving it seamlessly into your own text and adding some new context or insight.
Interestingly, the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally recently defended Mr. McEwan in just this way, writing, “Fiction depends on a certain value-added quality created on top of the raw material, and that McEwan has added value beyond the original will, I believe, be richly demonstrated.” In the case of “Atonement,” the principle seems inarguable, but it’s also a slippery slope. You could argue that Kaavya Viswanathan improved upon the raw material of the Megan McCafferty novel she relied on so liberally, and yet no one is rushing to her defense. (link)
In 1968 the Malian Yambo Ouloguem's novel Le Devoir de violence [English: Bound to Violence] was published by Editions du Seuil to widespread critical acclaim, culminating in the Prix Renaudot the same year. Reviewers and literary critics in the West praised the novel's "authenticity," some hailing it as the first authentic African novel ever written (as it was described on the back cover of the American edition). Matthiew Gallez, writing for Le Monde, called it the first African novel "digne de ce nom" [worthy of this name].
Yambo Ouloguem said on television that he 'wrote this book in French but followed the traditional African rhythms and the spirit of the African past.' It presumably says something for Graham Greene that, even before he went to a continent that later much concerned him he was capable of effortlessly conveying its traditional rhythms. (cited in Serrano)
[T]he first generation of modern African novels -- the generation of Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Laye's L'Enfant noir--were written in the context of notions of politics and culture dominant in the French and British university and publishing worlds in the fifties and sixties. This does not mean that they were like novels written in Western Europe at that time: for part of what was held to be obvious both by these writers and by the high culture of Europe of the day was that new literatures in new nations should be anticolonial and nationalist. These early novels seem to belong to the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary nationalism; they are theorized as the imaginative recreation of a common cultural past that is crafted into a shared tradition by the writer.... The novels of this first stage are thus realist legitimations of nationalism: they authorize a'return to traditions' while at the same time recognizing the demands of a Weberian rationalized modernity. (cited in Serrano, 23)
Via the Literary Saloon, I learn that Richard Posner has a new book on plagiarism out, called The Little Book of Plagiarism. There are already some reviews, including the Louisville Courier-Journal (which includes an interesting tidbit: the University of Oregon has been accused of plagiarizing its plagiarism policy from Stanford University). The Times review, by Charles McGrath, is more thorough, partly because McGrath is also reviewing a scholarly book by Tilar Mazzeo, called Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period When McGrath gets into Mazzeo's understanding of plagiarism at the end of the 18th century, things start to get interesting:In short, in the early 19th century a certain amount of borrowing was taken for granted and even allowed, as long as it was well-concealed and accompanied by fresh insights and work -- "value-added." And today, while both the law concerning plagiarism and the ethos of originality are quite different (today plagiarism is generally seen as shameful), some of the same thinking is still used, especially when there are gray areas (as in the McEwan case).* * *Speaking of gray areas, there are a number of them in the case of a famous plagiarist from the 1960s that I only recently learned about, the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem.Here's the back-story, as provided by Richard Serrano (author of a recent book called Against the Postcolonial):After the English edition was published in 1971, an anonymous article appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, noting that certain passages in Bound to Violence appeared to plagiarize Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield. The TLS writer even noted the irony that the novel's heralded African "authenticity" was at least partly derived from the text of a British travel writer:And shortly thereafter, it was discovered that Ouloguem had borrowed -- even more heavily -- from a French novel by Andre Schwartz-Bart, Le Dernier des justes (1959), which had, also ironically, won the same literary prize -- the Prix Renaudot. And in a manner characterisitc of plagiarism, once discovered, it seemed to spread: "citations" were soon found to half a dozen other writers, listed by Serrano as "Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Pascal, Godard, and in the English translation, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson."Graham Greene filed suit, and Bound to Violence was banned in France. Ouloguem himself went back to Mali shortly after all this transpired, gave up fiction, and took up Islam. (The critic Christopher Wise visited him there in the mid-1990s, and discovered him to be somewhat disturbed; he was spouting various conspiracy theories, and refused to directly address the controvery over his work)But here's the thing: shortly after all of this broke, Ouologuem himself claimed that the passages he took from other writers were in quotations in his original manuscript, and that those quotations were omitted by his publisher. As Christopher Wise notes, the publisher has never specifically denied this -- but it's also clear that the original manuscript of Le Devoir de violence has never been made public, which would allow Ouologuem's claim to be definitively supported. (The status of the manuscript isn't discussed in the Ouologuem scholarship I've read.)Once one starts looking closely at some of the specific instances of plagiarism in the text, especially from the Andre Schwartz-Bart, it begins to be clear that Ouologuem wasn't just randomly grabbing nice passages for his own use -- Schwartz-Bart's book is about the experience of European Jewry from the medieval period up through the Holocaust, and many of the passages that Ouologuem appropriates are in fact tied (in Ouologuem's redployment of them) to the advent of the early (pre-European) Arab slave trade in Mali, an event that Ouologuem views as catastrophic (Holocaust-esque). Moreover, postcolonial critics like Christopher Miller and Kwame Anthony Appiah have argued that Ouologuem's other borrowings are equally strategic -- that is to say, they are used ironically, to send up European misrepresentations of Africa. As Miller puts it, "this is a novel so highly refined and perverse in its manner of lifting titles, phrases, and passages from other texts that it makes the binary system of quotation and firect narration irrelevant" (cited in Serrano, 18). And Appiah, in his defense of Ouologuem, sees Bound to Violence as specifically a rejection of the first generation of modern African novels:Ouloguem's novel is harshly critical of African nationalism, and in fact, reserves its greatest hostility for the violence Africans committed against other Africans (though the Europeans don't get off scot-free; there is a brilliant parody of western anthropology in chapter four, which you can read online ). For Appiah, this ideological critique mirrors the novel's formal disintegration -- the story is convoluted, and must be, as a refutation of the false clarity in the first generation of African novels. And this argument might even be extended to explain Ouologuem's gratuitous borrowings; plagiarism may be a way of showing contempt for the entire ethos of European/colonial writing.Well, maybe. Though Wise, Appiah, and others are firmly committed to defending Ouologuem (while Serrano remains a bit hostile), it might be that the most intelligent position on Ouologuem would neither aim to exonerate him nor convict him all over again. There is clearly a commentary on the ideas of authorship and authenticity at play in many of the specific instances of plagiarism in his text. But there are also problems of intellectual property that have to be contended with; a decision has to be made about whether strategic or polemical borrowings such as the kind Ouologuem makes can be rendered acceptable (and one notes that the reasons given for those borrowings are adduced by critics, not by Ouologuem himself, though they are consistent with the idea that Ouologuem intended for the borrowed passages to have quotes around them). What one might study (or teach) is not just the book, but the controversy the book has generated -- Ouolgouem, and the "Ouoluguem Affair," if you will. In this light, Ouologuem, I believe, is in the plagiarism gray area after all.* * *Incidentally, another excerpt from Ouloguem's novel is here, and there's a 1971 interview here. Also see an article in TNR that covers much of this same ground, as well as the Yambo Ouologuem Forum, a weblog started by Ouologuem's daughter, Awa.In 2005, the top 1 percent of households earned as much annually as the bottom 60 percent combined. Not counting capital gains—which have recovered since the crash—these households saw income gains even in 2008.
In March of this year, the unemployment rate for those with only a high-school diploma was 12 percent. For college graduates it was 4.5 percent. For those with a professional degree, it was just 2 percent. From 2009 to 2010, according to Peck, wages grew 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon Valley.
From May 2009 to May 2011, according to Gallup data cited by Peck, "daily consumer spending rose by 16 percent among Americans earning more than $90,000 a year; among all other Americans, spending was completely flat."
"In 1967," Peck writes, "97 percent of 30-to-50-year-old American men with only a high-school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were.
Employment polarization is wreaking havoc on the nonprofessional middle class: Unhappy marriages, divorce rates, and out-of-wedlock birth rates in those communities are now comparable to those among high-school dropouts.
Read the whole thing.
There is no simple answer to all this. Such trends—the upward concentration of wealth, the shift away from manufacturing, the increasing value of intellectual capital and analytic skill-sets—are not unique to America, but, rather, common to most industrial nations embedding themselves into the global information economy. [See a collection of political cartoons on the economy.]
I'm a free-marketeer. I'm fully aware that, in a dynamic capitalist economy, inequality is inevitable.
But what's happening now is anything but dynamic—at least for the vast majority of citizens. It's more like a creeping caste system that perpetuates misery and blocks upward mobility.
The idea that the middle class—or whoever Rick Perry means by "We"—is suffering because the lower classes aren't paying taxes; the idea that the rich would create more jobs if their share of national wealth was even more heavily concentrated; the idea that, if everyone had "skin in the game," the economy would somehow improve, even as the beneficiaries of programs like the EITC are bearing the brunt of the Great Recession—all this is, to put it bluntly, a load of crap.
It's a stupid, nonempirical, and corrosive mindset.
Reagan wept.
See a photo gallery of Ronald Reagan.
Read Rick Newman: How Rick Perry Created Jobs in Texas.A California man embezzled nearly $5 million, and spent a chunk of it on free-to-play mobile title, Game of War.
It's not unusual to hear a story of a gamer going overboard spending money on a free-to-play mobile game, but some people take it to new heights. Case in point: Kevin Lee Co of Sacramento. The 45-year-old recently plead guilty to wire fraud and money laundering after embezzling $4.8 million from his employer over seven years.
That's egregious enough, but it turns out that in addition to using that money to purchase luxury cars, plastic surgery, home furniture, San Francisco Forty-Niners and Sacramento Kings season tickets, and a golf club membership, he also dropped about $1 million on a mobile game - specifically, Game of War. The amount came to light in a document dug up by Ars Technica and summarized on MoreLaw.
Game of War is well known for both its advertising starring supermodel Kate Upton and singer Mariah Carey and the fact that it has made as much as $1 million a day in revenues. Earlier this year, VentureBeat reported that paying members of Game of War averaged almost $550 in yearly spending.
As a result of his actions, Co is looking at a maximum of 20 years in prison for each charge (one for fraud and one for money laundering), as well as a combined $750,000 in fines. Of course, there's a plea deal in place that includes a recommendation for a reduced sentence, so there's no telling what the final outcome may be.On 2nd January, Samsung pushed a software update (I9300XXELLA) to the Galaxy S III and we can confirm that the new software update fixes the infamous Exynos 4 vulnerability. The security flaw was in the kernel which made the device R/W by all users, apps and gave access to full Physical Memory. In short, this vulnerability gave root permissions to *any* app and there was no control over it but now with the new system update the security hole has been patched.
We believe that the new system update also fixes the sudden death issue as the new firmware ships with brand new bootloaders and this is the first time Samsung has updated the bootloaders of the device since it started shipping back in May 2012. But, we can’t confirm if sudden death issue has been resolved or not as Samsung is the only one who can confirm about the fix.
For now the new software update is only available for the United kingdom (BTU) but we expect other countries to follow soon. We would urge Galaxy S III users to immediatly update their device to the latest firmware via Kies or OTA (Over-The-Air).
Official Firmware Details:
Android Version: 4.1.2 – Build JZO54K
PDA: I9300XXELLA
CSC: I9300OXAELLA
MODEM: I9300XXELLA
Build Date: 22-12-12
Change list: 742798
Screenshots:
SamMobile research, via, via
UPDATE: Our sources confirm that Samsung has fixed the sudden death issue with the latest Galaxy S III Software Update.Captains,
In less than a month our Away Team heads to FedCon 25 in Germany and we would like to share some great news and information regarding this upcoming convention. FedCon 25 will take place from Friday, 13th of May until Monday, 16th of May 2016 in Bonn, Germany. This year will be truly epic. Not only because it is the 25th FedCon or even because of the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, but because of what we have planned for you and FedCon 25.
Develeopers beam down to FedCon
We are very happy to announce that Executive Producer Stephen Ricossa and Lead Artist Samuel Wall will join forces with the Away Team in Europe this year! Have you ever wanted to meet the Devs and ask them your questions? Well, this is your chance! Stephen and Samuel will be around on Friday, 13th May and Saturday, 14th May 2016. Both are very excited to meet the European Community.
Community Meet-Up
One of the highlights for the Away Team will be Saturday evening, when we will host the community meet-up. Traditionally the meet-up will take place outside of the convention area, to ensure that each and every one of the community can join. Since we will be in Germany, what place would be more perfect for a community meet-up than a “Bierhaus”? Prepare yourself for a great evening full of Trek, conversations and Goodies at the Bierhaus Machold! The location is close to the city center and easy to reach by public transport (line 66) from the Maritim Hotel. We will provide more information shortly.
Activities and Booth
We have tons of stuff planned for you. The Away Team will not only provide you with the latest news about Star Trek Online, but is also looking forward to answering your questions and engage in Trek talk. Speaking of questions, we’ll put your Trek knowledge to the test with our Trek Trivia, if you know the answers to our tricky questions you’ll have the chance to win some epic swag! Not only will Stephen Ricossa and Samuel Wall will be around the booth for FedCon, but you will also have the chance to look over the shoulder of our Designer Tim “Suricata” Davies while he works on STO artwork.
If you want more of an STO fix and want to get more insight on what it’s like to work at Star Trek Online then our Devs will be hosting several panels at FedCon about STO, the very latest news and what the life of a Dev is like at Cryptic. We have much more prepared, so make sure to drop by our booth and meet us at FedCon!
Join the spirit
In case you have never been to a Sci-Fi convention like FedCon before or if you just cannot wait for the event next month, then take a look at our experiences and impressions from last year’s FedCon 24!
See you in Bonn, Germany!
Nevandon
Community Manager
Star Trek OnlineImage copyright PA Image caption Lord Ashdown has been a passionate defender of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg
Former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown and Conservative peer Lord Young have been made Companions of Honour in the New Year Honours List.
The honour, which is limited to 65 people in addition to the Queen, is awarded in recognition of services of conspicuous national importance.
Other politicians in the List include the Labour MP for Stirling Anne McGuire, who has been made a Dame.
Her Labour colleague Hugh Bayley and Tory MP David Amess are knighted.
The Order of the Companions of Honour was instituted in 1917 by George V at the same time as the Order of the British Empire was founded.
Current members include Professor Stephen Hawking, naturalist Sir David Attenborough and painter David Hockney as well as former Conservative prime minister Sir John Major and former Labour chancellor Lord Healey.
Image copyright Other Image caption Lord Young has had a 60 year career in business and politics
Lord Ashdown, who was Lib Dem leader between 1988 and 1999 before joining the House of Lords, has been recognised for public and political service.
The former Royal Marine, who was High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, has played a key role behind the scenes in securing and maintaining his party's support for its coalition with the Conservatives and bolstering party leader Nick Clegg.
Nato role
Lord Young, a successful businessman who was brought into politics by Margaret Thatcher, has been recognised for public service in a career of more than 50 years.
He served as employment and trade and industry secretary in the 1980s and as deputy chairman of the Conservatives before returning to the private sector.
Image caption Labour MP Anne McGuire is among a number of MPs to be recognised for their parliamentary service
Margaret Thatcher famously said of him that "other people bring me problems; David brings me solutions".
The Conservative peer became David Cameron's enterprise adviser after he took office in May 2010 but the peer resigned six months later after being criticised for claiming "most Britons had never had it so good" in the middle of a severe economic downturn and austerity in public spending.
Ms McGuire becomes a Dame Commander of the British Empire in recognition of parliamentary and political services during an 18-year career in Parliament.
After becoming an MP in 1997, she served in a number of junior ministerial roles under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, including as minister for disabled people. The MP, who is standing down next year, is a member of the Public Accounts Committee.
Mr Bayley, Labour MP for York Central, is recognised for his service as a member of the UK delegation to the 250-member NATO Parliamentary Assembly and as a former President of the Assembly. He is also standing down at the next election.
Conservative MP for Southend West, David Amess, has been knighted for political and public service in a parliamentary career spanning more than 30 years.
He first entered Parliament in 1983 and, although he has never served in government, has played a key role in passing legislation on issues such as animal welfare and abortion.
Among other public figures to be knighted are Paul Silk, whose commission produced a blueprint for further devolution to the Welsh Assembly and financier Theodore Agnew, a strong advocate of the government's free schools and academies programme who is a non-executive board member at the Department for Education.
And Baroness Ashton, the former EU foreign policy chief, has been made a member of the Order of St Michael and St George.
Meanwhile, an inquiry is to be carried out into the apparent leaking of a string of names from the list before they were officially announced. Sir Bob Kerslake, the outgoing head of the Civil Service, said he was "concerned", describing the situation as "highly regrettable".Peg Solitaire and Group Theory
Peg Solitaire (also known as Hi-Q) has very simple rules. Pegs (red circles) are allowed to jump over adjacent (vertically or horizontally) pegs. The peg that has been jumped over is removed. So jumps are like captures in Checkers.
The goal of a regular game is to remove all pegs but one. In central solitaire, the player starts with pegs filling all the holes, except for the central one. According to the game brochure (Milton Bradley Co., 1986), whoever succeeds in leaving the last peg in the center is a genius. Anyone who leaves a single peg elsewhere is an outstanding player.
Figure 1
Not long ago, with the help of very elementary group theory, Arie Bialostocki from University of Idaho proved that there are only five locations (b. above) where one can leave that single peg. Assuming that, e.g., the peg was left in the rightmost hole, part c. in Figure 1 shows the position before the last move. The irony is in that from the same position the player can leave the sole remaining peg in the central hole, thus gaining the status of genius, instead of an outstanding player. Would one trade the distinction? It's this amazing observation that led Arie Bialostocki to developing his nice theory which I am going to outline below.
Figure 2
Place letters x, y, z as shown in Figure 2a. The arrangement of letters is very special and has been noticed yet in the classic WW, page 706. Whenever one of the letters points to a peg that jumps over a peg with another letter on it it always lands in a hole labeled by the third letter.
Moves Over To x y z x z y y x z y z x z x y z y x
We may define an operation "+" on letters x, y, z to shorten move Description. Let's write x + y = z to indicate the fact expressed in the first row of the table, namely, that whenever peg x jumps over peg y it always lands in hole z. Similar notion are used for the remaining rows of the table, so that, for example, y + x = z and z + x = y and so on.
The operation thus defined is commutative. Indeed, for example, z + x = y, but also x + z = y, so that z + x = x + z. Further, the operation "+" has been defined for all pairs of three letters, other than x + x, y + y, and z + z. Guided by Group theory, we may set
x + x = y + y = z + z = 0,
where the new symbol 0 is required to fulfill
x + 0 = x, y + 0 = y and z + 0 = z.
All the properties of the operation "+" can now be summarized in its Cayley table:
0 x y z 0 0 x y z x x 0 z y y y z 0 x z z y x 0
The Cayley table of a group collects all the information about the group operation ("+" in our case) in compact form.
An additional property of "+" can be derived now from its Cayley table, namely, the sum of all three non-zero symbols x, y, z in any order is always 0: x + y + z = 0. (Does not this remind you of 3-purges?) We can also consider the sum of all pegs in a configuration (See Figure 2b-c.) For example, it is clear that the sum of all pegs in the starting position of central solitaire is y - the value of the sole unoccupied hole. When x jumps over y it lands in z. So that two pegs x + y are replaced with a single peg z, which means that the moves in peg solitaire do not change the value of the game's configuration. In other words, the value of a position in peg solitaire is invariant under the legal moves. In particular,
Any position derived in central solitaire by legal moves has the value of y!
This is of course true of any position with a single peg left.
Figure 3
Therefore, the only possible locations for the sole remaining peg are those indicated in Figure 3a. However, not all locations are attainable. Since the starting configuration has both central and line symmetry, and since moves may also follow any of those symmetries, if, for example, a single peg might be left in the "corner" position in Figure 3b, it would be also possible to leave a single peg in other "corner" positions, like that in Figure 3c. But position in Figure 3c is labeled by z. Therefore, the position in Figure 3b is not possible. The only positions that withstand the symmetry test are the five in Figure 1b.
A. Bialostocki mentions in a personal introduction to the paper that his Erdös number is 1. As I have recently learned, mine is 3. The reason is that I once wrote a paper with Ken Atkinson from University of Iowa whose Erdös number is 2, which means that he wrote a paper with somebody whose Erdös number is 1, which in turn means that the latter is one of a host of Erdös' co-authors.
Reference
K. Atkinson and A. Bogomolny, The discrete Galerkin method for integral equations, Math of Comp 48 (1987),595-616 and S11-S15. E. R. Berlekamp, J. H. Conway, R. K. Guy, Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, v2, Academic Press, 1982. A. Bialostocki, An Application of Elementary Group Theory to Central Solitaire, The College Mathematics Journal, v 29, n 3, May 1998, 208-212.
What Can Be Multiplied?
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Copyright © 1996-2018 Alexander BogomolnyEditor's note: NFL.com analyst Lance Zierlein is previewing the 2017 college football season by counting down the 25 teams with the most NFL-caliber talent, continuing today with teams 16-20 in his rankings. Click through the tabs above to see the rest of the rankings.
In compiling this list of the most talented college teams, I weighed each team's roster with an emphasis on identifying players who are likely to be draftees in 2018, or in future years. Teams with prospects who are among the most talented in the game were bolstered in the rankings.
20. Northwestern
Players to watch: TE Garrett Dickerson, OT Blake Hance, S Godwin Igwebuike, RB Justin Jackson, T Tyler Lancaster, WR Flynn Nagel, S Kyle Queiro, QB Clayton Thorson, WR Solomon Vault, CB Keith Watkins
The outlook: Justin Jackson and Garrett Dickerson are both talented seniors who should have highly productive 2017 campaigns before hearing their name called in the draft. However, Clayton Thorson intrigues me most after studying him on tape this summer. Thorson is the guy who could end up generating the most buzz in scouting circles from this team. Godwin Igwebuike is the best prospect on the defense, and the return of the talented Keith Watkins from a knee injury will help bolster the secondary.
19. Texas
Players to watch: QB Shane Buechele, LB Breckyn Hager, LB Malik Jefferson, WR Collin Johnson, DB P.J. Locke III, C Zach Shackelford, OG Patrick Vahe, RB Chris Warren III, LB Anthony Wheeler, OT Connor Williams
The outlook: Over the last six years, the Longhorns have had just two players drafted in the first two rounds and there hasn't been an offensive lineman drafted since tackle Tony Hills in 2008 (fourth round). Now, Connor Williams is one of the top tackles in the nation and center Zach Shackelford is an emerging talent. Scouts are intrigued by Chris Warren's size and talent at running back, but Collin Johnson is the skill player to watch in the future. On defense, Malik Jefferson is a stud athlete but needs his production to match up with his ability.
18. Arkansas
Players to watch: DE McTelvin Agim, QB Austin Allen, DB De'Andre Coley, WR Jared Cornelius, OG Hjalte Froholdt, LB Dre Greenlaw, NT Bijhon Jackson, OT Colton Jackson, S Josh Liddell, CB Ryan Pulley, C Frank Ragnow, CB Henre' Toliver
The outlook: It's hard to tell how many truly first-tier prospects the Hogs have, but it is clear that they have quality talent at a variety of positions. The secondary is loaded with four starters who should all find themselves in an NFL camp at some point. Junior Ryan Pulley had great ball production last season and both safeties are quality talents. Austin Allen is a little small, but he's gutsy and takes his shots down the field. Frank Ragnow is a rock-steady center who will play on Sundays.
17. Oklahoma State
Players to watch: WR Marcell Ateman, OT Zachary Crabtree, S Tre Flowers, RB Justice Hill, WR Jalen McCleskey, S Ramon Richards, QB Mason Rudolph, WR James Washington, DE Tralund Webber, OG Larry Williams
The outlook: The talent for the Cowboys rests primarily on offense this season. Mason Rudolph took a big step forward last year as a draft prospect and he has such a great rapport with the ultimate 50-50 ball winner, James Washington. Those two should hit it big again in 2017. Both will play on Sunday. Outside of those two guys, Oklahoma State has some talented young players who will be counted on to rise to their level of talent and become more productive this season.
16. Oklahoma
Players to watch: TE Mark Andrews, OT Orlando Brown, FB Dimitri Flowers, LB Caleb Kelly, QB Baker Mayfield, DE Ogbonnia Okoronkwo, S Steve Parker, OG Ben Powers, CB Jordan Thomas
The outlook: Baker Mayfield has size limitations that could hinder his pro potential, but he has talent and is the type of gamer who could find his way onto an NFL field. The offensive line is going to be Oklahoma's strength and the left side of it -- manned by Orlando Brown and Ben Powers -- is a mauling factory. Brown is one of the top players at his position. Mark Andrews has been underutilized, but has impressive pro potential. The defense lacks a sure-fire stud, but Sooner insiders believe sophomore Caleb Kelly could grow into it. Ogbonnia Okoronkwo is a little tight, but very productive.
Follow Lance Zierlein on Twitter @LanceZierlein.… Listen, O Lord, to the lament that rises from this place,
to the call of the dead from the depths of the Metz Yeghérn …
–John Paul II (2001)
Words matter. Some people try to keep them meaningful, while others render them meaningless. And while some struggle to preserve memory, others fight to impose amnesia.
“Medz Yeghern”1 is the most common term used by survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants to identify what befell the Armenian nation in 1915. Over the past decade, American, European and Turkish news outlets have consistently translated Medz Yeghern as “Great Calamity.” The Turkish media has repeated this seemingly innocuous translation over and over again in an attempt to deny the genocidal intent inherent in the meaning the victims themselves have given to the phrase.
In a parallel development, influential Armenian-American writers and editors have uncritically adopted this translation. We have come to the point where many readers and writers, Armenian and non-Armenian alike, appear to be sincerely convinced that the word “yeghern” has meant “calamity” over the past hundred years. This article, the first in a series, will explore the birth of “calamity” after Pope John Paul II and President George W. Bush used Medz Yeghern.
‘Chart’ and ‘Medz Yeghern’
Armenians across the diaspora have heard and applied the word “chart” (“massacre”) to describe the events of 1915. It has been widely used colloquially and is sometimes even seen in writing: Early on, journalist Sebouh Aguni, a survivor of the genocide, used the word chart in his 1920 book Milion me hayeru charti badmutiune (“The History of the Chart of a Million Armenians”). In 2009, British journalist Robert Fisk wrote the following when President Barack Obama first used Medz Yeghern in his April 24 address: “Like Presidents Clinton and George Bush, [Obama] called the mass killings ‘great atrocities’ and even tried to hedge his bets by using the Armenian phrase ‘Meds Yeghern,’ which means the same thing—it’s a phrase that elderly Armenians once used about the Nazi-like slaughter—but the Armenian for genocide is ‘chart.’ And even that was missing.”2 Fisk was, in fact, mistaken in his choice of the word; nowadays, there is a clear-cut difference between the legal terms to designate a non-systematic massacre (chart, or “massacre”) and systematic mass killing (tseghasbanutiun, or “genocide”). Sabra and Shatila during |
assigned by the government, suggesting that the right to work is not assured and that state-allocated employment, which is contrary to domestic legislation governing the right of the individual to freely choose a vocation, conflicts with international law. State-directed propaganda, surveillance, and indoctrination contribute to working environments where psychological abuses are normalised. Self-criticism sessions, in which every adult must participate, encourage a climate of fear and allow authorities to pursue policies of forced labour where workers have no evident recourse to justice.
With regard to labourers in the prison network, the use of forced labour within prison camps in North Korea carries an explicit political purpose — to remove, incarcerate, and in some cases exterminate those individuals deemed to pose a threat to the established political order. That the outside world is largely unaware of this practice strongly suggests that the DPRK state conceals forced labour and suppresses internal discussion on the matter. Countless inhumane acts, which range from sexual violence to psychological abuse, serve to regulate prison behaviour and extract labour from inmates.
Lastly, with regard to labourers deployed abroad, we found that the exportation of human labour violates existing UN sanctions. UN Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 2094 calls upon states to prevent the transfer of financial assets, including bulk cash, and the provision of public financial support for trade (such as the granting of export credits, guarantees, or insurance) that could contribute to the DPRK’s nuclear or ballistic missile programmes. Despite anecdotal speculation to the contrary, North Korean labourers do not experience or interact with the outside world or earn transformative wages that would enable them to grow into a middle-class upon their return to the DPRK. Although North Korean labourers may be able to earn more money abroad than they would in state-assigned jobs at home, this comes at a price on their human rights. Deductions of wages in the form of Korean Workers’ Party membership fees, loyalty payments to the Kim family, taxes, insurance costs, and fees for accommodation, food, passports and other expenses leave many labourers with little to show for up to three years of work.
To augment the efforts of those in the international community who seek to end human rights abuses in North Korea, our report has offered stakeholders with an overview of applicable domestic and international legislation measured against the direct experiences of North Korean victims. As labour rights-related standards increasingly form a normative order in the international community and become embedded in domestic legislation and practice by states, trade unions, and transnational companies, the legitimacy and universality of these mechanisms should not be put at risk by the practices of the DPRK. Addressing the forced labour of North Koreans is an achievable objective for states and civil society and can bring immediate improvements to the lives of its victims.
This report was first published on 30 September, 2015 on the EAHRNK’s website. The full report can be found here: https://eahrnk.org/articles/policy-and-research/the-will-of-the-state
European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea
The European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea seeks to improve human rights in North Korea through support of North Koreans, through improving media reporting, through improving diplomatic relations, and through policy and research work rooted in firsthand experience of life in the DPRK. EAHRNK’s objective is to inform policies that lead to the improvement of human rights in North Korea. It achieves this through providing practical policy advice, conducting informed research, and raising awareness across Europe on the key issues affecting North Koreans. EAHRNK works alongside exiled North Koreans, governments, policymakers, politicians, nongovernmental organisations, and civil society in Europe to achieve these objectives.Update: A bit out of it this morning. Here’s Rand Ghayad’s piece.
Rand Paul has lately been citing Rand Ghayad’s research as a reason to eliminate long-term unemployment benefits. Rand Ghayad replies, “You know nothing of my work.” Which is true: as the good Rand documents, it’s clear that neither the bad Rand nor anyone on his staff read beyond the opening sentence or two.
And in general, the whole notion that the way to cure unemployment is to slash aid to the unemployed is an astonishing case of sloppy thinking allied to cruelty.
What Ghayad showed was that employers are reluctant to hire workers who have been unemployed for a long time. Paul takes this as evidence that we need to make long-term unemployment even harder to endure than it is now, to force workers to get jobs sooner. What’s wrong with this idea? It’s fallacious at two levels.
First, the notion that unemployment benefits have a major negative impact on job search is no longer supported by most labor economists. The papers right-wingers love to cite are, in general, two or more decades old; it’s now generally believed that much of the apparent effect of benefit expiration came from the way firms handled temporary layoffs, which are much less common than they used to be. Evidence from recent data shows much smaller effects.
Second, and at a deeper level: The level of unemployment in America today has nothing to do with job search or the lack thereof. Think about it. It’s possible (though dubious) that an individual worker who is currently unemployed may increase his or her chances of getting a new job by engaging in heroic efforts — making hundreds of phone calls per week, expressing a willingness to accept minimum wage or less, whatever. But none of this gives employers any incentive to create a new job. All this worker can do is move closer to the head of the line, getting a job that would otherwise have gone to someone else.
And the reason for this condition is that we have a depressed economy, where the number of jobs is limited by inadequate demand.
You can argue that in an economy nearing full employment, generous unemployment benefits can limit employment, because they may cause the economy to start experiencing inflation sooner than it otherwise would. Or, if you like, you can say that UI may raise the natural rate of unemployment. But none of that is relevant now.
What is relevant, and is the real lesson of Ghayad’s paper, is the strong possibility that prolonged economic weakness raises the natural rate, because the long-term unemployed get exiled from future employment. And what that says is that we need aggressive fiscal and monetary stimulus — exactly the policies Rand Paul crusades against.The war has ended.
A week-long Nerf War involving 260 high school students came to a close Sunday night, with the Nerf Busters — along with the food pantry at the Huntington Church of the Nazarene — emerging as the victors.
And the spoils for the Nerf Busters?
“Just bragging rights,” says Nerf War co-organizer Jack Doughty.
The church, though, came away with 2,060 donated items to help stock its food pantry.
Nerf Wars — fought among students armed with plastic guns that fire foam darts — have broken out among Huntington North High School students on a semi-regular basis for several years. It’s not an HNHS-sponsored activity, but this year’s wars were organized by Doughty, an HNHS senior, and his neighbor, Kenny Butler, a teacher at Huntington North.
“I participated in a game once my freshman year,” Doughty says. “I decided I wanted to do it again before I graduate.”
He and Butler came up with some rules for the previously-unstructured game. They set off the first war, which lasted two weeks, in November.
“People really liked it and wanted to do it again,” Butler says.
The duo tweaked the rules and brought back a one-week war the week of April 17; 260 people signed up and were divided into 32 teams of up to eight people each. The 10 teams with the most kills during the week faced off in the finals the weekend of April 23 and 24.
The team with the most kills when the game ended Sunday night reigns as champion.
For the record, the champion Nerf Busters team was made up of Konner Morris, Alec Bolding, Katie Hunt, Gage Bustos, Cade Reust, Austin Teusch, Logan Hardacre and Nolan McCullough.
The premise of the game is simple: Rack up as many kills as possible by hitting members of other teams with Nerf darts. Huntington North, church and the workplace are out of bounds, but kills can be made anywhere else — even if it’s not in Huntington County.
Anyone who’s hit is dead for 24 hours, but there is a way out.
“I was talking to my wife and I said, ‘I wonder if we could accept donations and have them get a life back,’” Butler says.
The rule sounded good, so it was incorporated into the game.
“You could donate 10 items and get a perk in the game,” he says. “An extra life, a protection badge.”
Those donated items, destined for the Nazarene food pantry, included food, diapers, toiletry items and more.
The food pantry at the church serves between 100 and 150 Huntington County families per month. It’s open on the fourth Monday of each month from noon to 4:30 p.m. Entry to the pantry is through Door 10 of the church.President Obama said Wednesday that the military strike on Syria he is contemplating was for the limited purpose of preventing the further use chemical weapons, and was not intended to insert the U.S. into the bloody Syrian civil war. Even as he said he had not made a final decision, Obama’s precise explanation of the scope and purpose of prospective U.S. military action made clear that he has all but made up his mind.
“If we are saying in a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across the bow saying, ‘Stop doing this,’ this can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term,” Obama told PBS’s News Hour Wednesday.
The President’s comments came as the United Kingdom, facing demands from opposition lawmakers, signaled it wouldn’t be prepared to participate in any action for another week, following two votes by parliament and consideration of a UN inspectors’ report on Syria.
U.S. officials said while they were closely consulting with their British allies, they weren’t going to wait for the UN report to act. UN inspectors were expected to leave the country by the weekend, but do not have a mandate to determine accountability for any chemical weapons evidence they were able to obtain. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the Syrian regime knowingly delayed UN inspectors’ access to the site of the alleged August 21 chemical weapons attack for five days, and deliberately destroyed evidence by continuing to shell the area, in the Ghouta region outside Damascus.
“While we’re clearly consulting closely with the Brits, we are making decisions on our timeline,” a US official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor Wednesday evening.
While Washington will want UK participation, it “will be more concerned to get it done quickly,” a former senior U.S. administration official told Al-Monitor Wednesday, on condition of anonymity. The Obama administration “will accept that the UK needs a few days, but if [British Prime Minister David] Cameron doesn’t get [his ducks] in a row, they will not accept any more delays and not let it stop them.”
The emergency of British delay came after Russia on Wednesday once again blocked United Nations Security Council consideration of a UK-drafted resolution authorizing intervention against Syrian chemical weapons use.
The US said forcefully Wednesday that after two and a half years of Russia blocking any Council criticism of the Assad regime, it was done with pursuing the UN route on Syria.
“We see no avenue forward given continued Russian opposition to any meaningful council action on Syria,” Marie Harf, State Department spokesperson, said at the State Department press briefing Wednesday. “We cannot allow diplomatic paralysis to be a shield for the perpetrators of these crimes.”
The Obama administration was due to brief Congressional leaders on Thursday on Syria intelligence. France was also due to brief French lawmakers. The British parliament was set to take the first of two votes on Syria action on Thursday.
France would prefer not to have a UN Security Council resolution on Syria action vetoed before acting, so would probably not want another UN vote, a western European diplomat told Al-Monitor.
President Obama’ schedule for Thursday, meantime, indicated he had only one thing on his schedule all day: closed door meetings at the White House.After a strong showing at Capcom’s 25th Anniversary Tournament to close out 2012, I got a quick chance to catch up with the beast himself Daigo Umehara to find out his thoughts of his performance during the tournament, interesting facts about him, and what he’s got planned for the new year.
Yoon: What’d you think about the tournament overall? How do you feel about your performance throughout the tournament?
Daigo: It was a great fun. Just like at EVO, I focused on playing my game. To be true to my style was one of my top objectives for the tournament, and I met that objective. I think I did well in that regard. I would give myself 80 out of 100.
Y: I noticed you didn’t have much trouble throughout the tournament, getting into Grand Finals. Were there any touch matchups along the way? Any surprises from your competitors?
D: I didn’t lose any single match in winning the Japanese tournament for this series. Here in the US for the Final Tournament, I also didn’t lose any match up to the Grand Finals. I was in a good condition and able to play my game.
Y: What were your thoughts with your Winner’s Finals match and your Grand Finals match?
D: During the Winner’s Finals, I was able to reflect on the previous matches and do right things. That went well, and I was pleased about that.
On Grand Finals, however, Infiltration changed his gameplay after he lost on Winner’s Finals. He did very well. On the other hand, I didn’t have any strategy against the change. That was my weakness, which caused me to lose. But learned from the loss. There is always something to learn, and I have found my next challenge.
Y: What are you going to do with your winnings? Any plans to go to Disneyland? 🙂
D: I don’t have any plan. What should I do? 😉
Y: In years before, you used to enter multiple games at a single tournament. Were you focusing primarily on Arcade Edition this year? (I remember you were also quite the beast at 3rd Strike and Super Turbo.)
D: Simply because I want to showcase my best gameplay – the very best I can do as a pro-gamer, and the gameplay only I can exhibit, in every single game. If I were to split my energy and time with many games, it would only reduce me to a good player. I feel that’s not a right path for me. I can’t just showcase a good game, but I have to play a GREAT game, which is entertaining and inspiring. I know I can be a pro because there are great fans and supporters around in the world. It is my job to entertain and inspire them with my gameplay. I need to do the best I can, not only for myself but also for the people who support me. So the games I play at a given moment is based on a professional and moral decision. I give each game 100+% of myself to be the very best. I can’t play any more number of games to stay true to my objectives.
Y: Are there any other games, either fighting or non-fighting games, that you’ve been playing lately? Anything that you wish was in the tournament scene?
D: I have been playing Gunslinger Stratos a lot at arcades lately. It’s a multiple player online game, and that’s something so new to me. Trying something new is always fun in itself, but also the game is a lot of fun.
The game is constantly updated to introduce new elements, and I never get bored with the game. I can play with anyone, everywhere in Japan, unlike other arcade games before. And some of the best players of the game live in out of nowhere in the mountains in Japan. This is completely new to me (because best players were always concentrated in Tokyo or other metropolitan area), and I get a kick out of it. The game is so new, yet filled with smart and fun elements that would even entertain hardcore gamers. We have not seen a game like this in many many years. I hope people outside of Japan get to play one day!
I can’t think of any specific games I want to see at a tournament, but I personally would love to see more great tournaments like EVO.
Y: What’s next for you in the competitive fighting game scene? Any future events or are you going to take some time off?
D: I will be participating in the first Gunslinger national tournament in Tokyo on January 13 to be followed by Osaka tournament.
Also, I will be kicking off my Arcade Campaign on January 19 in Sapporo city. This is one my passions and efforts to give back to the community. I announced a year ago that I want to initiate a movement to support declining arcades in Japan, and received such a huge endorsement from all over the world. (Editor’s note: To learn more, visit http://www.bordaless.com/xoops/)
I am here as a gamer today because of there was an arcade. I can’t just sit around and do nothing to let arcades completely disappear. I would be touring around local arcades outside of Tokyo, from the North to the South, namely, Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima and Fukuoka and play with the local players with a help of Taito Station. All the revenue from the events will be donated to purchase wheelchairs for NPO Borderless, a non-profit organization that assists handicapped people’s needs and advocates their fundamental rights, led by Osamu Ichikawa.
So this campaign hits two big objectives. This is not about me but the arcades and the community. Together, we can work towards a great cause. I hope you join me.
Y: I’d like to learn more about you as a person! What has been your favorite place you’ve traveled to this past year? Any good stories from that place?
D: Everywhere I visit, people are so nice and I always have a good time at a tournament. I have been to the US the most, but I always look forward to my trip.
It’s hard to single out any special place, but if I have to, I would say Kuwait for its exotic nature. No other place I have ever visited is like Kuwait. And I so appreciated people’s extra warm hospitality.
Y: What is one fact about you that many people do not know?
D: I love to cook, and I can say I’m good at it 🙂 I love good food. I also love movies. I also love furry animals. Cats, dogs, and bears, all the furry animals. (Editor’s note: Awesome)
Y: Lightning Round – One Word Answers:
Y: Android or iPhone?
D: Both
Y: Favorite type of Japanese food: Ramen, Izakaya, Sushi, or other?
D: Ramen
Y: Favorite movie from this past year
D: Skyfall — I saw it last week.
Y:Any person you look forward to seeing at tournaments?
D: Old-timers in the US. We grew older together. It’s always good to see them. It makes me happy.
For more information on Daigo’s adventures as well as his upcoming Arcade Campaign, t-shirts and more, be sure to follow him at @daigothebeast.
Also, stay tuned as I’ll be reaching out to Infiltration for a quick interview to see what he’s got planned after an impressive 2012 season.In his strongest public words to date on the subject of abortion, Pope Francis affirmed the sacredness of unborn human life and linked its defence to the pursuit of social justice.
The Pope told a gathering of Catholic gynaecologists: “In all its phases and at every age, human life is always sacred and always of quality. And not as a matter of faith, but of reason and science.”
Pope Francis characterised abortion as a product of a “widespread mentality of profit, the ‘throwaway culture’, which has today enslaved the hearts and minds of so many.”
That mentality, he said, “calls for the elimination of human beings, above all if they are physically or socially weaker. Our response to that mentality is a decisive and unhesitating ‘yes’ to life.”
The Pope grouped together unborn children, the aged and the poor as among the most vulnerable people whom Christians are called especially to love.
“In the fragile human being each one of us is invited to recognise the face of the Lord, who in his human flesh experienced the indifference and solitude to which we often condemn the poorest, whether in developing countries or in wealthy societies,” he said.
“Every unborn child, though unjustly condemned to be aborted, has the face of the Lord, who even before his birth, and then as soon as he was born, experienced the rejection of the world,” he said. “And every old person, even if infirm and at the end of his days, carries with him the face of Christ. They must not be thrown away!”
Quoting Caritas in Veritate, the social encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis connected the protection of unborn life with the promotion of social justice.
“Openness to life is at the centre of true development,” he said. “If personal and social sensitivity in welcoming a new life is lost, other forms of welcome useful to social life will dry up. Welcoming life tempers moral energies and makes people capable of helping each other.”
Pope Francis told the doctors that they faced a “paradoxical situation” in their professional lives, because even as medical science discovers new cures for disease, the “health care professions are sometimes induced not to respect life itself”.
The Pope characterised this paradox as part of a more widespread “cultural disorientation” in which rising individualism parallels a growing disrespect for life.
“Even as persons are accorded new rights, at times only presumed rights, life as the primary value and primordial right of every man is not always protected,” he said.
The Pope told the gynaecologists that they had a responsibility to make known the “transcendent dimension, the imprint of God’s creative work, in human life from the first instant of conception. And this is a commitment of new evangelisation that often requires going against the tide, paying a personal price. The Lord counts on you, too, to spread the Gospel of life.”
Pope Francis’s remarks came one day after the publication of an interview in which he warned that focusing on certain moral teachings, including abortion, could undermine the Church’s efforts to preach the Gospel.Story highlights Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from a tent more than 30 years ago
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton claimed her baby had been taken by a dingo
Prosecutors convinced a jury she was guilty of murder; conviction later quashed
Mom's reaction: "Relieved and delighted to come to the end of this saga"
A coroner ruled Tuesday that a dingo, a wild dog native to Australia, caused the death of a baby more than 30 years ago.
Azaria Chamberlain was just 2 months old when she disappeared from a tent during a family holiday to Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, sparking one of the country's most sensational and enduring murder mysteries.
"The cause of her death was as the result of being attacked and taken by a dingo," Elizabeth Morris, coroner for Northern Territory, announced to Darwin Magistrates court early Tuesday. "Dingos can and do cause harm to humans."
The girl's mother, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, long maintained that a dingo took her baby, even as she was sentenced to life in jail for her daughter's murder, a conviction that was later quashed.
During the trial, a witness recounted the then 32-year-old mother's cries of a "dingo's got my baby," which was immortalized in the 1988 film "A Cry in the Dark" starring Meryl Streep, who earned an Oscar nomination for the role.
Outside the court Tuesday, Chamberlain-Creighton said she and her family were "relieved and delighted to come to the end of this saga."
Photos: Photos: Court rules dingo took baby Photos: Photos: Court rules dingo took baby Court rules dingo took baby – Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton shows reporters Azaria's death certificate outside a Darwin court Tuesday after coroner Elizabeth Morris rules that a dingo caused her baby's death 32 years ago. Hide Caption 1 of 6 Photos: Photos: Court rules dingo took baby Court rules dingo took baby – Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton arrives at Darwin Magistrates Court in February for the fourth inquest into her daughter Azaria's death. A coroner ruled Tuesday, June 12, that a dingo was responsible. Hide Caption 2 of 6 Photos: Photos: Court rules dingo took baby Court rules dingo took baby – Azaria Chamberlain was two months old when she disappeared from her family's tent at Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, in August 1980. Hide Caption 3 of 6 Photos: Photos: Court rules dingo took baby Court rules dingo took baby – A file image of a captive dingo inside an enclosure at the Dingo Discovery and Research Centre in Victoria, Australia. Chamberlain-Creighton long maintained that a dingo took her baby. Hide Caption 4 of 6 Photos: Photos: Court rules dingo took baby Court rules dingo took baby – Lindy and Michael Chamberlain enter a Sydney court in January 1987. Lindy was sentenced to life in jail in 1982 for her daughter's murder, a conviction that was later quashed. Hide Caption 5 of 6 Photos: Photos: Court rules dingo took baby Court rules dingo took baby – A fence, thousands of kilometers long, attempts to keep dingoes away from livestock in a file image from 2005. Hide Caption 6 of 6
JUST WATCHED Azaria's mom: Some doubt my innocence Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Azaria's mom: Some doubt my innocence 04:39
JUST WATCHED Coroner rules a dingo did take her baby Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Coroner rules a dingo did take her baby 02:01
"No longer will Australia be able to say that dingoes are not dangerous and will only attack if provoked," she said.
Evidence produced at the fourth inquest into Azaria's death in February included reports of attacks by dingoes and dogs assumed to be part-dingo or crossbreeds. The coroner heard that in 2001 a 9-year-old boy died as a result of a dingo attack on Fraser Island in the Australian state of Queensland.
Years later, two girls, each around two-years-old, died in separate attacks by dogs believed to be part-dingo in the states of New South Wales and Victoria.
In her findings, Morris said no other disappearance exactly like that of Azaria had been recorded.
However, she said, "it is clear that there is evidence that in particular circumstances, a dingo is capable of attacking, taking and causing the death of young children."
It is a scenario that was unthinkable in 1980 when mother-of-three Lindy Chamberlain, then married to Michael Chamberlain, sparked a frantic search of a remote campsite in central Australia after claiming that a dingo took her baby.
So unbelievable was the idea that dingo would enter a tent to snatch a two-month-old that suspicion soon turned to the couple. The mystery was compounded by the lack of a body. Azaria's was never found, although her heavily blood-stained singlet, jumpsuit and nappy were discovered near the campsite one week after she disappeared.
The first inquest into Azaria's death in 1981 found that the baby died as a result of being taken by a dingo. However, the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory quashed the finding later that year and ordered a second inquest into Azaria's death.
At the second inquest Lindy Chamberlain was committed to trial for murder. Her husband Michael was charged with being an accessory after the fact.
The prosecution alleged that Chamberlain slit her daughter's throat with a pair of scissors before hiding her body, possibly in a camera bag, before she and her husband Michael buried her somewhere in the vicinity of the campsite.
The 35-day trial created a media frenzy in Australia as commentators picked apart the intricacies of the case, while a fascinated public speculated wildly as to how and why Azaria had died.
The jury returned its verdict in 1982; Lindy Chamberlain was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in jail. Her husband Michael was given a suspended sentence.
Chamberlain served four years of her sentence before the Northern Territory government ordered her release in 1986 after the discovery of new evidence; a baby's jacket, believed to be Azaria's, found half-buried near a dingo lair at Uluru. In 1988, a Royal Commission set up to review the evidence formally quashed convictions for both husband and wife.
Despite the finding that the couple was not to blame, a third inquest into their daughter's death returned an open verdict in 1995. It was that verdict that the couple sought to overturn with a fourth inquest this year.#top
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There are approximately 14 million Jews, 2.3 billion Christians, 1.8 billion Muslims, 1.1 billion Hindus, 500 million Buddhists and 1.2 billion Nonreligious people in the world. (Source: Wikipedia ) There are approximately 3.2 billion people using the internet today. (Source: Wikipedia ) As of the third quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.27 billion monthly active users.
DROID Ken is NOT AFRAID of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, Atheists, the Nonreligious, Uncle Sam or the United Nations. Ken is SECULAR. Ken is SAFE and SECURE. THE WHOLE SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL. DROID Ken is GOLDEN. Ken is AS GOOD AS IT GETS FOR REAL - WE GUARANTEE IT.
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THIS IS A PROPOSED SCIENTIFIC SOLUTION TO POVERTY, THE RELIGION PROBLEM AND THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROBLEM FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A UTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTION FANTASY WRITER - I AM A WRITER AND SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND PEACE ACTIVIST - THERE ARE PLENTY OF INTERESTING AND UNCONVENTIONAL IDEAS HERE IF YOU ENJOY READING SPECULATIVE SCIENCE FICTION THAT OFFERS HIGH TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS TO ALL THE WORLD'S MOST SERIOUS PROBLEMS - MY WRITINGS BEGIN AFTER THE KALEIDOSCOPE INFORMATION (#14)
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The Splendor of Color: A Kaleidoscope Video
For some reason involving the way our mind, consciousness, color perceptors, visual pattern recognition systems and visual motion predictors are connected to our emotions, the beautiful colors of these fractal flame images combined with the gently changing forms of a slowly rotating kaleidoscope is a soothing, calming, relaxing and pleasant experience.
These are soothing and calming kaleidoscope videos that I made to help people with PTSD. They are also useful for dealing with intense paranoia. A lot of cannabis, mushroom and LSD users watch this video if they start feeling paranoid and it guides them back to a pleasant reality and a more enjoyable trip. These videos are good for meditation and are used in some clinical settings for guided hypnosis.
This video also is soothing and mesmerizing for crying babies and children suffering from autism, as well as older adults who are suffering from advanced Alzheimer's.
I have versions of the kaleidoscope that turn faster than version 1.5 shown above, but this is the slowest of them all. This is the one that the advanced Alzheimer's patients prefer. The still photos of the fractal flames are being rotated in 360 degrees over 120 seconds, or half the speed of the second hand on a clock.
These spectacular videos are two full hours of crystal clear, colorful, detailed and ever-changing kaleidoscopes with modern, relaxing background music. Created for enjoyment on your PC or away from the computer on Media Players connected large HDTVs in home theaters.
Take a break from the noise and haste of daily life and play 120 minutes of calm, gorgeous, continuously changing kaleidoscopes made from rotating fractal flame images.
Give your eyes a bright and colorful reward while you relax and enjoy the ride as endless patterns and color combinations slowly rotate and evolve in a hypnotic, mesmerizing dance of light.
- Ken Meyering
I can be reached via e-mail at:
Credits
For the longest time I've wanted to make a kaleidoscope video to add to the mix of what's out there, but I just didn't know how to do it. My math and programming skills are pretty elementary, so what might have been an easy task for many smarter or more experienced people was a very challenging one for me.
Slowly but surely, I learned the necessary skills. One quantum leap in my progress occurred when through some Google searching I finally found a simple kaleidoscope example on Terence Tsang's Shine Draw instructional website. (That link used to be here but he has since taken it down.)
What had frustrated and confounded me for years took him an hour and a half to complete. After taking many programming classes at school, I was able to modify and expand his example code by adding several hundred lines of my own, until I had a working version suitable for video creation that I understood. That mostly involved finding lots of open source code for manipulating files and processing images.
About the Artwork
The beautiful fractals used in this video were based on original flame formula parameter sets created by other very talented artists and posted on the web as instructional examples. I am extremely grateful for their decision to share some of their parameters with the public and in these cases to permit commercial use by others.
Many of these parameters were from Blatte's Fractal Resources. Many others were shared on the now inactive Fractal Repository website. There is an unsupported mirror of this site archived here.
The hypnotic background music is written and performed by Bjorn Lynne. The soundtrack songs are "A Journey Within" and "Endless Oceans."
Download Access to All of My Kaleidoscope Videos
All of my videos are available for FREE in their entirety in highly compressed web streaming quality without overlayed ads on YouTube (see the playlist and fully embeddable videos below).
If you'd like a much higher bandwidth Master quality version for direct playback on a PC or Media Player, you can purchase download access to all of my fractal image-based Splendor of Color Kaleidoscope Videos in 30p Blu-ray quality for $10 by clicking on the button below.
If you are mentally ill, a caregiver for someone who is, or a professional who deals with mental illness, you are encouraged to FREELY copy and share these videos with others who may benefit from them. I'm obviously not getting rich on my kaleidoscope videos and would just prefer that they bring joy to people.
Please keep the hdcolors.com URL in the video. Don't edit it out. I'm trying to attract visitors to this website for my philanthropic and humanitarian activism and to introduce new people to my online writing activities.
All of these videos are available as FREE torrents that third parties have uploaded if you are into file sharing. I have no problem with that.
If you are a musician or content creator who would like to reuse footage from these videos in your own works, I ask that you please contact me to obtain permission first. While I am encouraging the sharing of these videos in their entirety (with the hdcolors.com logo), I prefer to keep control over their reuse.
These are very large video files (22GB or 24GB), so to download these, you will probably only have success if you use a download manager, such as this one from Microsoft for PCs or this one for the Macintosh.
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The Splendor of Color Kaleidoscope Video Version 1.2
30 seconds per REVOLUTION.
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The Splendor of Color Kaleidoscope Video Version 1.3
60 seconds per REVOLUTION.
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The Splendor of Color Kaleidoscope Video Version 1.4
60 seconds per REVOLUTION.
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The Splendor of Color Kaleidoscope Video Version 1.5
120 seconds per REVOLUTION.
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The Splendor of Color Kaleidoscope Video Version 1.6
120 seconds per REVOLUTION.
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THIS IS A PEACEFUL AND NONVIOLENT REVOLUTION
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I AM AN OPTIMISTIC UTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTION FANTASY WRITER - THESE ARE SCIENCE FICTION FANTASY SCENARIOS SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED AS THOUGH THEY HAVE ALREADY COME TO PASS - THESE ARE CREATIVE DESCRIPTIONS OF AN OPTIMISTIC ALTERNATE REALITY EXPLAINED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIBERAL BENEVOLENT TERRESTRIAL ALIEN SCIENTISTS THAT ARE INVISIBLE TO HUMAN BEINGS BECAUSE THEY ARE TOO SMALL FOR US TO SEE - THEY USE HUMANS AS HOSTS - I AM A HOST - I SHARE MY BODY WITH THEM - THEY TALK THROUGH ME
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THE WHOLE SYSTEM WAS TOTALLY CORRUPT - WE PEACEFULLY AND NONVIOLENTLY TOOK OUT THE WHOLE SYSTEM
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THIS IS A PEACEFUL AND NONVIOLENT WORLDWIDE SCIENTIFIC COUP D'ETAT BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR
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ALL NECESSARY MEANS
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ADVANCED NANOTECHNOLOGY - BASED BENEVOLENT MIND CONTROL OF THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE - IT HAS BEEN DEEMED NECESSARY - THEY TOOK FULL CONTROL OF THE WHOLE SITUATION ON EARTH DECADES AGO - I AM THEIR PUPPET - YOU WILL NOT HARM ME - WE ARE ELIMIN |
Risst, include depression, suicidal thoughts and unstable behavior. For any individual rocket the situation is risky enough, but if any of the unused missiles spend prolonged periods of time in one another’s company, the effects are compounded. “These units desperately need someone to sit down with them and explain that nothing here is their fault, that there are forces much larger influencing events – and above all, to just give them a listening ear,” she stressed.
Such help is unlikely to be available anytime soon, warned Bura Kratt, a social worker with the nonexistent Gaza City Municipal Welfare Office. Hamas resources, already challenged by the logistical obstacles thrown up by all the recent destruction, are likely to focus primarily on replenishing stockpiles of rockets, and not on maintenance of the older units – and certainly not on anyone’s welfare, emotional or otherwise.
Foreign donors are also unlikely to provide funding or personnel for the necessary counseling. The European Union generally reserves its funding for infrastructure, education and peacemaking initiatives, while Muslim countries such as Iran favor training humans to use more and different varieties of weapons, then providing them. GL-5678832 will have to muddle through on its own.
At press time, social workers were spreading throughout Israel’s south to help residents cope with the aftereffects of the Palestinian rocket fire. No plans have been announced to counsel the unused projectiles in the antimissile Iron Dome system, which brutally shot down hundreds of innocent Grad rockets.Description
The 2013 Landyachtz Ripple Ridge is a double kick free-ride board designed to make the most of the city environment. At 34" in length with a 18.5" wheelbase, this maneuverable deck can help you thread your way down a busy street and still give you the confidence to throw out some check slides for style. Reworked with mellowed out rocker and super functional concave featuring ripples along the rails, the platform on the Ripple Ridge locks you in and let's you feel exactly where your feet are without having to glance down. The 2013 model has the addition of a small but still functional nose that helps catch your front foot doing ollies and powerslides. Put on some smaller trucks and this board will make a great lightweight commuting board. For a smooth-rolling commuter board that will be great for carving across campus, customize your Ripple Ridge with a set of 181mm Bear Grizzly trucks and a set of 70mm Mini Monster wheels!Scott Lakatos, Georgia’s defensive backfield coach since 2010, has resigned his position on the Bulldogs’ football staff.
Lakatos, 49, would say only that he is leaving for “personal reasons.”
“Let’s leave it at that — personal reasons,” Lakatos, 49, said in a short telephone interview Thursday night.
Asked if he had a choice about leaving, Lakatos said, “oh, yeah, of course. Just leave it at personal reasons. There’s no story here.”
That was the only reason given in a short news release sent out by UGA on Thursday night.
“We are very appreciative of Scott’s contributions to our program over the last four years, and I have a great amount of respect for him as a coach and as a person,” Georgia coach Mark Richt said in the release. “We wish him and his family nothing but the best.”
Lakatos, 49, was hired by defensive coordinator Todd Grantham and came to Georgia from Connecticut right after the Huskies defeated South Carolina in the 2010 Papa John’s Bowl.
In 2011, Lakatos coached All-American safety Bacarri Rambo and Paul Hornung Award winner Brandon Boykin on what ended up being a national top-10 defense. But Georgia’s pass defense struggled the past two seasons, most notably in 2013, when the Bulldogs finished 60th in the nation and sixth in the SEC in passing yards allowed (227.4 pg) and 10th in the conference in pass-efficiency defense.
Georgia’s defensive backfield was extremely young this season, with four first-year starters and four freshmen earning starts. But they gave up some devastating pass plays, including a 73-yard winning touchdown to Auburn with 25 seconds remaining and a 99-yard TD to Nebraska in the Gator Bowl.
Lakatos is a native of Long Valley, N.J., and played college ball at Western Connecticut. His 20-plus year coaching career had all been spent in the Northeast — the last nine at Rutgers and Connecticut — before he joined the staff at Georgia.
Asked if he intended to head back north, Lakatos said, “Don’t really know at this point in time.”Today we're filing an appeal in the legal battle over the records of several Twitter users being sought by the government in connection with its WikiLeaks investigation. In this latest round, we’re again fighting to make public the government’s efforts to obtain Internet users’ private information without a warrant.
The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation represent Icelandic parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir. In a November ruling, U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady refused to unseal or publicly list any court orders or legal motions concerning our clients in the case, including any government orders issued to companies other than Twitter. These secret orders and these secret court dockets prevent our clients from having the chance to protect their constitutional rights by challenging the orders, as we did in the Twitter case.
This isn’t the only time that government investigators have tried to get the private records of Internet users, and it unfortunately probably won’t be the last. In another case involving a Twitter user, local prosecutors in Boston recently subpoenaed Twitter to learn the identity of a user who posted publicly available information about Boston police officers following the removal of the Occupy Boston protestors. The ACLU of Massachusetts and ACLU national are representing that Twitter user’s legal challenge to the subpoena. Last month, over our objections, the judge held a hearing in secret and sealed all of the records, even though the subpoena itself is a public document.
The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. Internet users don’t automatically give up their rights to privacy and free speech when they use services like Twitter. An open court system is a fundamental part of our democracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public. That’s not how our judicial system works, and we’re hopeful that the courts will start to put an end to this secrecy.
Learn more about internet privacy: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.It’s a good thing Florida signed two running backs in the 2013 recruiting cycle.
At this time, it looks like the Gators will have trouble landing one for 2014.
UF’s chances of keeping Dalvin Cook in the class appear to be diminishing with each week that passes.
Five days after calling himself 80 percent committed to Florida, Cook named Florida State his leader in an on-site interview with 247Sports. The Sun has been unable to reach him because he lost his phone.
Cook will no longer be at UF this weekend due to his playoff game with Miami Central on Saturday, and he isn’t scheduled to return to Gainesville despite having two official visits still available.
However, the hometown Hurricanes will receive a visit from him on Dec. 7. He plans to announce his college destination the following weekend at the state championship game.
The contact period begins Dec. 1, so the UF coaches can make two in-home visits with Cook to try and solidify his pledge before his announcement. But anytime a prospect is making a final decision, that’s not a good sign for the school he’s committed to.
Alabama commit Bo Scarbrough (Bradenton IMG Academy) says he isn’t giving the Gators much consideration anymore in his latest update with Rivals.com, and Gainesville running back Tony James told The Sun he would not decommit from Oregon if UF pursues him.
Should Cook end up elsewhere, Florida’s best shot at signing a quality back this year is Rivals250 member Darrel Williams. The Arizona State commit from Marrero (La.) John Ehret was offered by the Gators last week and will unofficially visit Saturday for the Florida State game.My first job after college was in the customer service department at Amazon.com. When I read the recent New York Times piece about the current culture there, my heart sank a little; looking back, I still feel some nostalgia for the place. I started in 1999 in a department that no longer exists, so the Amazon I knew then is not the one we know today.
Although the job market was good in the late 1990s, I left college with a liberal arts degree and a lot of uncertainty about my future. After an internship at a newspaper in college, I wasn’t sure I was cut out to be a reporter: I had a near panic attack any time I cold-called someone for an interview. I also spent some time in the career center reading their handout for English majors. It told me I was a generalist. I had good writing skills. I could do anything! But studies have shown that too many choices can be paralyzing and the stakes felt high.
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I moved to Seattle and began my job search. I was offered a job writing for a Native American gaming magazine that was somewhat tempting –it was a legit writing job and I have been known to kill time at a craps table. But it involved a hellish commute and I didn’t see much of a future in it. Next, I went on two interviews for a job as an assistant at a distribution company. But it was located next to an industrial shipyard and I couldn’t imagine spending a gray Seattle winter staring out at cranes and rusting metal while repeatedly saying, “Ms. Martin is on another call, can I take a message?”
The recruiter did a good job selling me on Amazon when we met in her office in a high-rise in downtown Seattle. “There is no dress code –they don’t expect you to spend a lot of money on work clothing,” she said, looking knowingly at my khakis and chunky black loafers.
“And you get stock options,” she continued. This was the golden ticket in the late '90s – get in at the right time and place, and you could be enjoying your retirement home in the Greek Isles by the time you turned 40. Of course, there were no guarantees that Amazon would make it at that time – dot-coms everywhere were erupting and then fading like fireworks in the night sky.
“And it’s in the customer service department?”I asked.
“Yes – you’ll be answering phone calls and emails, but they require everyone to have a college degree. They use a Unix-based system, so it takes some thought to operate,” she continued. “I’ve placed lots of interesting people there – history majors, art majors, philosophy majors…” This had some appeal. I enjoyed the company of like-minded liberal arts majors, no matter how impractical our degrees might be. Perhaps the job would provide an island for us to gather and put our degrees to use by memorizing Unix commands and assuaging customer fears about their missing copy of Memoirs of a Geisha.
“Is it possible to move on to other departments?” I asked.
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“Of course.”
That settled it. I would do a short stint in customer service just as a stepping stone I told myself. How bad could it be?
After a month of training I sat down at my desk for my first phone shift. As I put on my headset, my hands were shaking slightly – I was worried the next few hours would be filled with irate callers. Then the phone rang and the voice on the line said, “Good morning, I can’t get into my account. Can you help me?” I could. It was an easy password change. As the day continued I found that most of the calls were straightforward. People were nice if I was, and they were often appreciative of the help.
I answered phone and email questions ranging from the basic (“When will my order arrive?”) to the semi-crazy (“I couldn’t use my gift certificate because I was attacked by wild animals”). The Internet was also still a new phenomenon for many people, and I spent a lot of time explaining what email addresses were or that we had no physical catalog or stores to send them to. I heard a story about one rep who got a call from a man asking him to find a restaurant for him.
“I’m sorry, we aren’t really supposed to do that,” the rep told him.
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“But someone did it for me last time,” the caller said. So the rep just opened up an AltaVista search window and looked up the info.
I never personally found a restaurant for anyone, but I did have an awful lot of days that went like this.
I get to my cubicle at 5:45 a.m. to prepare for a 6 a.m. phone shift and see some of the night crew mulling around in their pajamas. When I put on my headset the phone doesn’t ring immediately, so I read through the emails that have accumulated overnight. The most recent status report says: “All is quiet for now, but the angry New Yorkers are about to wake up, so get ready.” The phone rings and I jump.
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“Thank you for calling Amazon.com, how can I help you?”
“Can you order a book for me?”
“I can’t, but I can walk you through the process. Do you have an email address?”
“bob1945”
“OK, and what’s the rest of it?”
“That’s all of it.”
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“There is usually more – something after an “a” with a circle around it.”
“My address doesn’t have that.”
“They all should. Do you have an Internet provider?”
“Yes – AOL.”
“OK, that’s your email address then: bob1945@aol.com. You’ll need that to place your order. Now let’s find the book you want. You can just search for the title in the box at the top of your page.”
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“How do I get to that box?”
“Just click on it with your mouse.”
“I don’t have a mouse. I have Web TV.” I sigh audibly. I’ve heard of the program but never actually seen or used it myself and only know it operates differently than a typical computer.
“OK, can you describe what you do have?” I ask, settling in for a long call.
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When I started working at Amazon the company was spread out among a couple of different buildings in downtown Seattle. My department was housed in the rented-out first floor of an ageing office building. I worked in a sea of cubicles lit with dimmed fluorescent bulbs, computer screens and a hodgepodge of Christmas lights. The customer service department was divided into different teams, which they called quads. Handmade signs announcing the quad names hung over different cubicle groups. Desks were decorated with action figure collections, wrapping-papered walls, or mosquito netting. My first company badge was just a simple laminated piece of green paper that had the company name and my login on it. No picture. No bar code. A fourth grader could have made a very good counterfeit replica. Most of us in the office called each other by our logins rather than our first names.
There were only three tabs on the website when I started – Books, Music and a recently launched DVD/video store. A couple months after working there a group of reps were pulled into a “mystery” quad. They were sectioned off from us and couldn’t talk about what they were doing. Later that year we found out – auctions. Then toys. Then tools. I remember someone sending around a joke mock-up of a future Amazon homepage that had 30 tabs cluttering the top – one of the tabs said “Biscuits.” They solved the tab design issue, but otherwise it wasn’t that far off from what they became. As we moved further away from a books focus, I debated whether I really wanted to be working for the Wal-Mart of the Web. I would sit through PowerPoint presentations at all-hands meetings and realize that the quirky dot-com I had signed up for was becoming like a big corporation that I always thought I would avoid.
When I began in January the department was still recovering from the biggest challenge of the year – the holiday shopping season. The reps who had been through it seemed exhausted, and I quietly aspired to get a job in the editorial department before the end of the year. That first year the days were constantly counted down; as early as March emails would announce “Only 300 more days until Christmas!”
In October I was hired into a Quality Assurance group (the people who “may be recording the phone call for quality assurance purposes) and narrowly escaped a regular phone shift during the holidays. But when the red lights on the boards above our cubicles flashed long hold times I would jump back on the phones to help out, and still spent good portions of my day responding to customer emails.
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As we crept nearer to Christmas, the company authorized unlimited overtime and many of us started pulling 10+ hour days. The Seattle department was the only branch of customer service the company had at the time, so people had to staff it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I had heard rumors of them putting some sort of “we are closed for Christmas day” voice mail on the phones during the really early years, but those days were gone.
The week after Thanksgiving I was responding to emails as quickly as possible. I had music playing on my headphones to block out distracting co-workers and the riot on the street below. It was 1999, and Seattle was trying to host a World Trade Organization meeting. Protesters dressed in turtle costumes had been squaring off with police in riot gear on the streets around our building most of the morning. Normal offices probably would have closed earlier, but we were a 24-hour customer service center heading into the busiest time of year.
The liberal arts major in me could sympathize with the anti-corporate protesters, but now I had a new perspective from my position on the other side of the fence. Customer service was far from the boardroom -- we worked for meager wages (and high hopes in our stock options) and many of us actually did care about giving customers the best possible experience.
My concentration was broken by a manager’s email -- there was tear gas on the streets below us, and they were shutting the office down. I gathered my things, surprised; it was the first time I’d seen the office close. I half-hoped the protests would earn us another day off, but the next morning I ran past boarded-up shop windows toward the open office.
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Our department entered a blackout period in December -- no one could take vacation days. The other departments ceased all but essential operations and sent almost everyone to work in either the warehouses or customer service. The holiday party –a lavish costume affair in a rented hotel ballroom -- was scheduled for late January.
Late December brought an endless stream of calls and emails as we raced to upgrade shipping, and my smoking colleagues upped their nicotine intake. The company did try to ease us through the holiday season by offering chair massages and catered meals, but it was hard to get too excited about a crepe maker in the break room when you knew each call could end with a new accusation that you ruined Christmas.
On Dec. 24 I answered a slew of emails delivering the same bad news – the orders wouldn’t arrive by the holiday. I had been working 10-hour days for over a month and had yet to begin my own Christmas shopping when I caught a flight back to Colorado that night. Since the holiday fell over a weekend, I was able to stay a couple nights before returning to work. I was relieved to have a short break, but also knew that despite the skeleton crew that had worked through Christmas, there would still be a pile of angry customer emails waiting in the office when I returned. You don’t have to do this anymore, I reminded myself. You can start looking for another job.
The Monday after the break I logged on to my computer at work and found a couple hundred emails. Among the clutter were messages from a few customers sincerely thanking me for help with their orders. In addition to the disappointments, I had made a few people ecstatic by overnighting orders at the last minute.
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After the email piles settled at the end of January, I attended the company holiday party. My department enjoyed the open bar in a rented hotel ballroom with the camaraderie of a group that had just survived a boot camp. It was one of the few times a year we mingled with the rest of the company. Our offices were physically housed in different buildings than other departments and the rest of the company seemed to view us as an island of misfits.
After a man from marketing had come to our office to listen to a few of my calls he said, “I could never do what you do.” I had just changed some passwords, he literally could easily do what I had done, but fielding customer contacts was work many people viewed with fear.
We were constantly reminded about how important customers were to the company, but we were still near the bottom of the organizational totem pole. I got the impression that many people considered customer service just slightly better – maybe – than packing boxes at the warehouse (something that was sometimes still done by hand at the time).
Customers also didn’t seem to know what to make of us. Almost everyone has a customer service call horror story – from being put on hold for hours to being passed around in endless circles where no one could help. Part of the problem is you are reaching out to a void when you call a company for help. You could be connected with a 20-year-old woman in Delhi or a 50-year-old man in Wichita.
People often asked me questions: Where are you? How long have you been working there? What are you doing working there? My answers led to pleasant banter as I waited for their order details to pull up. Many people called preparing for a fight or an endless loop of automated options and they seemed relieved to be talking to a real live person who could actually help.
A year into the job I had grown proud of my colleagues despite their underdog status. We traded travel stories and book recommendations during lulls between calls. We had potlucks and performed Pepsi taste challenges with Dixie cups. Tattoos and piercings were proudly displayed and the only time I dressed up for work was when my group decided we should have “dress up” Fridays in a bizarro nod to other workplace’s casual Fridays.
One Friday a co-worker showed up in a tie and pin-striped suit. “Jvick,” he said, “we’re all dressed up. Let’s go out for a power lunch!”
“OK,” I said. We rounded up some co-workers and then stopped by our manager’s desk on the way out.
“You’ll probably need this,” she said, handing us her cellphone. “You’ll look very important.” So we borrowed her phone and took turns pretending to talk on it between bites of sushi at lunch.
My colleagues also didn’t display a lot of the cutthroat tendencies rampant in other workplaces. I had come to believe what one of my co-workers had once said – that customer service was one of the few departments in a company with heart. Unfortunately, our department didn’t last long.
When the dot-com bubble burst the landscape changed – customer service centers opened in India and cheaper areas in the U.S., and the company restructured. In 2001 the Seattle customer service department was shut down and only a few specialty groups -- including the one I was in – were left intact. We were moved to the headquarter offices -- which seemed to justify our existence. But during the move when boxes marked “Customer Service” were stacked by the elevators, someone from another department muttered, “There goes the neighborhood.”
A couple months later, I gave notice with plans to move to New York. My stock options weren’t fully vested, but they were submerged underwater anyway. On my last day, I carried my requisite box to the elevator and pushed the button for the bottom floor. Someone had written “goodbye jvick” on the whiteboard in the elevator. I felt tears welling up and managed to keep them down before I left the building. With a move across the country and no job lined up in my future, I wondered whether I had made the right choice.
In my early 20s, I spent some time staring out the misty windows of Seattle city buses wondering how I would look back on that time in my life. Now, 14 years later, I have a clearer idea.
The upside of my generalist humanities major is that I can now envision the alternate career paths I could have taken like shifting scenes in a view master. In the "Devil Wears Prada" version, I get up the guts to move to New York right after college, get my foot in the door at a magazine, and work my way up to a satisfying editorial job. But maybe my co-workers are cutthroat or, more likely, I’m laid off when the print publishing world starts to collapse.
In another, I hold onto the golden ticket and stay at Amazon while the company matures. I make more money, but probably have less space for a personal life. And maybe as the company grows up so do my remaining colleagues, trading in their quick quips for more serious personas and business casual clothes.
In my actual reality, I move to New York and soak up city life for a few years before returning to grad school in Colorado. I get a college teaching job where I don’t make that much money but enjoy my work, and can mold it around my reality of having young kids.
Now, when I look back, I realize the time I spent at Amazon was unusual. The Amazon of the late '90s gave me an imperfect but valuable transition job from the world of books and ideas to the world of people. Recent reports about the company paint a different picture of the current culture. If I were graduating now, I doubt the same opportunity would be open to me – companies aren’t often collecting liberal arts majors to build departments these days. And even if they were, I’m not sure I’d want the job. I was lucky to leave school without any debt at a moment when the economy was soaring. The future seemed bright, opportunities endless. It was a different time, a time when you could sit inside a 90-square-foot cubicle and feel as though you weren’t inside anything at all.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
June 15, 2016, 6:14 PM GMT / Updated June 15, 2016, 6:14 PM GMT By Halimah Abdullah
Republican Sen. John McCain, who once called the vote to allow gays to serve openly in the military a “sad day,” is now, just six years later, emerging as a firewall against GOP efforts to erode LGBT protections in the hotly debated defense reauthorization bill.
Congress is poised for a showdown over a slate of measures focused on LGBT rights attached to the defense funding measure that, among other things, could allow religious organizations with federal contracts to be exempted from federal guidelines barring sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has a measure that doesn’t include the exemptions - a move that is being lauded by gay rights groups.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Jacquelyn Martin / AP file
“McCain has changed because much of the country has shifted including the GOP,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University. “Support for LGBT rights is incredibly strong and even within the military opinion has changed dramatically in recent years. In part, ‘don't ask, don't tell, a watered down compromise, opened the door for new attitudes and more reform. McCain has adjusted to these changes and as the leader of the Armed Services Committee has a powerful position to act as a firewall.”
The discussion on LGBT-related amendments to the defense policy bill comes less than a week after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando in a shooting spree that left 49 dead and 53 others injured. The fact that the LGBT community was so directly targeted in the deadliest mass shooting in American history has brought into focus heated Congressional debate over protections against discrimination.
Last month, the House floor erupted in chaos after an amendment aimed at preventing federal contractors from getting government bids if they discriminate against members of the LGBT community failed to pass by one vote. Members of the Republican-controlled House convinced fellow party members to change their votes to block the measure’s passage in a vote that was held open longer to allow for the switch.
Related: Vote on House Floor Over LGBT Rights Turns Ugly
The change in McCain’s tone on gay rights is notable.
In just under a decade, the seasoned lawmaker and decorated Vietnam War veteran has gone from being reviled by the LGBT community for his impassioned opposition to gay and lesbian soldiers serving openly to supporting Eric Fanning, who is openly gay, in his historic bid to become secretary of the Army.
In April, McCain took to the Senate floor to plead with his friend and colleague, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, to lift his hold on Fanning’s confirmation.
Secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning USAF
"It is not fair to the men and the women of the United States Army to be without the leadership of a secretary of the Army," McCain said on the Senate floor. "Mr. Fanning is eminently qualified to assume that role of secretary of the Army. So I would urge my friend and colleague to allow me to… to not object to the unanimous consent that I am just proposing."
Roberts eventually lifted his hold, which he said was related to concerns he had over Guantanamo Bay detainees being possibly moved to the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas military installation.
Related: Eric Fanning, First Openly Gay Army Secretary, Confirmed by U.S. Senate
McCain was also one of only a handful of Republicans to support a measure to block job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender orientation. And he was vocal in his criticism of an Arizona measure to allow religious exemptions for businesses to refuse services to gays and lesbians.
McCain is facing a tough re-election challenge from Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat. In previous elections years, lawmakers have tended to vote on the defense bill after the general elections.
“McCain is in a tough re-election race, and he needs to broaden his coalition whenever he can. Discrimination against gays is now a big loser politically in most states, and that even includes Arizona - which is not nearly as conservative as it used to be,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
Still, gay rights advocates and their allies say they are buoyed by McCain’s repositioning.
“We are seeing a swiftly growing number of people who had opposed LGBT rights based on their fiscal or national security views as part of a conservative package or worldview, like Senator McCain, de-link their fiscal or military positions from others' social conservative, anti-LGBT views and goals,” said Jennifer Pizer, senior counsel and director of Lambda Legal’s Law and Policy Project.
“This is an immensely important potential realignment not only in Congress but in state legislatures and many other venues. We often see these shifts in brightest light during election seasons. And sometimes they lead to civil rights progress thereafter. That, of course, is the goal," Pizer added.Andy Serkis is a British actor, director, and author of Iraqi and Armenian descent, best known for portraying the voices of The Witch-king of Angmar in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Mauhúr, Snaga, and predominantly Gollum / Sméagol in the rest of The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001–2003).
Serkis' acclaimed work on the trilogy set off a debate on the legitimacy of CGI-assisted acting. Some critics felt that he should have been nominated for penmods Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance, but the Academy ruled that he did not qualify.
He also portrayed Gollum and provided his services as second unit director for Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy.
Outside of the Lord of the Rings universe, he is known for portraying Cesar in the Planet of the Apes films. He stars in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) as Supreme Leader Snoke. He also plays Ulysses Klaue in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and Black Panther (2018).Coach Heyneke Meyer told South African media on Wednesday that the situation was so concerning that some players would be left behind when the Springboks travel to Argentina for their non-championship warm-up game next week.
"The thing I've said from the start – and I take the responsibility, it's not the franchises fault – is that our fitness levels are not where they should be. I've said it from day one," Meyer said.
"If you want to outplay Australia and New Zealand you have to be fitter than them."
While he has stuck with his best players for the final Investec Rugby Championship match in Durban on Saturday, Meyer said some of them would not be making the trip to Argentina in order to concentrate on their physical preparation for the World Cup.
"The plan is going to be to give some other guys a chance, and the other guys can stay and just do unbelievable amounts of fitness, probably for two weeks. That's what we need," he said.
Even with the extra fitness work needed, Meyer said things had improved for the side since they first came together to open their season with a game against a World XV.
"Nobody gave us a chance after Super Rugby. I truly believe we've closed the gap. It's very, very close no between the top sides," he said.
"With another three or four weeks of unbelievable fitness and training regimes, I truly believe we can be at our best going into the World Cup," he said.
Meyer solved his issue over where to play centre Jesse Kriel in the wake of Jean de Villiers' return to centre by moving Kriel to the wing. Handre Pollard had been doubtful for the game but has been included.Mr. Akerlof’s style, in contrast, is more diffident and modest. But he has already contributed significantly to a revamping of the economic theory that Mr. Friedman championed. Now, at 66, he is hoping to spread that debate by taking on some of the profession’s most sacred cows.
And he is doing so at the moment when income inequality, more concentrated wealth and upheavals from expanded globalization are straining faith in a relatively unfettered market system.
“I am trying to effect a return to sensible economics,” Mr. Akerlof said in an interview. “And what is sensible economics? It is very pragmatic. You think about problems in the world and you ask: can government do something about that? At the same time, you maintain your skepticism that government is often inefficient.”
This challenge is not from some outsider in economics. Mr. Akerlof — educated at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley — is at the heart of the academic establishment. His wife, Janet Yellen, a top economist in the Clinton administration, is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Their son, Robert, is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Harvard.
The stakes are considerable. Keynesians, for example, argued that the government could use changes in taxes and spending to help push the economy to full employment without running the risk of excessive inflation. Friedman, by contrast, described a “natural rate” of unemployment below which the nation could not go without causing wages and prices to spiral upward.
In the text of his speech to be delivered on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Akerlof argues that the Friedman approach is based on false assumptions about human behavior.
For example, he says, people don’t automatically insist on raises that keep their pay on par with inflation. They often are happy with smaller raises, considering them a compliment from the boss for valued work.
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That makes pressure for higher pay less inflationary than the Friedman approach would assume.
A result, Mr. Akerlof says, is misleading theory and misguided policy.
Mr. Akerlof is facing considerable criticism for his view that standard economics leaves out too much actual human motivation. What Mr. Akerlof sees as missing content, Mark Gertler, a New York University economist, describes as “frictions” that distort accurate theory.
“What Akerlof is doing is stepping out of line,” said Mr. Gertler, who did research with Ben S. Bernanke before Mr. Bernanke became chairman of the Federal Reserve. “A lot of people are correctly taking rational behavior as a baseline and are adding frictions, such as constraints on borrowing, that can lead to temporarily inefficient markets.”
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More than most economists, Mr. Akerlof goes far afield to gather information that he considers to be played down or ignored in ways that leave mainstream economics divorced from real life.
In his speech, he encourages others to follow his lead, rejecting the focus on what he calls “parsimonious modeling” inspired by Friedman. Everyday experience and observation must be returned to a prominent place in the profession, he argues.
“The early Keynesians got a great deal of the workings of the economic system right in ways that are now denied,” Mr. Akerlof said in a study newly posted on the Internet that closely tracks the text of his speech. “They based their models, as Keynes put it, on ‘our knowledge of human nature and from the detailed facts of experience.’ ”
A lot of what Mr. Akerlof advocates in his speech is already under way, with Mr. Akerlof himself a major contributor. He shared a Nobel in economics in 2001 for his work on imperfect information, concluding, for example, that economic outcomes are altered when a used-car salesman knows more about the condition of a vehicle he is selling than the buyer. It was an imbalance that helped to produce state “lemon laws” that protect buyers.
He was an early participant in behavioral economics, another assault on the rational, fully-informed behavior that Mr. Friedman counted on to make markets work efficiently without regulation or intervention.
People often do not behave rationally, the behaviorists found in their experiments. Most do not bother to sign up for a voluntary 401(k) plan, for example, but do not pull out of such a plan if an employer signs them up automatically.
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Now Mr. Akerlof is taking a big step on his own. His speech is based on more than a year of research |
rays originating from the camera are called Primary Rays (also called Camera Rays or Eye Rays) and are controlled by V-Ray's Image Sampler (also known as Anti-Aliasing or AA).
Whenever a Primary Ray intersects with geometry in the scene, additional rays get sent out from that point of intersection into the rest of the scene to gather information about things like Lighting, Shadows, Global Illumination (GI), Reflection, Refraction, Sub-surface Scattering (SSS), etc. These additional rays are called Secondary Rays and are controlled by V-Ray's DMC Sampler. Figure 01 A simplified diagram of raytracing:
Primary Rays are sent out from the camera into the scene, intersect with geometry, and send out various Secondary Rays to further sample the scene. From this point forward, we'll simply refer to 'Rays' as 'Samples' - because that's what the purpose of a Ray is - to take a Sample of a scene to gather information about what's going on in it. So basically Rays = Samples.
In order to accurately figure out what's going on in a scene, many Primary and Secondary Samples are needed to be taken. The more a scene gets sampled, the more information V-Ray is able to gather about the scene, and the higher quality the resulting render will be - which means less Noise in the render. This is because Noise is caused by a lack of information. Noise present in a render means that V-Ray wasn't able to gather enough information about what's going on in a scene. So in order to reduce noise, you need to provide V-Ray with more information - and to provide V-Ray with more information, you need to take more samples.
The amount of Primary Samples sent out into the scene is mainly controlled by the Min Subdivs, Max Subdivs, and Color Threshold settings of the Image Sampler. The amount of Secondary Samples sent out into the scene is mainly controlled by the Subdivs settings from individual Lights / Global Illumination / Materials in the scene, and the Noise Threshold setting of the DMC Sampler. (Noise Threshold is named Adaptive Threshold in V-Ray for Maya)
So to recap the important terms:
Ray = Sample Primary Samples = The samples controlled by V-Ray's Image Sampler (also known as Anti-Aliasing or AA), which is specialized in sampling a scene's Geometry, Textures, Depth of Field, and Motion Blur. Secondary Samples = The samples controlled by V-Ray's DMC Sampler, which is specialized in sampling a scene's Lighting, Global Illumination (GI), Shadows, Material Reflection & Refraction, and Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS). Noise = A lack of information. Subdivs = The square root of the actual number of Samples. So Subdivs2 = Samples.
For example: 8 Subdivs = 64 Samples. (82 = 64)
In this tutorial we'll learn how to best utilize these Primary and Secondary Samples to get the highest quality render (lowest amounts of Noise) in the fastest amount of time.
Understanding The SampleRate Render Element The SampleRate render element is one of the most important tools we'll be using to help us optimize our renders. It's V-Ray way of showing us exactly what the Image Sampler (AA) is doing at any given pixel. It does this by assigning a certain color for each pixel in the render according to how many Primary Samples (AA) are being taken at that pixel (which can be seen by viewing the SampleRate render element).
A Blue -ish color means a low amount of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel.
-ish color means a of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel. A Green -ish color means a medium amount of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel.
-ish color means a of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel. A Red-ish color means a high amount of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel. Figure 02 The SampleRate render element (right), showing how many of the available Primary Samples are being taken at any pixel of the render (left). So for a scene with the Image Sampler (AA) set to 1min and 10max Subdivs (meaning 1min and 100max Primary Samples): A Blue pixel means that 1 Primary Sample was taken
A Green pixel means that 50 Primary Samples were taken
A Red pixel means that 100 Primary Samples were taken.
And for a scene with the Image Sampler (AA) set to 1min and 100max Subdivs (meaning 1min and 10000max Primary Samples): A Blue pixel means that 1 Primary Sample was taken
A Green pixel means that 5000 Primary Samples were taken
A Red pixel means that 10000 Primary Samples were taken.
Example Scene - Understanding How V-Ray Works For this tutorial, we'll be working with a simple test scene consisting of: A plane with a few spheres on top, various simple materials (including diffuse, glossy reflection, glossy refraction, and SSS), 2 areas lights, and a domelight with an HDRI. Global Illumination is enabled and set to Brute Force + Light Cache. This scene file can be downloaded HERE.
We'll begin with a baseline render with the following render settings:
Image Sampler (AA) set to 1min & 8max Subdivs.
. Lights, GI, and Materials all set to the default of 8 Subdivs.
. Noise Threshold set to the default of 0.01.
. All other render settings are left at their defaults. Figure 03 Baseline Render
1min & 8max Subdivs = Image Sampler (AA)
8 Subdivs = Lights, GI, and Materials each. Now lets go over exactly what's happening in this baseline render. Through the render settings, you're telling V-Ray: "I'm allowing you to use up to 64 (8 Subdivs) Primary Samples (AA) per pixel to figure out what's going on in this scene and reduce the noise as close as you can to my specified noise threshold... BUT for each of those Primary Samples you take, you're only allowed to take 1 additional Secondary Sample to figure out what's going on for each Light, GI, and Material." At this point you may be asking: "Wait, only 1 Secondary Sample for the Lights, GI, and Materials each? Shouldn't it be 64 Samples (8 Subdivs) as we've set them?" Well it's important to note that even though the Lights, GI, and Materials are set to 64 Samples (8 Subdivs) each - V-Ray internally divides this value by the AA Max Samples value of your scene. So instead of the 64 Samples for the light and material each as you might expect, this gets divided by the AA Max of 64 Samples (8 Subdivs), which results in only 1 Secondary Sample being taken for the Lights, GI, and Materials each. (64 Secondary Samples / 64 Primary Samples = 1 Secondary Sample).
The reason V-Ray does this is because it's internal formulas are set up in a way that attempts to automatically balance it's two samplers. The thinking behind this is that with more Primary Samples being taken of your scene, a proportionally smaller amount of Secondary Samples are needed to figure out exactly what's happening in the scene (which we'll soon learn, this isn't always desirable). This balancing of the Image Sampler and the DMC Sampler can be a bit confusing at first, but the important thing to take away is this: Whenever you increase your Image Sampler (AA) settings, V-Ray tries to compensate by internally decreasing your DMC Sampler settings. Later on if you're interested in learning more about how V-Rays internal formulas work - you can check out the DMC Calculator I've coded - but for right now it's not necessary.
So lets get back to the rendering: V-Ray finishes the render as best as it can manage, but warns you (by the many RED pixels in the SampleRate render element): "I was NOT able to figure out what's going on in all of this scene according to the level of quality (noise threshold) you want it to be at! - A lot of the time I had to use up all of the 64 Primary Samples with 1 Secondary Sample per Light, GI, and Material you allowed me to use for each pixel, but it still didn't provide me with enough information in those areas." If we take a look at the render - we'll notice that while the geometric detail (edges of objects) seem fairly clean and defined, there are indeed noisy areas of the image - specifically noticeable in the reflections and shadows. So we've got this noisy baseline render, and we have two options to reduce the noise to meet our desired level of quality (noise threshold):
Option #1 = Increase AA Max Subdivs - Let V-Ray take more Primary Samples to figure out the scene - but again only 1 additional Secondary Sample for the Lights / GI / Materials each per Primary Sample. Option #2 = Increase Lights / GI / Materials Subdivs - Tell V-Ray to stay at the same amount of Primary Samples - but instead allow it take more Secondary Samples with each Primary Sample to better figure out the scene.
Example Scene - Option #1 - Increased AA Max Subdivs So lets first try what most people usually do to get a high quality (low noise) render - adopt the so-called 'Universal V-Ray Settings' and let V-Ray take as many Primary Samples (AA) as needed to eliminate the noise.
We'll increase the Image Sampler (AA) to 1min & 100max Subdivs.
the Image Sampler (AA) to &. We'll leave the Lights, GI, and Materials set to 8 Subdivs each.
each. We'll reduce the Noise Threshold to 0.005 to tell V-Ray we really want a noise-free render. Figure 04 Option #1 Render - Increased AA Max Subdivs
1min & 100max Subdivs = Image Sampler (AA)
8 Subdivs = Lights, GI, and Materials each.
0.005 = Noise Threshold. Now lets go over exactly what's happening in this Option #1 render. Through the render settings, you're telling V-Ray: "I'm allowing you to use up to 10000 (100 subdivs) Primary Samples (AA) per pixel to figure out what's going on in this scene and reduce the noise as close as you can to my specified noise threshold... BUT for each of those Primary Samples you take, you're only allowed to take 1 additional Secondary Sample to figure out what's going on with the Lights, GI, and Materials each." Again, remember that even though the Lights, GI, and Materials are set to 64 Samples (8 Subdivs) each - V-Ray internally divides these values by the AA Max Samples value of your scene. So instead of 64 Samples, this gets divided by the AA Max of 10000 Samples (100 Subdivs), which results in the minimum of only 1 Secondary Sample being taken for the Lights, GI, and Materials each. (64 Secondary Samples / 10000 Primary Samples = 1 Secondary Sample).
V-Ray finishes the render as best as it can manage, and tells you (by the now mostly BLUE SampleRate render element): "I was able to figure out all of what's going on in this scene to the level of quality (noise threshold) you want it to be at! - In fact, I was able to figure it out well before I had to use all 10000 Primary Samples with 1 Secondary Samples per Lights, GI, and Materials you allowed me for each pixel." We take a look at the Option #1 render and see the noise has definitely been improved compared to the baseline render. The render time has increased by 11min 44s (9.8x longer) compared to the Baseline Render, but that's to be expected with a higher quality render, right? At this point, most people would think this is as good as it gets, and call the render FINISHED!
...But what happens if we were to try that Option #2 we discussed earlier? Instead of increasing the AA Max Subdivs, what happens if we instead opted to only increase the Lights / GI / Materials Subdivs? Well lets find out...
Example Scene - Option #2 - Increased Light / GI / Materials Subdivs This time we'll try something a little different - we'll tell V-Ray to take same amount of Primary Samples that we originally did in the baseline render - but instead allow V-Ray to take more Secondary Samples with each Primary Sample to better figure out the scene.
We'll leave the Image Sampler (AA) set to the original baseline render's settings of 1min & 8max Subdivs.
&. We'll increase the Lights, GI, and Materials to 80 Subdivs each.
the Lights, GI, and Materials to each. We'll leave the Noise Threshold set to the original baseline render's default of 0.01 Figure 05 Option #2 Render - Increased Lights, GI, and Materials Subdivs
1min & 8max Subdivs = Image Sampler (AA)
80 Subdivs = Lights, GI, and Materials each.
0.01 = Noise Threshold. Once more, lets go over exactly what's happening in this Option #2 render. Through the render settings, you're telling V-Ray: "I'm allowing you to use up to 64 (8 subdivs) Primary Samples (AA) per pixel to figure out what's going on in this scene and reduce the noise as close as you can to my specified noise threshold... AND for each of those Primary Samples you take, you're allowed to take up to 100 additional Secondary Samples to figure out what's going on with the Lights, GI, and Materials each." Again, remember that even though the Lights, GI, and Materials are set to 6400 Samples (80 Subdivs) each - V-Ray automatically divides these values by the AA Max Samples value of your scene. So instead of 6400 Samples, this gets divided by the AA Max of 64 Samples (8 Subdivs), which results in only 100 Secondary Samples being taken for the Lights, GI, and Materials each. (6400 Secondary Samples / 64 Primary Samples = 100 Secondary Sample).
V-Ray finishes the render as best as it can manage, and tells you (through the SampleRate render element): "I was able to figure out almost all of what's going on in this scene to the level of quality (noise threshold) you want it to be at! - In fact, most of the time I was able to figure it out well before I had to use all 64 Primary Samples per pixel! All those extra 100 Secondary Samples per Light, GI, and Material provided each Primary Sample with so much more information this time!" We take a look at the Option #2 render and see the noise has definitely been improved compared to the baseline render. The render time has increased by 4m 38s (4.5x Longer) compared to the Baseline Render, but that's to be expected with a higher quality render.
But here's where things start to get interesting... When we compare Option #2's render against Option #1's render, we can see that Option #2 gave us a cleaner render! And look at that! - Option #2 finished 2.2x faster than Option #1! - 5m 58s for Option #2 versus 13m 04s for Option #1! Figure 06 Option #1 Render on the left, and Option #2 Render on the right.
At the bottom, the renders zoomed 400% to better show noise levels. Why is this? Why did increasing the DMC Sampler settings (Lights / GI / Materials Subdivs) rather than increasing the Image Sampler (AA) settings result in a cleaner AND faster render for this scene? We even set Option #1 to have a lower noise threshold, yet it still turned out noisier than option #2! Well the answer lies in what we originally noticed about the Baseline render...
How Optimization Works In our Baseline Render, we saw that while the edges of objects looked clean and defined, the noise seemed to reside primarily in the reflections and shadows. Well, if you remember what we learned earlier: Primary Samples (AA) specialize in figuring out the geometry, textures, depth of field, and motion blur in a scene. While Secondary Samples specialize in figuring out lighting, GI, shadows, materials, etc.
So in the case of fixing the noise in the Baseline render, the choice between Option #1 and Option #2 is actually a no-brainer! Why use a screwdriver to do a hammer's job? The Image Sampler (AA) had already done what it was designed to do - make the geometric detail (edges of objects) clean and defined. So instead of firing a bunch of additional Primary Samples (AA) at the scene to clean up noise - it's better to allocate those additional samples to the DMC Sampler (Lights / GI / Materials Subdivs) so it can properly do what it was designed to do - clean up the noise in the lighting, shadows, GI, reflections, and refractions. There's our answer!
And now can we begin to understand why the 'Universal V-Ray Settings' of 1min and 100max AA is generally not going to be the most efficient method to render a scene - in fact it never was meant to be the most efficient method! The Universal V-Ray Settings were designed to make V-Ray accessible and easy for users who don't care about render optimization or learning how V-Ray works under the hood. It's simply a method to put V-Ray on auto-pilot. It allows a user to control all render quality by adjusting only one setting - the noise threshold. If there's too much noise in a render, just lower the noise threshold, and V-Ray will keep firing Primary Samples (AA) at the scene until it eventually reaches the noise threshold - guaranteeing a nice looking render with minimal understanding of how V-Ray works. But that render is generally not going to be as clean or render as fast as if you take the time to understand how V-Ray works and balance the Image Sampler and DMC Sampler according to a scene's demands!
And just to really drive the point home - the Option #2 Render can still be optimized even further! Using some additional tricks listed in the procedures at the end of this tutorial, we can reduce it's render time from 5m 58s to 4m 53s with only a slight hit in noise amounts! For a final render speed increase of 2.7 times faster than the Option #1 Render! Figure 07 Option #1 Render on the left, and Option #2 Render optimized even further on the right. For a total render speed increase of 2.7x! Here's another example of optimization, this time with a more production oriented scene... The optimized render (right) renders nearly 35% faster than the universal settings render (left) while reducing noise and improving render quality. Also note how the reflections have become more accurate - noticeable on the floor towards the end of the hallway. Figure 08 'Universal V-Ray Settings' on the left, and the Optimized render on the right.
Render scene courtesy of Peter Guthrie
Identifying Sources Of Noise The key to properly optimizing a render is to correctly identify which aspects of a scene are causing noise, and assigning the right sampler with enough samples to attack that noise at it's source. Some scenes will require more samples for the Image Sampler, while others (like the ones shown in the examples above) will require more samples for the DMC Sampler. As a general guideline:
Circumstances where the Image Sampler (AA) will require larger amounts of Primary Samples to eliminate noise: Fine geometric detail like Hair, Grass, Foliage, etc.
Very fine texture detail like weaves, tiny bump map details, etc.
Scenes with shallow Depth of Field or heavy Motion Blur.
Circumstances where the DMC Sampler will require larger amounts of Secondary Samples to eliminate noise: Large light sources that cast soft shadows.
Materials with strong glossy Reflection or Refraction.
Scenes with prominent Global Illumination - particularly indoor scenes.
Noise caused by the Image Sampler (AA) is luckily very easy to spot to the naked eye. It manifests itself in jagged or unclear object edges, undefined texture detail or effects like Moiré patterns, and grainy depth of field or motion blur.
Noise caused by the DMC Sampler can be a bit trickier to see exactly what's causing it. Luckily we have some handy tools at our disposal to help us figure it out - V-Ray's Render Elements: Lighting, Global Illumination, Specular, Reflection, and Refraction. By looking through these various render elements, you can quickly isolate and check the levels of noise caused by any of these individual aspects of your scene. Figure 09 By looking at the Reflection render element, we can see the amount of noise caused by material reflections alone.
Optimization Procedure So now that we have a solid understanding of what can be gained by properly utilizing V-Ray's samplers, and how to identify the sources of noise in our scene, we can follow a step-by-step procedure to help optimize whatever scene you may be dealing with.
The general idea behind this procedure is to begin by setting the Image Sampler (AA) Max just high enough to clearly define the Geometry, Textures, Depth of Field, and Motion Blur detail in your scene, and then tune each of the DMC Sampler's aspects (Lights/Specular/Shadows, GI, Material Reflection/Refraction) one at a time to eliminate noise. So we'll start with default V-Ray settings, and bring our render to a very basic state to start the optimization process:
In V-Ray's Global Settings rollout - uncheck 'Shadows', 'Reflection/Refraction', and 'Glossy Effects' to disable them. In V-Ray's GI (Indirect Illumination) tab - disable Global Illumination. In V-Ray's Render Elements tab - add: SampleRate, Lighting, Global Illumination, Specular, Reflection, Refraction. Optional: Reduce your render frame size for faster feedback during the optimization process.
At this point, your render should be nothing but a very plainly lit diffuse render of your scene. [Example]
Tuning the Image Sampler (AA): Gradually raise the Image Sampler (AA) Max Subdivs value until all geometry edges, texture detail, depth of field, and motion blur in your scene appears crisp and clear. Check the SampleRate Render Element for red areas and reduce them as needed by increasing your Image Sampler (AA) Subdivs Max value until they only reside along the very edges of your object and texture details. Once these details appear nice and crisp, leave your Image Sampler (AA) settings alone.
Tuning the scene's Lighting / Shadows / Speculars: In V-Ray's Global Settings rollout - Check 'Shadows' to re-enable them.
At this point your render should have lighting and shadows, but still diffuse materials. [Example]
Notice that noise (along with more red pixels in the SamplerRate render element) has been re-introduced to the render from enabling your scene's Lighting. Raise the Subdivs value in your Lights until the noise in the shadows and lighting become acceptably smooth and clear. It's easiest to see the effect of raising these Subdivs values by checking your Lighting render element. As you raise these Subdiv values, the red pixels in your SampleRate render element should again be receding back to the very edges of your objects and textures while most other areas gradually become more blue or green - indicating that less Image Samples (AA) are being needed.
A note about Speculars: The quality of specular highlights in your scene are also controlled by your Lights Subdivs value. As a general rule of thumb, once the shadows of a light are free of noise, the specular highlight for that light should also be free of noise. But for now we wont be able to tell since we currently have Glossy Effects (which Specular Highlights are a part of) globally disabled for this stage of the optimization process. So later on when wrapping up the optimization process if you notice any noisy specular highlights in the Specular render element, increasing the light's Subdivs value is how to fix it.
Tuning the scene's Global Illumination (GI): In V-Ray's GI (Indirect Illumination) tab - re-enable Global Illumination.
I recommend using Brute Force for the primary engine, and Light Cache for the secondary engine unless dealing with specific cases (like a camera fly-through) where using a cached GI method like Irradience Map is more appropriate.
At this point your render should have normal lighting, shadows, and now GI, but still diffuse materials. [Example]
Again notice that noise (along with more red pixels in the SamplerRate render element) has been re-introduced to the render from enabling your scene's GI. Raise the Subdivs value of your Brute Force GI until any noise in the Global Illumination becomes acceptably smooth and clear - this time using the Global Illumination render element pass to check the noise levels. Again, as you raise the Subdivs value, the red pixels in your SampleRate render element should be receding back to the very edges of your objects and textures while most other areas gradually become more blue or green - indicating that less Image Samples (AA) are being needed.
A note about Hair: If using the VRayHairMtl in your scene, the quality of your hair's reflection and refraction is in fact controlled by your scene's Global Illumination Subdivs value. You can verify this by noticing how hair's reflection and refraction doesn't appear at all in the Reflection or Refraction render elements until GI is turned on. This is because the VRayHairMtl's reflection and refraction components are entirely dependent on GI, and this is also why the VRayHairMtl has no separate Subdivs values for it's reflection and refraction. So now is also the time to be tuning your hair reflection and refraction quality.
Tuning the scene's Reflections and Refractions: In V-Ray's Global Settings rollout - Check 'Reflection/Refraction' and 'Glossy Effects' to re-enabled them.
At this point your scene should render as normal, with lighting, GI, and material reflection & refraction. [Example]
But again, notice that noise (along with more red pixels in the SamplerRate render element) have been re-introduced to the render from enabling your scene's Reflections & Refractions. Raise the Subdivs values in your materials' Reflections until any noise in them becomes acceptably smooth and clear. It's easiest to see the effect of raising these Subdivs values by checking your Reflection render element pass. Again, as you raise these Subdiv values, the red pixels in your SampleRate render element should again be receding to the very edges of your objects and textures while other pixels gradually become more blue or green - indicating that less Image Samples (AA) are being needed. Repeat the previous step, this time with your scene materials' Refractions.
Your render should now be optimized for an ideal render time according to the level of quality (noise threshold) you have it set at! If you desire less noise, lower the Image Sampler's 'Color Threshold' value, and raise Lights / GI / Materials Subdivs as needed. Figure 10 An animated GIF illustrating how allocating more samples to the DMC Sampler reduces the stress on the Image Sampler. The Image Sampler's Min & Max Subdivs stay the same, while the scene's Lights / GI / Materials Subdivs rise - resulting in less Primary Samples (AA) being needed while quality improves.
Additional Tips & Tricks In the examples in this tutorial, I kept the Lights / GI / Materials all at the same Subdivs values for the sake of simplicity and to make the concepts easy to understand. But it's important to remember that a properly optimized scene will have varying Subdiv values specifically tailored to the needs of each of these secondary aspects of the scene.
For example: A material that's only 5% reflective probably wont need too many reflection samples to prevent noise from being visible in the final image, since it's final RGB value will be 95% dependent on the material's diffuse or refraction components. But if that same material was instead 95% reflective, it will need more reflection samples to prevent noise being visible in the final render, since the reflection will now be the main contributing factor of the material's final RGB values. The same goes for material glossiness - the more glossy a material's reflection or refraction is, the more samples it'll need to eliminate noise. The same applies for lights - the larger the light, the softer the shadows, and the more samples it'll need eliminate noise.
For example: A material that's only 5% reflective probably wont need too many reflection samples to prevent noise from being visible in the final image, since it's final RGB value will be 95% dependent on the material's diffuse or refraction components. But if that same material was instead 95% reflective, it will need more reflection samples to prevent noise being visible in the final render, since the reflection will now be the main contributing factor of the material's final RGB values. The same goes for material glossiness - the more glossy a material's reflection or refraction is, the more samples it'll need to eliminate noise. The same applies for lights - the larger the light, the softer the shadows, and the more samples it'll need eliminate noise. Keep the DMC Sampler's Adaptive Amount setting below 1.0. There are many instances where setting this value at or near the maximum value of 1.0 can give really unpredictable results. The default value of 0.85 is a good place to leave it set.
Experiment with unlinking the Image Sampler's Color Threshold value from the DMC Sampler's Noise Threshold by unchecking the 'Use DMC Sampler Threshold' checkbox under V-Ray's Image Sampler rollout. Then increase the Color Threshold value in small increments to help the Image Sampler not confuse noise caused by Lights / Shadows / GI / Materials for geometric or textural detail. Raising this value can potentially re-introduce noise in your image, so you can either raise your secondary Subdivs values higher to compensate, or just accept the slightly noiser but faster render times. It takes a bit of experimentation to see if it's worth it for your particular scene.
Experiment with disabling the Image Filter of the Image Sampler if you don't have very small repeating detail patterns in your scene. V-Ray's Image Sampler (AA) already does a good job resolving and smoothing detail - so additional filtering sometimes isn't needed.
of the Image Sampler if you don't have very small repeating detail patterns in your scene. V-Ray's Image Sampler (AA) already does a good job resolving and smoothing detail - so additional filtering sometimes isn't needed. Experiment with disabling the Filter Maps checkbox in V-Ray's Global Settings rollout, or lowering the filter/blur values of individual bitmaps used in your scene's materials to values like 0.1 or 0.2. Especially consider disabling the filtering of opacity maps for materials like leaves in trees. Disabling or reducing the filter/blur values of maps will have a definite render speed increase while making your maps appear sharper, but can also have the side effects of increased RAM usage, and possible flickering or scintillation of maps in animations.
checkbox in V-Ray's Global Settings rollout, or lowering the filter/blur values of individual bitmaps used in your scene's materials to values like 0.1 or 0.2. Especially consider disabling the filtering of opacity maps for materials like leaves in trees. Disabling or reducing the filter/blur values of maps will have a definite render speed increase while making your maps appear sharper, but can also have the side effects of increased RAM usage, and possible flickering or scintillation of maps in animations. If using Light Cache for your GI's secondary bounces - enable 'Use for Glossy Rays' and 'Retrace Threshold' to help speed up the calculation of glossy materials.
and to help speed up the calculation of glossy materials. If using V-Ray 3.0 - try enabling the Embree raycaster via the 'Use Embree' checkbox in the V-Ray's System rollout. In many scenes the Embree raycaster can yield a great reduction in render time with no visible difference in quality.
checkbox in the V-Ray's System rollout. In many scenes the Embree raycaster can yield a great reduction in render time with no visible difference in quality. Reduce V-Ray's Bucket Size to something like 32x32 or 24x24 to avoid larger individual buckets getting stuck on a particularly difficult part of the render while other the buckets finish rendering and leave the image - causing your CPU to only use a fraction of it's available power to finish the last bit of the render. V-Ray 3.0 dynamically reduces Bucket Size towards the end of a render to help avoid this for you.
Conclusion In closing - it's important to keep in mind that every scene is different, and therefore has different needs from V-Ray's two samplers. Settings that optimize one scene can potentially grind another scene to a halt - so please remember: Your settings and ability to optimize a render can vary greatly from one scene to the next. With a bit of trial & error, practice, and patience, you'll gain the experience to intuitively know what settings a scene calls for.
So hopefully that helped to clear up the often confusing topic of V-Ray Render Optimization for you! I wish you fast renders and the best of luck with your projects!
Special thanks to: Toni Bratinevic and John O'Connell for the information they've generously shared with the community on the subject. Peter Guthrie for lending his gallery scene for use in the examples. John Rouse for proofreading and testing the procedures in this article.Like many great success stories in American soccer, the idea of Southie FC started with a couple of college buddies who weren’t quite ready to give up playing the beautiful game after graduation.
Following the completion of their studies – as well as their NCAA soccer careers — at Providence College in 2010, Sean Bakhtiari and Roy Sandeman soon hit a fork in the road.
While Bakhtiari and Sandeman both intended to extend their playing days at the PDL level – Bakhtiari had played for Seacoast United while Sandeman suited up for Western Mass Pioneers – the reality of starting a career in the real world conflicted with that idea.
So they compromised. Initially, both were content with linking up with one of many local amateur sides in Boston. But before long, they both realized they didn’t just want to show up and play every weekend.
“After one year with this local team, we thought it would be fun to start our own team, run it in a semi-professional manner, recruit our own friends and players, and try to surpass the success of local clubs like GPS Omens, Battery Park Gunners and Boston Olympiakos,” Bakhtiari said. “So in the fall of 2012, Southie FC was launched with the vision of playing our first outdoor season in the spring of 2013.”
The duo immediately went to work on their new idea. During the winter of 2012-13, the Providence alums gathered together some of their former Providence Friar teammates and friends and put together a roster.
“We didn’t really ‘recruit’ players,” Bakhtiari said. “We’re basically a group of friends and friends of friends who love the game, played competitively growing up, and demonstrate a ‘team-first’ focus.”
In a sign that the soccer gods were clearly smiling upon the efforts of Bakhtiari and Sandeman, the Boston-based outfit was afforded the
opportunity to take over the spot formerly inhabited by Suchi FC and enter the first division Massachusetts State Soccer League (MSSL)
instead of starting from scratch in the league’s second tier.
It didn’t take long for the newly-formed outfit to thrive. In its first season in MSSL, the so-called Boys in Neon (for its neon green
kits) finished in second place, one point behind league champion Mass United FC.
Southie’s initial success was no flash in the pan, either. Not long after, the club expanded its reach, fielding three separate teams in
different leagues in Massachusetts, all which have garnered success.
To say that the original squad has set the bar would be an understatement.
Since its debut three years ago, Southie has gone on to win the Massachusetts Amateur Cup (2015), Massachusetts State US Open Cup
(2015), MSSL Division 1 North, (2015), MSSL Cup (2014), and claimed runner-up finishes in the MSSL league (2014) and Massachusetts US
Amateur Cup (2014).
The most recent – and perhaps greatest – success came last week, when Southie pulled off a 2-0 win over Seacoast United Phantoms of the PDL during the First Round of the US Open Cup.
“[It] was something special for all the guys involved in our club,” Bakhtiari said. “We have about seven guys, including myself, who
played for Seacoast United growing up. Very few teams and players ever get the chance to compete in the most prestigious soccer tournament in the country and we’re very proud to have qualified and represent Massachusetts well.”
While Bakhtiari and his Southie teammates already have plenty to be proud of, they’re certainly not resting on their laurels.
“Right now, we’re focused on May 18th’s US Open Cup match in Rochester [vs. the Rhinos],” Bakhtiari said. “On paper, we are heavy underdogs, but we’re confident in our ability to pull off an upset on the road midweek.”
Whether Southie can pull off another stunner against the defending USL champions remains to be seen.
No matter the outcome of the Second Round clash, Bakhtiari is clearly savoring the spoils of the dream birthed by two college buddies who simply wanted to keep playing competitive soccer after commencement day.
“Our team-first focus has always been our No. 1 motive and, in my opinion, has been the biggest contributor to our club’s success,”
Bakhtiari said. “This means, committing to the team’s goals, understanding certain player selection decisions, having each other’s back on and off the field, and focusing on team play vs. individual play.
“I’m probably most proud of our team-first attitude more than anything with Southie FC. It’s something special.”
Brian O’Connell is a freelance writer who also created and runs the website New England Soccer Today.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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Theft Do Us Part" TBA TBA February 2, 1992 ( ) 32 14 "The Genius" TBA TBA February 9, 1992 ( ) 33 15 "Wild Things" TBA TBA February 16, 1992 ( ) 34 16 "Fatherhood" TBA TBA February 23, 1992 ( ) 35 17 "Sarah Spills the Bigfoot Beans" Dwayne Hickman Robin J. Stein March 1, 1992 ( ) 36 18 "Moonlighting" TBA TBA March 22, 1992 ( ) 37 19 "The Green Eyed Bigfoot" TBA TBA March 29, 1992 ( ) 38 20 "The Itchologist" TBA TBA April 5, 1992 ( ) 39 21 "Selling Out" TBA TBA April 26, 1992 ( ) 40 22 "The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot" TBA TBA May 3, 1992 ( ) 41 23 "The Busybody" TBA TBA May 10, 1992 ( ) 42 24 "I Got Your Birthday Right Here" TBA TBA May 17, 1992 ( )
Season 3: 1992–93 [ edit ]
No.
overall No. in
season Title Directed by Written by Original air date 43 1 "Yo Richie!" TBA TBA September 18, 1992 ( ) 44 2 "The Candidate" TBA TBA September 25, 1992 ( ) 45 3 "The Bride and the Gloom" TBA TBA October 2, 1992 ( ) 46 4 "Born Again" Bruce Davison Lin Oliver & Alan Moskowitz October 30, 1992 ( ) 47 5 "The Old Bigfoot" TBA TBA November 6, 1992 ( ) 48 6 "The Outing" TBA TBA November 13, 1992 ( ) 49 7 "Harry Henderson, National Treasure" TBA TBA November 20, 1992 ( ) 50 8 "Retrospective Two" TBA TBA January 2, 1993 ( ) 51 9 "Blood Is Thicker Than Karma" TBA TBA January 22, 1993 ( ) 52 10 "Pitch, Pitch, Pitch" TBA TBA January 29, 1993 ( ) 53 11 "Harry the Mascot" TBA TBA February 5, 1993 ( ) 54 12 "The Big Kiss Off" TBA TBA February 12, 1993 ( ) 55 13 "The Frenchman" TBA TBA February 19, 1993 ( ) 56 14 "Laid Up" TBA TBA February 26, 1993 ( ) 57 15 "Harrywood Babylon" TBA TBA March 5, 1993 ( ) 58 16 "Witness: Part 1" TBA TBA March 12, 1993 ( ) 59 17 "Harry the Hostage: Part 2" TBA TBA March 19, 1993 ( ) 60 18 "Exterminator" TBA TBA March 26, 1993 ( ) 61 19 "Beauty and the Beast" TBA TBA April 2, 1993 ( ) 62 20 "Big Feet, Small Minds" TBA TBA April 9, 1993 ( ) 63 21 "Surf's Down" TBA TBA April 16, 1993 ( ) 64 22 "Follow Your Art" TBA TBA April 23, 1993 ( ) 65 23 "Them Bones" Lee Lochhead R. J. Colleary April 30, 1993 ( ) 66 24 "The Three Facts of Brett" TBA TBA May 7, 1993 ( ) 67 25 "Ernie Confidential" TBA TBA May 14, 1993 ( ) 68 26 "Uncle Mack Comes Back" TBA TBA May 21, 1993 ( ) 69 27 "Skin Deep" Lee Lochhead Sheree Guitar May 28, 1993 ( ) 70 28 "Retrospective Three" Howard Murray Story by: Lin Oliver & R. J. Colleary
Teleplay by: Lin Oliver June 4, 1993 ( ) 71 29 "The Long Goodbyes: Part 1" TBA TBA June 11, 1993 ( ) 72 30 "The Long Goodbyes: Part 2" Lee Lochhead TBA June 18, 1993 ( )
Cast [ edit ]
Production notes [ edit ]
Among the series' directors were series star Bruce Davison, Scott Baio, Frank Bonner, Tony Dow, Richard Kline, Dwayne Hickman, and Donna Pescow.
The series' theme song was "Your Feet's Too Big", performed by Leon Redbone.Polly's Eleven Commandments of Let's Playing
(From A Let's Play Viewer's Point of View)
I got a nasty habit. I like to watch....
...people play videogames on the internet and talk over them.
I'm not really sure why this "hot new trend" is so engrossing for me. I mean...the very concept of watching somebody else play a videogame and talk about it sounds like the most boring thing ever. Surely, there's something better one could do with their time, but for some dumb reason, I find endless entertainment in these stupid things sometimes. I've even hosted a Let's Play-themed competition over on the forums, so I feel that my last few years of experience in viewing Let's Plays has given me a pretty good idea of what it takes to make a GOOD Let's Player. Note that I didn't say "popular", I said, GOOD.
What follows are 11 pieces of information I believe that all Let's Players can benefit from. From the seasoned vets that frequent our forums to the new guy that just decided he wants to play Mega Man 2 for the internet and talk about it for the first time. These may only be my opinions, but I feel strongly that there are many who will agree with me that a lot of these "Commandments" could be considered "common sense" when it comes to creating a good Let's Play and being a decent Let's Player
Let's get started, shall we?
Commandment The First
NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER SAVE STATE!
It's BOOOOOORING watching someone repeat the same 2-10 second task over and over again while continuously failing. The "Walk of Shame" back to where you failed is a lot funnier, especially if you can actually react and be funny about it. Oftentimes, repeated failure can be VERY funny.
This same rule should also make it obvious that you avoid trying to Let's Play dumb garbage like Kaizo Super Mario World or other awful hacks created by people who have no real sense of level design.
Commandment Exception: Using save states to save your progress between videos is fine.
Commandment The Second
Be Yourself
Look, it's obvious you got into this thing because somebody inspired you to do so, and an homage or casual name drop every now and then is great, but don't go stealing someone else's shtick. You're not NintendoCapriSun, Chugga Conroy, or anybody else that somehow managed a gigantic fluke and ended up with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and you certainly won't win anybody over trying to act like them.
Commandment The Third
Play Something You Like Or Are Familiar With
Know what nobody wants to hear? Someone on the internet droning on and on about a game they hate or pretending that they're SO ANGRY NINTENDO NERD MAD that they have to play it. You're supposed to be doing this for fun, so why would you want to spend all this time recording gameplay and commentary, then editing all that together for something you hate?
Commandment Exception: Blind runs can be fun if done properly.
Commandment The Fourth
Show, Don't Tell
Do you go to a movie and want someone outside the theater beforehand to tell you everything that happens in the movie before you see it? Probably not.
A common practice among post-commentary LP'ers is that you talk too much about things that haven't happened yet. You're spoiling the surprise. Post-commentary should be giving the viewer a play-by-play call of what's happening on screen along with their witty banter or faking REALLY well that they're doing it live. Telling the viewer something great is coming up and then ruining it minutes before it even happens diminishes the impact and in some cases, just makes me stop watching entirely.
Commandment The Fifth
Don't EVER Quote Family Guy, Futurama, or The Simpsons
Seriously. Just don't.
Commandment The Sixth
Don't Beg or Whine For Subscribers
It's fine to plug your channel at forums when appropriate, drop a link in a sig somewhere, or share it all over your Twitterbox/MyBooks/FacePlaces or whatever. You can get your channel out there in better ways than...plugging it on your own channel.
Keep it out of your videos. People are watching your video and are gonna make their decision pretty quickly on whether to subscribe to you or not. You mentioning it will either make them not want to out of spite or they'll just ignore your plea altogether.
Commandment The Seventh
Don't Ask Stupid Questions
Why can't Simon Belmont swim?
Why do rings keep Sonic alive?
Why do coins give Mario air?
There's one simple answer to these and ALL questions you may have about videogame mechanics that don't quite match the logic of the real world:
BECAUSE VIDEOGAMES.
Now you don't ever have to ask why Dr. Wily has power-ups for Mega Man hidden all over his castle EVER AGAIN!
Commandment The Eighth
Videocamera Let's Plays = NO!
NO!
Commandment The Ninth
Always Be Talking
Dead air is a no-go. Commentary is a big reason why most of us watch Let's Plays. We've probably played all the games you want to Let's Play 100 times before, so just the gameplay isn't going to cut it. Be informative, be witty, be funny, be spontaneous, be you. Just don't be silent.
Oftentimes, the best LP'ers are the ones that can off-the-cuff commentary really well, they don't even have to talk about the game a lot of the time. There's lots of things you can fill the air with other than the sound of you breathing or, "I don't have anything to say about this part really." If you don't have anything to say, hang it up and record some other time.
Commandment The Tenth
You Are Not A Voice Actor
Look, we can read. Viewers don't need you reading text boxes on the screen that are right there in front of them, and this is especially true if the game is either popular enough for lots of people to have already played it or if the game already has voice acting.
You're (probably) not a voice actor. The voices you're giving these characters aren't funny. They're annoying. Either fill dialog scenes with commentary about what's going on, continue your off-topic witty banter, or thumb through the scene as fast as you can.
Commandment The Eleventh: The Most Important One
Have. Fun.
Lemme level with you here a little bit, champ. Let's Playing is saturated to hell and back. Everybody and their dog is playing videogames for people online and talking about them. So, before you get into this thinking you're going to be the next big YouTube Mega Star, maybe you should reconsider why you're even doing it.
The chances of you making it "big" are pretty damn slim. If you manage to pull even 50 subscribers, you should probably feel pretty accomplished for managing to stand out enough in 50 peoples' minds for them to want to stay updated with you. If success happens, it happens, if not (and it probably won't) and that really bothers you, then stop Let's Playing.
You gotta do things because they're fun for you, not because you need validation from others. People will find you. It may take a while, but your videos will be seen. If you can't be happy unless you meet some magic number of subscribers or views per video, you're doing this for the wrong reasons.
Discuss this article on the forum
Articles Index Alright SMPS, I have a confession to make...I got a nasty habit. I like to watch.......people play videogames on the internet and talk over them.I'm not really sure why this "hot new trend" is so engrossing for me. I mean...the very concept of watching somebody else play a videogame and talk about it sounds like the most boring thing ever. Surely, there's something better one could do with their time, but for some dumb reason, I find endless entertainment in these stupid things sometimes. I've even hosted a Let's Play-themed competition over on the forums, so I feel that my last few years of experience in viewing Let's Plays has given me a pretty good idea of what it takes to make aLet's Player. Note that I didn't say "popular", I said,What follows are 11 pieces of information I believe thatLet's Players can benefit from. From the seasoned vets that frequent our forums to the new guy that just decided he wants to playfor the internet and talk about it for the first time. These may only be my opinions, but I feel strongly that there are many who will agree with me that a lot of these "Commandments" could be considered "common sense" when it comes to creating a good Let's Play and being a decent Let's PlayerLet's get started, shall we?It's BOOOOOORING watching someone repeat the same 2-10 second task over and over again while continuously failing. The "Walk of Shame" back to where you failed is a lot funnier, especially if you can actually react and be funny about it. Oftentimes, repeated failure can be VERY funny.This same rule should also make it obvious that you avoid trying to Let's Play dumb garbage like Kaizo Super Mario World or other awful hacks created by people who have no real sense of level design.: Using save states to save your progress between videos is fine.Look, it's obvious you got into this thing because somebody inspired you to do so, and an homage or casual name drop every now and then is great, but don't go stealing someone else's shtick. You're not NintendoCapriSun, Chugga Conroy, or anybody else that somehow managed a gigantic fluke and ended up with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and you certainly won't win anybody over trying to act like them.Know what nobody wants to hear? Someone on the internet droning on and on about a game they hate or pretending that they're SO ANGRY NINTENDO NERD MAD that they have to play it. You're supposed to be doing this for fun, so why would you want to spend all this time recording gameplay and commentary, then editing all that together for something you hate?: Blind runs can be fun if done properly.Do you go to a movie and want someone outside the theater beforehand to tell you everything that happens in the movie before you see it? Probably not.A common practice among post-commentary LP'ers is that you talk too much about things that haven't happened yet. You're spoiling the surprise. Post-commentary should be giving the viewer a play-by-play call of what's happening on screen along with their witty banter or faking REALLY well that they're doing it live. Telling the viewer something great is coming up and then ruining it minutes before it even happens diminishes the impact and in some cases, just makes me stop watching entirely.Seriously. Just don't.It's fine to plug your channel at forums when appropriate, drop a link in a sig somewhere, or share it all over your Twitterbox/MyBooks/FacePlaces or whatever. You can get your channel out there in better ways than...plugging it on your own channel.Keep it out of your videos. People are watching your video and are gonna make their decision pretty quickly on whether to subscribe to you or not. You mentioning it will either make them not want to out of spite or they'll just ignore your plea altogether.Why can't Simon Belmont swim?Why do rings keep Sonic alive?Why do coins give Mario air?There's one simple answer to these and ALL questions you may have about videogame mechanics that don't quite match the logic of the real world:BECAUSE VIDEOGAMES.Now you don't ever have to ask why Dr. Wily has power-ups for Mega Man hidden all over his castle EVER AGAIN!NO!Dead air is a no-go. Commentary is a big reason why most of us watch Let's Plays. We've probably played all the games you want to Let's Play 100 times before, so just the gameplay isn't going to cut it. Be informative, be witty, be funny, be spontaneous, be you. Just don't be silent.Oftentimes, the best LP'ers are the ones that can off-the-cuff commentary really well, they don't even have to talk about the game a lot of the time. There's lots of things you can fill the air with other than the sound of you breathing or, "I don't have anything to say about this part really." If you don't have anything to say, hang it up and record some other time.Look, we can read. Viewers don't need you reading text boxes on the screen that are right there in front of them, and this is especially true if the game is either popular enough for lots of people to have already played it or if the game already has voice acting.You're (probably) not a voice actor. The voices you're giving these characters aren't funny. They're annoying. Either fill dialog scenes with commentary about what's going on, continue your off-topic witty banter, or thumb through the scene as fast as you can.Lemme level with you here a little bit, champ. Let's Playing is saturated to hell and back. Everybody and their dog is playing videogames for people online and talking about them. So, before you get into this thinking you're going to be the next big YouTube Mega Star, maybe you should reconsider why you're even doing it.The chances of you making it "big" are pretty damn slim. If you manage to pull even 50 subscribers, you should probably feel pretty accomplished for managing to stand out enough in 50 peoples' minds for them to want to stay updated with you. If success happens, it happens, if not (and it probably won't) and that really bothers you, then stop Let's Playing.You gotta do things because they're fun for you, not because you need validation from others. People will find you. It may take a while, but your videos will be seen. If you can't be happy unless you meet some magic number of subscribers or views per video, you're doing this for the wrong reasons.
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© 2005-2019 smps/*-|):D © 2005-2019 smps/*-|):D“The fa’afafine are culturally accepted,” he said. “They have a role in Samoan society. They are the caretakers of the elders because their brothers and sisters get married, but the fa’afafine traditionally don’t.”
Saelua agreed: “In Samoa the fa’afafine are very reliable. We can do what the boys do and what the girls do.”
In an immensely popular sport that is still encountering episodes of racism in any number of spots on the globe, it is noteworthy that Saelua has been easily accepted by her teammates.
She began playing soccer at age 11, in private school. By age 14, she had risen to be an international player for American Samoa.
“I read somewhere that it was a record when I was drafted into the national team,” Saelua said. “I was reserve the whole tournament and I had to leave because I was still in high school.”
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She added that the coach “ put me in for 10 minutes.”
But she is now older, and integral to the team. “I just go out and play soccer as a soccer player,” Saelua said. “Not as transgender, not as a boy and not as a girl. Just as a soccer player.”
When the American Samoa coach Thomas Rongen — who took the United States under-20 team to three World Cup finals and won the Major League Soccer title with D.C. United in 1999 — was hired three weeks ago, he promoted Saelua to the starting lineup for the first time. His faith was repaid.
In the match against Tonga, Saelua provided an assist on one goal and made a 90th-minute goal-line clearance with American Samoa’s goalkeeper Nicky Salapu already beaten on the play.
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“He’s like a brother to us and he’s like a sister to us,” Salapu said of Saelua.
“In the Samoan way, lots of people are making jokes about them,” he added in reference to the fa’afafine. “It’s difficult for their situation. I let people do whatever they want. It’s their life. He’s part of our family right now.”
Saelua, in effect returning the compliment, said she owed her confidence to the fact that teammates “make me feel like a part of them.”
“They don’t make me feel different because I am the way I am,” she said. “It is what anybody needs to feel wanted within a team. That is why I always do my best. I can’t let them down.”
American Samoa followed up its victory by tying Cook Islands, 1-1, on Thursday. On Saturday, it plays Samoa in a game that will decide who will advance to the next round of World Cup qualification, and move at least one small step closer to Brazil 2014.
For American Samoa, actually qualifying for the World Cup finals remains an almost unobtainable dream, but Saelua has hope that it could happen someday. For now though, she is concentrating on winning American Samoa’s second international game and in the process providing hope to those who do not necessarily feel they fit into a traditional male sports culture.
“I hope I can inspire people,” Saelua said. “Not only transgender but anybody who feels different in their society or community. If there’s something you love to do, go out and don’t let anybody stop you from chasing after your dreams.”by |
Alice in Chains were easily the most morbid band of the grunge era. Lyrical themes of death and drug abuse permeate the band’s 1992 classic, Dirt. According to a recent biography of the band, virtuoso vocalist Layne Staley achieved the brooding tone of the album partially by creating a disturbingly macabre environment in the studio.
The story comes via David de Sola’s book Alice in Chains: The Untold Story. While recording Dirt, Staley built a “shrine” of inspirational items in his vocal booth, and asked production staff to build a wall around his area so that he could have complete privacy. According to Dirt engineer Bryan Carlstrom, this shrine included “candles and a picture of the Last Supper, and then a dead puppy in a jar.” Assistant engineer Annette Cisneros said, “It was scary back there. I tried not to go back there.” By keeping a dead animal at his side, the singer had literally surrounded himself with death.
The details reveal the darkness of Staley’s creative headspace as he recorded some of the best vocal tracks in rock history on classic songs like ‘Would?’ and ‘Rooster.’ The dark tone is consistent on the Alice in Chains masterpiece, as Staley wails lyrics like, “It’s gonna rain when I die.” Staley lost his battle with drug addiction in 2002.Surat: On July 8, Surat, the economic capital of Gujarat, witnessed an unprecedented protest against the new tax regime, the Goods and Service Tax (GST). Texile traders swarmed a three-km stretch on the Ring Road, which holds city’s main textile market, on a silent march, as their strike entered its 23rd day.
The mammoth rally, in which organisers claimed more than one lakh people participated, was organised under the leadership of Hitesh Sanklecha, a textile trader who has been on an indefinite hunger strike for the last nine days.
The Surat textile industry produces about four crore meters of fabric in the dyeing and textile mills in Pandesera, Sachin and Palsana areas every day, with a net worth of about Rs 150 crores. Over the last 22 days of strike, traders have incurred losses amounting to over Rs 5000 crore.
“It is not just the mill owners, textile traders at every level have incurred losses. Sales went down the day government announced that a new tax regime will be implemented. In fact, the products we shipped to whole sellers were returned, as nobody knew how the old stock would be priced,” said Champalal Bothra, a textile trader from Surat and secretary of GST Sangharsh Samiti, the newly floated organisation under whose banner the protests are being carried out.
GST Sangharsh Samiti is headed by traders who are also members of the Federation of Surat Textile Traders Association (FOSTTA). Interestingly, three key functionaries of the outfit also hold key positions in political parties.
Tarachand Kasat, the president of GST Sangharsh Samiti is also the executive member of the BJP’s Surat cell, and has been associated with the party for over 30 years now. Champalal Bothra, secretary of the organisation, holds the post of vice president in Surat city Congress and is general secretary in the state Congress economic cell. Jaylal Lalwani, the spokesperson of GST Sangharsh Samiti, is associated with the Aam Aadmi Party.
“After the declaration that a new tax regime would be implemented, we have met Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani, Subramanian Swamy and minister of textile Smriti Irani, but in vain. Later, we met finance minister Arun Jaitley, and he assured us that he would bring up the issue in the meeting of the GST council. But when we got no response from the government, we decided to take our fight to the street. The organisation has been formed to fight the issue and once it is resolved the organisation shall be dissolved as well,” said Bothra.
No one from Surat’s textile sector, the country’s largest market for manmade fabric, wants to be under the GST tax regime, the GST Sangharsh Samiti said.
“Small traders will die. They had hardly come out of effect of demonetisation that GST has been slapped on their face. Most small time traders are either illiterate or computer illiterate. For businessmen whose transactions are not in lakhs and crores and who deal with unorganised sector, GST has disrupted their chain of business. Hiring a chartered accountant will increase the cost of running the business by lakhs,” said Rizwan Usmani, a textile trader from Surat.
“There are small-time traders who cannot afford to shut down their businesses for so long yet they refuse to budge and back off from the protest. Many such traders have no money now to run their households. The GST Sangharsh Samiti has decided to distribute food kits to such traders that will contain 5 kilograms of wheat flour and other basic food items,” Bothra said.
Meanwhile, as 75,000 textile traders of Surat continue their indefinite strike, about 15 lakh labourers involved in the have been rendered jobless.
“They are daily wage earners who have not got any money for 23 days now. Many of them are migrants from states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, and are now going back to their home states,” said Suresh Sonawne, leader of Rashtriya Mazdoor Sena, a trade union body of labourers working in Surat textile sector.
“I don’t even have Rs 100 with me right now. How do I feed my family? We have to return to our village but I don’t have the money to get tickets,” said Jivan, one of the many jobless labourers who want to work but do have a job anymore. “I am trying to arrange money so that we can return to our village in Bihar,” he said.
Of the 15 lakh labourers rendered jobless, about five lakh are women, who are part of the unorganised sector that has developed around the main business.
“A huge cottage industry as developed around the main textile industry that involves women who do the stitch art work and embroidery etc on the finished fabric. They are part of the unorganised sector and form a very important part of textile industry. But the government did not care to consider them while slapping GST,” said Usmani.
These women from the unorganised sector are likely to join the protest in large numbers from July 11, said a core member of the GST Sangharsh Samiti.
In the course of the protest, the textile traders have resorted to all kinds of means to be heard. While 35-year-old textile trader Hitesh Sanlklecha has been on a hunger strike since July 1, some traders have marched half naked.
However, the protest took a new turn on July 3 when police lathicharged on the traders, injuring about five. Avatar Singh, a textile trader and former president of FOSTTA, was reportedly pushed from the stairs of a building where the traders had gathered during the protest.
“We were standing peacefully in front of our closed shops when the police came and forcefully tried to open the shops. They hit the watchmen first. Some traders opposed that and the police lathicharged on them. I was standing at a distance when some police personnel gheraoed me and tied a piece of cloth on my face and started beating me. Eight or nine policemen kept beating me till some traders came to the rescue. I have four stitches on my head and injuries on my hands, legs and back,” said 23-year-old Danny Dave, the son of a textile trader and who helps in his family business.
The incident infuriated the traders and 75,000 traders and brokers, who are members of BJP, threatened to quit the party if strict action was not taken against the concerned police personnel.
Later, Tarachand Kasat had told the media, “The lathi charge on traders is unacceptable. We are protesting peacefully and want the government to rethink the 5% GST on textile trading.”
“Why does the government have to impose GST at every stage of making the fabric? The GST can be imposed at the yarn and the slab may be increased while keeping the entire lower chain free,” he added.
Meanwhile, Union minister Mansukh Mandaviya met the protesting traders on July 7, as the meeting of the traders with BJP party president Amit Shah was called off.
“Mandaviya has clearly stated that GST shall not be taken back and that we should find a middle ground,” said Bothra.
Under these circumstances, the traders have decided that the movement will only intensify.Gamers who are also football fans fall into two camps - the ones who can't get enough of EA's FIFA franchise, and those who think that Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer series can do no wrong - and the two rarely, if ever, see eye to eye. If you are a FIFA fan, then you know that FIFA 16, the next instalment of the franchise, is out next week. It's one of the few games that's available not just on the PC and the current generation consoles (the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), but also on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. But which version of the game is the one worth getting? We checked the demo out on every platform to tell you.
Few options on PC
Thanks to its immense popularity, FIFA 16 manages to attract a mainstream audience which may not have the most up-to-date PC to play the game. This is most obvious from the system settings available. While GTA V, The Witcher 3, and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain all sported a wealth of options for PC users, the graphic options for FIFA 16 are rather sparse.
We tested the game on an Intel Core i5 3470 at 3.2GHz, 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 980Ti. Needless to say, playing FIFA 16 at 4K was effortless with this setup. The game looked crisp and sharp and felt blisteringly fast, netting between 110 to 120 frames per second with every graphic setting turned to the maximum. This was expected considering that most gaming PCs are overkill for this title.
(Also see: FIFA 16 Player Ratings: What You Need to Know)
Playing using a midrange GTX 950 card, we were still able to max out the game at 1440p, with a frame rate of around 60fps for most part, and the rare dip to 40 during replays. At 1080p we were able to get close to 120 frames per second at most times, dropping to the low 90s on occasion.
At all resolutions and hardware configurations, we noticed visible tearing in the game's cut-scenes and replays which took away from the immersion to an extent. Capping the frame rate to 60fps did little to rectify this.
In terms of hardware, the PC version of FIFA 16 doesn't require cutting edge components to get it running. If you have a Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 64-bit operating system and at the very least, an Intel Core i3 at 3.1GHz, 4GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 650, you should be able to play the game fairly well at 720p. And if you're the adventurous sort - like some FIFA 16 PC fans on EA Sports forums - then you can overclock your ailing, obsolete PC to the minimum 3.0GHz to get it running.
Getting the PC version running was more challenging than the game itself
While the PC version looked decent, getting it running was an exercise in frustration. Every time we tried booting it up, we were met with errors, and EA's support forums were anything but helpful. We tried everything from reinstalling the requisite.NET Framework files to verifying the installation. What finally worked was disabling Origin - the game's client - in the options, after which it started up without a hitch.
That's an odd fix, but considering that the option is there within the client itself, it's possible that EA expects players to do this; though how most people are supposed to divine this is hard to see. This was the case both on Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 64-bit operating systems.
Start up issues aside, our trusty Xbox 360 controller was not recognised at all, although it usually works on Windows without a hitch. Our Xbox One gamepad worked just fine, which is quite puzzling.
Play it on the PS4 or Xbox One instead
Side by side with the Xbox One and PS4 versions, FIFA 16 on PC runs a lot faster thanks to our overpowered machine. While it did look slightly better, there's nothing to suggest that it's a drastic upgrade over its console brethren. The PC version is a better bet than the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions though, with no slowdown and texture pop-in.
But how does it play? Compared to the console versions, FIFA 16 on PC didn't feel as responsive. Performing basic actions like passing and shooting even with a controller felt rather laboured, as we found ourselves exerting more effort than we had to versus the console versions (even with the same settings). This made matches feel like a chore. Adjusting the controls for passing and shooting didn't make it any easier either.
(Also see: FIFA 16 India Price Confirmed; Amazon Is EA's New Exclusive Partner)
Also, on all versions of the game, heading the ball always netted a goal and every cross was a perfect cross. Scoring seemed too easy and playing as the women's teams resulted in gameplay that was a lot faster, while the men's teams felt sluggish.
Add to this the fact that just getting the game - which is only available as a digital download, you can't just buy a disc and start playing - up and running on the PC was a monumental effort, and then choosing the console version seems like the obvious option.
Still, EA is known to change a few things in the final release, so it will be interesting to see what is different when we get our hands on the full version of the game next week. Stay tuned for our review.Aniplex of America announced on Tuesday that it will begin streaming the television anime of Yuiko Tokumi's Slow Start manga on Crunchyroll on January 6 at 12:00 p.m. EST.
The anime will premiere on January 6 in Japan on Tokyo MX, Tochigi TV, Gunma TV, and BS11 at 12:30 a.m. (effectively on January 7) before later airing on Kansai TV and TV Aichi.
The show stars:
Reina Kondo as Hana Ichinose
Ayasa Itō as Tamate Momochi
Tomomi Mineuchi as Eiko Tokura
Maria Naganawa as Kamuri Sengoku
Manami Numakura as Kiyose Enami
Maaya Uchida as Hiroe Hannen
M.A.O as Shion Kyōzuka
Hiroyuki Hashimoto ( Is the order a rabbit?, Magical Girl Raising Project ) is directing the anime at A-1 Pictures. Mio Inoue ( Is the order a rabbit? episode scripts, Eiga Precure All Stars: Haru no Carnival ) is in charge of the series scripts. Masato Yasuno ( Flying Witch ) is designing the characters for animation.
Reina Kondo, Ayasa Itō, Tomomi Mineuchi |
Sunday, day of Sun; Somavãra: Monday (day of Moon), Mañgalvã: Tuesday (day of Mars), Budhavãra: Wednesday (day of Mercury), Guruvãra: Thursday (day of Jupiter), Sukravãra: Friday (day of Venus), and Sanivãra: Saturday (day of Saturn).
Coding
Each color-item association made by each participant was coded by two research assistants according to the coding schema of Simner et al. (2005) and Rich et al. (2005). These coding schemes includes eleven basic colors: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, orange, brown, black, gray, white (Berlin and Kay, 1969). In accordance with these earlier studies descriptions of other colors, were recoded according to a fixed pattern. For example, “apricot” was coded as light orange. Responses that could not be classified as a color (e.g., clear or transparent), or responses that included several colors (e.g., green and blue, or rainbow) were excluded. Turquoise was coded into green.
Results
Prevalence of Explicit Color Associations
Dutch
Questionnaire. In the Dutch questionnaire a test—retest was administered. We identified participants who said “yes” to the questions on explicit (conscious) color associations both times. Of the 457 participants, 47 indicated in both the test and retest that they perceived colors with days (10%), 7 indicated colors with letters (2%), and 12 indicated colors with numbers (3%).
English
Questionnaire. Of the 92 participants, 15 (16%) indicated that they saw colors with days of the week, 10 indicated colors with letters (11%), 9 indicated colors with numbers (10%).
Hindi
Questionnaire. Of the 49 participants, 15 (31%) indicated that they saw colors with days of the week, 3 indicated colors with letters (6%), 2 indicated colors with numbers (4%).
Color Preferences in Dutch, English and Hindi Subgroups: Days
In this section we present the patterns of color preferences for days of the week. In each of the three language groups, non-random color preferences were present for each of the days of the week. In the next sections, we first correlate results across languages, and then examine if these results still hold in a subgroup of participants selected on their non-English, non-USA background. Next, we examine results separately for participants indicating color-day associations (“putative synesthetes”) and those not indicating color-day associations (non-synesthetes). The last subsection of this paragraph examines the effect of overall color selection biases on color-item preference patterns (across the three language groups).
Cross-language
First, we examined cross-language consistencies in these day-color preferences. The number of participants choosing a particular day-color combination (N stands for number of color-to-day categories used by participants in that test) were correlated between the three participant groups. The distribution of these variables was not normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov of Dutch and Hindi color choices p < 0.1 and of English color choices p < 0.05), thus non-parametric correlations are calculated in this results section (“Days”). The Spearman's correlations showed consistencies in the order of day-color preferences across these languages: Hindi—English [rs (64) = 0.51, p < 0.001]; Hindi—Dutch [rs (66) = 0.54, p < 0.001], and English—Dutch [rs (73) = 0.84, p < 0.001]. These correlations suggest that participants did not randomly chose colors for weekdays. While some days do not show a clear first-choice color, there are a few days with high similarity of most important color choices across languages. Table 2 shows similarities in the primary and secondary color preferences across languages. The strongest cross-language effects are obtained with Monday and Sunday: in each language group the strongest preference for Monday is red or blue, and for Sunday it is white or yellow. See Supplementary material for an overview of color choices per color category for these days, for each of the three language groups.
TABLE 2
Table 2. Consistency between languages for day-color preferences.
Non-English Native Language Subgroups
We selected a subgroup within the English-speaking participants who were not born in the USA, whose parents also were not born in the USA, and who indicated that their mother tongue was not English (see “Participants”). Similarly, in the Hindi group we selected a subgroup whose native language was not English, were currently living in India, were born in India, as were there parents. These two groups allowed to examine if the obtained effects were due to an underlying shared language/cultural influence (in these participant groups, USA/English). We examined the degree to which effects are diminished in these subgroup with a relatively weak influence of USA culture/English language. The color-word preferences of this group of participants were correlated with the color-word preferences in the Dutch subgroup, who also do not have a USA/English background. Both subgroups still showed significant correlations with the Dutch group; English [rs (77) = 0.46, p < 0.001] and Hindi subgroup [rs (77) = 0.36, p < 0.001]. The correlation between the two subgroups is however only marginally significant [rs (77) = 0.19, p < 0.1]. Next, we examined the degree to which in these participant groups the main effects (as reported in the previous section) were still present. We collapsed the two subgroups (Hindi and English participants with relatively little English/USA background), as else there would be too few counts or participants in these item-by-item comparisons. This subgroup has 38 participants (note that sometimes invalid answers were given, so not all color choices to a particular day add up to 38). For the color-to-days, the main effects were a red and a blue color preference with Monday, and white and a yellow color preference with Sunday. The first and second choice for Monday are still blue (N = 8, 26%) and red (N = 7, 23%). Similarly, the first choice for Sunday is still white (N = 6, 20%). The second choice is now red (N = 5, 17%) as much as yellow (N = 5, 17%). Thus, the main effects in day-to-color preferences are largely preserved in these participants with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Overall, even though none of the participants included in this analysis had English as their native language or USA as their cultural background, they still shared regularities in their color-to-day preferences. However, the effects were stronger in the combined/more inclusive groups, and a possible influence of USA culture or English language (e.g., through movies, music and internet) cannot be excluded. The results are still clearly present when nobody in the participant group has an English/USA background, raising the question of why across participants with different language/cultural backgrounds, certain days tends to evoke a particular preferred color association.
Explicit vs. Implicit Color Preferences
Next, cross-language correlations were examined separately for participants indicating color-day associations (“putative synesthetes”) and those not indicating color-day associations (non-synesthetes). This analysis revealed similar patterns of day-to-color preferences between languages, with the consistencies somewhat stronger for non-synesthetes (participants indicating that to them days of the week do not have color). The correlation between Hindi and Dutch speaking participants was significant for non-synesthetes [rs (67) = 0.54, p < 0.001], but not for putative synesthete participants [rs (67) = 0.31, p < 0.011]. The correlation between Hindi and English speaking participants was a bit higher in non-synesthetes [rs (63) = 0.52, p < 0.001], than in putative synesthetes [rs (41) = 0.46, p < 0.003]. This same pattern was obtained for non-synesthete English and Dutch speaking participants [rs (73) = 0.84, p < 0.001] vs. putative synesthete participants [rs (49) = 0.63, p < 0.001]. We offer two cautionary notes regarding these analyses. First, no thorough screening of putative synesthetes took place, so the “synesthete” group could in fact be a mix of synesthetes and non-synesthetes. Second, there are relatively few participants in each synesthetic group.
As can be expected based on these correlations, within each language group the putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes were very similar in their day-to-color preferences. Significant correlations for color-to-day preferences were obtained between putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes within the Hindi [rs (71) = 0.58, p < 0.001], English [rs (45) = 0.63, p < 0.001], and Dutch [rs (90) = 0.86, p < 0.001] speaking participants.
There are similarities across participants in day-to-color preferences. These similarities are found both across languages. Furthermore, they are not dependent on the trait of synesthesia, if anything the cross-language effects were stronger in non-synesthetes than in participants indicating explicit day-to-color associations (putative synesthetes). What factors underlie these strong correlations? To examine this question, we first consider the role of overall color preferences. For example, participants might exhibit a general bias to choose red more often than gray; such overall preferences could skew the day-to-color preference patterns.
Overall Color Preferences
This section presents exploratory analyses examining possible underlying mechanisms to the day-to-color preferences. First, to examine the effect of overall color selection biases on color-item preference patterns, we calculated overall color selection preferences in the three participant groups. Next, we related these preferences to the three factors studied by Simner et al. (2005), as explained in the Introduction: 1. order of entry of color into language (e.g., “white” is learned earlier in life than “yellow”); 2. color name frequency (in English language); 3. ease/order of color generation (in spontaneous generation of color words, some are produced earlier and more often than others). The sequence in which colors are ordered according to color entry and color name frequency did not correlate with overall color preferences in English, Hindi or Dutch speaking participants. In contrast, the color frequency did correlate with ease of color generation in all three participant groups [rs (11) ranged between 0.84 and 0.96, p < 0.001]. Thus, the most frequently produced colors were those ranked highest for typicality/ease-of-generation (Battig and Montague, 1969).
This raises a question of whether the cross-language correlations are driven by this overall bias. The analyses performed on day-to-color preferences per participant group were repeated while controlling for the factor “ease of color generation.” This analyses showed that the correlations were still significant: English and Hindi [rs (61) = 0.32, p < 0.05], English and Dutch [rs (61) = 0.76, p < 0.001], Dutch and Hindi [rs (61) = 0.40, p = 0.001].
The overall number of choices for a color was related to ease to generate these colors. What, then, is the influence of these general color preference on the patterns of day-to-color associations we obtained? Are the correlations amplified by general color biases within the participant group? We next examined day-to-color preferences while controlling for overall color biases. First, the overall color selection frequencies (across days) were calculated for each color in each language group. Then, for each language group, and for each day, a chi-test was computed to determine whether the number of selections for a given color was significantly different from the expected value (based on the weekly percent selection of that color in that language group). Following the previous results, we examined whether the red and a blue color preference for Monday still holds, and the white and yellow color preference for Sunday. Table 3 shows only the chi values that are at or below 0.05 (and for which the color is chosen more often than on average across all weekdays). Note that this is an exploratory study only, thus the variety of results in the whole table is mostly meant to create hypotheses for follow-up studies.
TABLE 3
Table 3. Colors for each of the weekdays that were significantly different from expected values (in a chi-test), in the Dutch (D) English (E) and Hindi (H) speaking participant groups.
Some clear effects are obtained in this analysis. First, red is assigned to Monday in all language groups at a significantly higher rate than to the other days of the week. Interestingly, red is also chosen at a significantly higher rate only for Monday in all language groups. The other effect shared by all language groups is assigning the color white to the Sunday. The association between yellow and Sunday was not confirmed by this analyses and thus may in fact be reflecting an overall color bias. Finally, blue is now only found related to Monday. This effect is present in Dutch and English but not in Hindi speaking participants. Possibly it reflects the notion of “Blue Monday,” which exists in Dutch (“blauwe maandag”) as a saying, and as an urban myth (the most depressing day of the year) in English. As far as we know such expression does not exist in Hindi. The rest of these (exploratory) tests showed that the only other day related to white is the Saturday (in the Dutch speaking group). Furthermore, primary colors black, white and gray are only given to Monday or week-end days. Different from the previous analyses that did not take overall color bias into account, we now also find that days in the middle of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and also Friday) are matched to secondary and/or more complex colors, namely purple, pink, orange, yellow, green, and brown.
Summary: Day-to-Color Preferences
In this section we present the patterns of color preferences for days of the week. In each of the three language groups, non-random color preferences were present. We obtained cross-language correlations on the patterns of color preferences. Next, we explored possible underlying mechanisms. We first established that these results still hold in a subgroup of participants selected on their non-English, non-USA background. The cross-language correlations were still present, and specific main effects were also still present: a preference for red or blue color with “Monday” and white color preference to “Sunday.” Next, we examined results separately for participants indicating color-day associations (“putative synesthetes”) and those not indicating color-day associations (non-synesthetes). Synesthesia does not appear to be the underlying reason for the cross-language similarities; instead the cross-language effects were stronger in non-synesthetes than in putative synesthetes. The last subsection of this paragraph presents exploratory analyses on the effect of overall color selection biases on color-item preference patterns (across the three language groups). It showed that while “ease of color generation” affects color choices, taking out this factor still results in significant cross-language correlations. Furthermore, taking out overall color preferences still shows particular day-to-color main effects (e.g., red Monday and white Sunday).
Color Preferences in Dutch, English and Hindi Subgroups: Letters
In this second subsection, we show patterns of color preferences for letters. Analyses are with the 14 letter stimuli presented to all language groups. These letters were chosen from the latin alphabet to include both vowels and consonants, letters from both the beginning and end of alphabet, and letters with both curved and straight-shapes. For the hindi questionnaire, letters were translated based on their phonological properties (see methods section). We first examine letter-to-color preferences across the three language groups. We then examine whether cross-language similarities in letter-color preferences still hold in a subgroup of participants selected on their non-English, non-USA background. Next, results are examined separately for participants indicating color-day associations (“putative synesthetes”) and those not indicating color-day associations (non-synesthetes). The last subsection of this paragraph examines the effect of overall color selection biases on color-item preference patterns (across the three language groups).
Dutch, english and hindi subgroups
First, a cross-group analysis was performed on color preferences with letters. English and Hindi letters were matched on phonology (but of course differed in orthography), see Table 1. The distribution of these variables (reflecting the number of particular colors assigned to particular letters, in each of the three language groups) was not normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test of Dutch, Hindi and English color choices were all significant, p < 0.005), thus non-parametric correlations are calculated in this results section (“Letters”). English-to Hindi color associations correlated significantly [rs (136) = 0.43, p < 0.001]. English and Dutch letters had exactly the same shape, and similar (but not exactly the same) phonology. Again significant correlations [rs (167) = 0.68, p < 0.001] were obtained. Dutch and Hindi had different orthography and similar (but not exactly matched) phonology, but still color preferences correlated [rs (139) = 0.59, p < 0.001].
As can be viewed in Table 4, the (first and second) strongest color-to-letter preferences have different cross-language consistency for the different letters. A few specific effects, however, do arise. First, there is a strong tendency to choose red for the letter/sound “A.” This effect is present in all language groups. Second, there is a tendency to choose blue for the letter/sound B. See Supplementary material for the percentage color choices for the letter A and letter B in the three language groups. Perhaps this is because of linguistic priming; both the English and Dutch color words (“Blue” and “Blauw”) start with the letter B. (In Hindi the word blue starts however with “N”). Other preference effects are weaker, and not expected: for example, it is not clear to us why the letter T has a green or blue color.
TABLE 4
Table 4. Consistency between languages for letter-color preferences.
The “Red A” replicates earlier findings (Rich et al., 2005; Simner et al., 2005; Barnett et al., 2009). In this study, the effect is replicated in different participant groups with different linguistic backgrounds; Dutch, English and Hindi. The preference for the color red for the Hindi letter pronounced as “A” indicates that it is not the shape, nor the particular (latin) letter identity. One possible explanation is that the red color is somehow connected with the position of the letter in the alphabet: the first letter in each of the three alphabets gets a “signal” color. While not all calendars are typeset in the same way, for many people (in USA, Holland, India), Monday is the start of a new workweek. Similarly, the red color of the Monday could be to mark it is the first day of the (work)week. To explore this explanation, the preferred color for the number 1 was determined for each of the three language groups. In the Hindi subgroup, of all number-color combinations, the highest preference was obtained for red “1” (14 participants indicated a red “1,” 33% from the total of 42 provided colors to the number 1). In the English group, red and blue were most often chosen (each 17 participants, 18.5% of the choices). The Dutch participant group behaved differently, with white (22%) and yellow (21%) as most common color choices. The preference of white with the number 1 is in line with previous findings with English and German speaking synesthetes (Beeli et al., 2007; Barnett et al., 2008a) and English speaking synesthetes as well as non-synesthetes (Rich et al., 2005). Thus, while there is some support for the idea of the red color of “A” or “Monday” as signaling the first (ordinal) item in a sequence, the evidence for associating the number “1” with red is rather mixed.
Non-english native language subgroups
We looked at the subgroup of participants in both the Hindi-speaking and English-speaking groups who were not born in USA and did not have parents born in the USA, and whose native language was not English (for details see the “participants” section). If an overall USA/English language influence is driving the shared color-preferences, the effects should be diminished in the current subgroups. The letter-color preferences of these two subgroups correlated [rs (153) = 0.84, p < 0.001]. Furthermore, the color preferences of both groups correlated with the Dutch group; English participants [rs (154) = 0.46, p < 0.001] and Hindi participants [rs (153) = 0.56, p < 0.001]. The Hindi subgroup also correlated with the color preferences of the Dutch participant group [rs (153) = 0.56, p < 0.001]. Thus, while none of the participants included in this analysis had English as their native language or USA as their cultural background, they still clearly showed shared regularities in their color-to-letter preferences. Furthermore, these correlations were of comparable size to the ones obtained in the previous (overall) analyses. Next, we examined whether the main color-to-letter regularities reported above still persist in this combined subgroup (English and Hindi who are non-native English/USA). These participants showed a clear and strong letter-to-color preference for the letter A (N = 18, 51%). Next, there was a tendency to choose black with the letter K (N = 10, 28%), for blue with the letter “b” (N = 9, 28%), and green for T (N = 9, 24%). This is in line with the findings in the native Dutch group (see Table 4), where the strongest effects were a red A and a blue B.
Explicit vs. implicit color preferences
Cross-language consistencies were examined in putative synesthetes (participants indicating explicit color associations with the letters/days) vs. non-synesthete participants. While orthography was different, the Hindi- Dutch correlation in non-synesthetes were significant [rs (139) = 0.26, p = 0.002]. It was however not significant between putative synesthetes [rs (139) = 0.09, p = 0.27]. Similarly, the Hindi - English [rs (134) = 0.44, p < 0.001] correlations were significant in non-synesthetes, but again not significant for putative synesthetes [rs (71) = −0.05, p = 0.70]. The English and Dutch alphabet has the same orthography (but sometimes different pronunciation) and showed significant correlation in non-synesthetes [rs (79) = 0.31, p = 0.006] and in putative synesthetes [rs (79) = 0.29, p = 0.009].
While between languages the correlations were higher for non-synesthetes than for putative synesthetes, there is an overall effect of between-participant consistency in letter-to-color choices. In each individual language group the putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes were very similar in their day-to-color preferences: English [rs (84) = 0.42, p < 0.001]; Dutch [rs (182) = 0.56, p < 0.001] and Hindi [rs (140) = 0.23, p = 0.007].
Overall color preferences
Next, the overall color preferences (collapsed across letters) were calculated per language group. Color preferences of the English speaking group correlated highly with the Hindi group [rs (13) = 0.91, p < 0.001] and with the Dutch group [rs (14) = 0.95, p < 0.001, N = 14]. The Dutch overall preferences correlated highly with the Hindi preferences [rs (13) = 0.91 p < 0.001].
To examine the nature of the overall color bias, these color preferences were correlated with Color Frequency, Color Ease, and Color Entry. Frequency of Color Name did not correlate with color preference, for the English participants (the factor was extracted originally from English language, see Simner et al., 2005) the correlation was [rs (11) = 0.05, p = 0.89]. Color entry specifically correlated in Hindi subgroup only, [rs (10) = 0.65, p = 0.04] (this is significant both for putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes). Ease of Color Generation correlated with preferences in all groups, English [rs (11) = 0.85, p = 0.001], Dutch [rs (11) = 0.90, p < 0.001], and Hindi [rs (11) = 0.89, p = 0.003].
This raises a question of whether the cross-language correlations are driven by this overall bias. The analyses performed on color-letter preferences per participant group were repeated for letters, while controlling for Ease of Color Generation. This analyses showed that the correlations were still significant: English and Hindi [rs (129) = 0.331, p < 0.001], English and Dutch [rs (129) = 0.60, p < 0.001], Dutch and Hindi [rs (129) = 0.28, p = 0.001].
Chi-test
As previously performed in the analyses of colored days, we examined the pattern of color preferences with letters while taking overall color bias for letters into account. For each language group, and for each letter, a chi-test was computed to determine whether the number of selections for a given color was significantly different from the expected value (based on the percent selection of that color in that language group). We examined whether the main effects in the previous analyses still hold in this control analysis; these were red/A, blue/B, and a green or blue T. This analysis only showed that the “red A” and “blue B” effects are still present in Dutch and English, but not Hindi, subgroups. The blue or green association with T is not present. Table 5 shows only the chi values that are at or below 0.05 (and for which the color is chosen more often than on average across all letters). As with Table 3, please note that these results are exploratory only. These patterns will need to be confirmed by further research on larger samples of individuals in these language groups.
TABLE 5
Table 5. Colors for each of the letters that were significantly different from expected values (in a chi-test), in the Dutch (D) English (E) and Hindi (H) speaking participant groups.
Summary: Letter-to-Color Preferences
In this section we present the patterns of color preferences for letters. We found cross-language similarities in color choices, even with the Hindi language group were letters were matched based on phonology. While most letters do not show a clear and strong “first choice” color across languages, a few specific preferences do appear. Particularly strong is the cross-language preference for red with the letter A, but also a preference of blue with B and of green or blue with T. Next, we explored possible underlying mechanisms for non-random color preferences. We first established that both the cross-language correlations and the obtained specific “first-choice” effects still hold in a subgroup of participants selected on their non-English, non-USA background. Next, we examined results separately for participants indicating letter-to-day associations (“putative synesthetes”) and those not indicating these associations (non-synesthetes). Synesthesia does not appear to be the underlying reason for the cross-language similarities. Again, while there are similarities in color choices between putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes, the cross-language regularities were stronger in non-synesthetes than in putative synesthetes. The last subsection of this paragraph presents exploratory analyses on the effect of overall color selection biases on color-item preference patterns (across the three language groups). It showed that while “ease of color generation” affects color choices, taking out this factor still results in significant cross-language correlations. An exploratory analyses showed that some specific effects, such as green or blue with T, might be explained by overall color preferences. There are however still specific “red A” and “blue B” effects.
Overall Color Preferences (Across Language Subgroups)
We next explored the role of overall color preferences in the assignment of colors to days and letters. The data are collapsed across the three language groups. In this section we examine the role of three factors possibly influencing color biases, following the analyses of Simner et al. (2005): ease of color generation, color entry, color name frequency'. As in Simner et al., the color name frequency was measured with English color words (Appendix I). Based on the previous results, we expect that the factor “ease of color generation” is particularly important for non-synesthetes, as compared with the putative synesthetes (who indicate to experience colors with days or letters).
Days
We first looked at the color responses provided with days of the week, across language subgroups. The data were collapsed to letter-color preferences over the three language groups. In these collapsed data, we calculated the percentage of number-color choices separately for putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes. These variables indicate, per day, the ratio of how often a certain color is chosen (from all color choices for that day). These two variables, percentage day/color choice for putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes, were not normally distributed [Kolmogorov-Smirnov; Ks (85) = 0.16 p < 0.001 and Ks (85) = 0.14, p < 0.001], respectively), thus a non-parametric correlation was calculated. The correlation showed a high correspondence between the synesthetic and non-synesthetic color choices, [rs (85) = 0.87, p < 0.001].
Next, we examined whether the color choices were related to ease of color generation, and found this significant for both non-synesthete [rs (77) = 0.73, p < 0.001] and putative synesthete [rs (77) = 0.68, p < 0.001] participants. Entry in language (age of acquisition of the color term) showed a significant, but weaker, correlation with both and non-synesthete [rs (77) = 0.28, p = 0.01] and putative synesthete [rs (77) = 0.33, p = 0.003] participants. There was no significant relationship with color name frequency. As this latter factor might be a more language-specific effect, we separately examined the English participant group, but again found no correlation between color name frequency and color preference in putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes (p > 0.1).
A possible alternative explanation for the cross-participant similarities is that ease of color generation underlies the correlations. Therefore, the correlations were repeated with ease of color generation partialled out; still a strong correlation was maintained between “putative synesthete” and non-synesthete color choices [rs (74) = 0.80, p < 0.001].
Thus, there are regularities in day-to-color preferences, and these are shared between the participants who indicate that to them, days have color, and those who do not experience color with days. For both participant groups, overall color preferences to days are related to ease of color generation and entry into language.
Letters
We then explored the overall color biases with letters, across language subgroups. Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests also indicated that neither ‘putative synesthetic’ [Ks (182) = 0.20, p < 0.001] nor “non-synesthetic” letter-to-color percentages [Ks (182) = 0.12, p < 0.001] were normally distributed, therefore a non-parametric correlation was used. This showed similar overall color-to-letter preference for putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes [rs (182) = 0.69, p < 0.001].
Non-parametric correlation analyses showed a strong effect of “ease of color generation” on the color choices of non-synesthetes [rs (154) = 0.77, p < 0.001] and a significant, but weaker, effect with the putative synesthetes [rs (165) = 0.33, p < 0.001]. Furthermore, “color entry” correlated with non-synesthete color choices [rs (140) = 0.28, p = 0.001], but not those of the putative synesthetes. There was no effect of “color name frequency” on the choices of color categories of non-synesthetes or putative synesthetes. As color name frequency was measured with English color words, a separate analyses on the “English” participant group was performed. This however again showed no correlation between color name frequency and color preferences, either in the non-synesthetes [rs (160) = 0.05, p = 0.51] or in the putative synesthetes [rs (85) = 0.15, p = 0.16].
If ease of color generation influences both synesthete and non-synesthete color choices, does this explain the obtained correlation between the two participant groups? A partial correlation was run, showing that synesthetic and non-synesthetic color choices still correlated [rs (151) = 0.671, p < 0.001] when controlling for the factor “ease of color generation.”
Summary: overall color preferences
There was a clear effect of “ease of color generation” on the color choices, somewhat stronger with the non-synesthetes but also significant for putative synesthetes. There is a weaker effect of “entry in language” (age of acquisition of the color term) on both participant groups, and no effect of “color name frequency”. Note however that in previous results this effect was related to specific properties of the color that were not measured in the current study, as the naming procedure in assigning colors only defines categories of the color hue. The cross-participant correlations (putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes) show that there are regularities in the data. These regularities are still present if the overall color preference based on “ease of color generation” is partialled out.
Discussion
In the current study we find statistically significant, non-random patterns of day-to-color preferences and letter-to-color preferences in non-synesthetes. Moreover, there are similarities in these patterns across three language groups: Dutch, English and Hindi language. The third hypothesis was also confirmed: there are similarities in the patterns of color preferences for non-synesthetes as for the putative synesthetes in this study. While clearly not all variation is explained by cross-language associations, and random (or unexplained) influences are also present in the color choices, results suggest regularities as well. As discussed in the Introduction, regularities can both be based in a “first-order” relationship (a category of color relates to a category of the letter/day inducer) and “second-order” relationships (relative differences in inducer relates to relative differences in the concurrent). As expected, our results indicate a role for both types of regularities, in a complementary rather than excluding manner. A few specific day-to-color preferences appear to be particularly strong and consistent, such as red/Monday, blue/Monday, and white/Sunday. The day-to-color preference patterns were furthermore shared over different language groups, and also present in participants with a cultural background other than USA/English. In letter-to-color preferences, we also obtained certain specific preferences. The strongest effect is the red/A bias, which has previously been reported in English (Marks, 1975; Simner et al., 2005) and is now extended to English, Dutch and Hindi language subgroups. Furthermore, biases for blue/B, and green or blue T were obtained. The overall letter-to-color preference patterns are at least to some extent shared across the language groups (and were still present in participants with a cultural background other than USA/English). The similarities in the patterns of color preferences between Hindi and English/Dutch indicates that orthography of the letters, and linguistic properties of the weekday names, are not the only or defining characteristics of the color preferences. As we will explain below, it is likely that different factors are simultaneously at play in generating color preferences. As expected, there are shared biases in color preferences of participants with conscious color experiences with letters (“putative synesthetes”), and participants who do not report such a conscious color association (non-synesthetes). Exploring the patterns of color preferences, we also obtained differences between the groups, as the participants without any explicit color associations showed stronger cross-language similarities (both with letters and days) than the participants who indicated to have conscious color associations with this material. Perhaps not surprising (and in replication of the results of Simner et al., 2005), the factor “ease of color generation” influenced color preference, and this effect was effect was somewhat stronger for the non-synesthetes (compared with putative synesthetes). Importantly, partialling out this factor still led to significant correspondences in cross-language color associations.
Exploratory analyses examined the factors driving the color preferences. Possibly, the preference of “red” with Monday or the letter A is to mark the start of a sequence (of the workweek/ of the alphabet). In line with obtained linguistic effects in synesthetes (Rich et al., 2005, but see Marks, 1975; Simner et al., 2005), there might be effects in non-synesthetes as well. An example of such linguistic-specific effects is the preference of blue with “b” (Simner et al., |
, “Hight temps expected. Check on neighbors. Drink water.” It also advises residents to seek out cooler spaces. Here’s a map of cooling stations currently open around San Francisco.
Don’t pull out that oversized scarf just yet. The autumnal chill in the air is but a fleeting one—at least for now. Temperatures in the San Francisco and South Bay areas will warm up this week, culminating Wednesday or Thursday afternoon with another heat wave, according to the National Weather Service.
“When temperatures peak on Wednesday or Thursday, 80s will be widespread along the coast and residents of inland areas may experience temperatures in the low to mid 90s,” reports Bay City News Service. “The forecast for San Francisco on Wednesday is 88 degrees.”
San Francisco will not feel the recording-breaking temperatures that soared past the 105 mark. If you recall, earlier this month Baghdad by the Bay saw the mercury rise to its highest recorded levels ever, hitting a steep 106 degrees and breaking the previous high of 103.
But this week’s heatwave (fingers crossed) will only reach the high 80s.
For those of you who want to beat the proverbial heat, check out the best beaches in the Bay Area or best public spots where you can swim for under $10.FEN
[Event "Rated Bullet game"] [Site "https://lichess.org/5VG9oO0Z"] [Date "2016.11.04"] [Round "-"] [White "kittyfoofoo"] [Black "Solipsisms"] [Result "1-0"] [UTCDate "2016.11.04"] [UTCTime "02:02:23"] [WhiteElo "2302"] [BlackElo "2389"] [WhiteRatingDiff "+14"] [BlackRatingDiff "-13"] [Variant "Standard"] [TimeControl "60+0"] [ECO "C46"] [Opening "Four Knights Game: Halloween Gambit"] [Termination "Normal"] [Annotator "lichess.org"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Nxe5? { (0.09 → -1.05) Mistake. Best move was Bb5. } { C46 Four Knights Game: Halloween Gambit } (4. Bb5 Bb4 5. O-O Bxc3 6. bxc3 O-O 7. d3 d6 8. Bd2 Bg4 9. Bxc6 bxc6 10. c4 c5) 4... Nxe5 5. d4 Nc6 6. d5 Nb8 7. e5 Ng8? { (-0.03 → 1.22) Mistake. Best move was Qe7. } (7... Qe7 8. Qe2 Ng8 9. d6 Qe6 10. Bf4 cxd6 11. exd6 Na6 12. O-O-O Qxe2 13. Bxe2 Nc5 14. Rhe1) 8. d6 cxd6 9. exd6 Qf6 10. Nb5 Na6? { (0.80 → 3.10) Mistake. Best move was b6. } (10... b6 11. Bc4 Qe5+ 12. Be3 Bb7 13. Qd2 Nf6 14. f3 Nc6 15. Nc7+ Kd8 16. O-O-O Qxd6 17. Qxd6) 11. Bc4 g6? { (2.43 → 4.17) Mistake. Best move was Nc5. } (11... Nc5 12. O-O Ne6 13. Bxe6 fxe6 14. Nc7+ Kf7 15. Nxa8 Qe5 16. Qf3+ Nf6 17. Bf4 Qf5 18. Rae1) 12. O-O Bg7 13. Re1+ Kd8?? { (3.65 → 12.01) Blunder. Best move was Kf8. } (13... Kf8 14. Bd2) 14. Qe2 Nh6?! { (11.62 → Mate in 3) Checkmate is now unavoidable. Best move was Qe6. } (14... Qe6 15. Bxe6) 15. Qe7+ Qxe7 16. dxe7+ Ke8 17. Nd6# { White wins by checkmate. } 1-0Everyone's got such great lists. Here is mine. They pretty much all relate to the fact that so many people are crammed into such a tiny space.
Don't stop in doorways, bottom or top of stairs or escalators. Go through and if you need to look around or root around in your bag or whatever, step aside.
. If you're in a busy place, be prepared! If you're going through the Union Square station during rush hour, for goodness sake, have your MetroCard in your hand and ready to swipe.
Tables at restaurants are ridiculously close together. If it's a quiet place, then speak quietly. The whole restaurant doesn't need to hear you tell your friend about your process for picking out new window tapestries.
Cover your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze! There's almost always someone in front of you.
Manspreading is evil. Don't do it. If you do, I hope someone kicks you in the nuts.
is evil. Don't do it. If you do, I hope someone kicks you in the nuts. Look where you walk. Seriously. Don't look behind you, down at your phone, or even to gaze lovingly at your date. You're in NYC baby! Someone is using gazelle-like timing so the don't ram into you. Not looking equals a pedestrian crash.
Be helpful and courteous when you can. If you see a woman with a kid and stroller and you have an extra hand, offer to help her bring it up or down the subway steps. Offer your subway seat to an elderly person or pregnant woman or person with kids. Don't be an ass.
Be respectful of celebrities. One easy way to tell a New Yorker from a tourist is how they react when they run into a celeb. New Yorker will smile, maybe a slight head nod, that's it. New Yorker sees them at a restaurant and keeps eating. Tourists ask for pictures, autographs, etc. If you have to bother them, do so politely. Remember, they don't owe you anything and they're not zoo animals.
Lines are sacred. If you cut, best case, you'll get a tongue lashing from multiple people. Worst case, the biggest guy in the line will physically assist you to your proper place in line.
Good luck!Governor Scott Walker (R-WI), already well known for his efforts to curb union power, has now set out to tackle an equally big task: busting the higher education bubble.
The problem of college affordability is recognized on both sides of the aisle, but sadly, most efforts to abate the problem – such as increasing federal subsidies – have only exacerbated it. Walker wants to try a different approach for taxpayers and students in his state.
Last Tuesday, Walker released his proposal to create the University of Wisconsin Flexible Degree Program, a competency-based approach using both online learning and traditional college courses. He explained:
This unique competency-based model will allow students to start classes anytime they like, work at their own pace, and earn credit for what they already know… Students can use knowledge obtained on the job, through free open courseware, or anywhere else to quickly test out of a module or a course. A student may move ahead as soon as he or she can prove content mastery.
Obtaining a degree through the University of Wisconsin system will now be more affordable and customizable. By tapping into and giving credit for the knowledge a student has obtained outside the classroom or through another school, the Flexible Degree Program brings down the cost and the time required to graduate. If a student proves his mastery of a certain subject, he can obtain credit without taking a full class. Walker’s office notes:
Students can demonstrate college-level competencies – no matter where they learned the material – as soon as they can prove that they know it… Rather than molding coursework around a set timeframe, these modules can be designed to contain only the knowledge required within a specific competency. This could benefit working adults who need to start and pause their studies because of work and personal commitments. It could also benefit highly motivated students who are able to move through course materials at a faster pace. Courses in this new program will be based on competency, not seat time, so students can move on to the next topic when they have mastered the current material. Students will have broad access to high quality coursework and student services, and they can graduate as soon as they can prove their mastery of the material… Students with extensive knowledge from the workplace, free open courseware, or other life experiences will be able to quickly move closer to degree completion by having their knowledge assessed and credited.
The classes can also be tailored to allow for a student’s busy schedule or career goals. What’s more, Walker expects the program to reach even international students, broadening the university’s student and revenue base.
Governor Walker, as was the case with his efforts to curb union influence and empower teachers, is on the cutting edge of a higher education revolution. As Heritage’s Stuart Butler notes:
In as little as a decade, most colleges and universities could look very different from their present forms – with the cost of a college credential plummeting even as the quality of instruction rises. If this transformation does come to pass, it could have profound and beneficial implications. It could significantly increase the international competitiveness of American workers in a world in which we need higher skills and productivity to compete. It could sharply improve the employability of those on the bottom rungs of America’s income ladder, giving them the tools they need to move up. And it could do much to restore the American Dream for those who have begun to believe that opportunity in this country is disappearing. In other words, such a change could hardly come too soon.
Walker’s plan is a real solution to the problem of college affordability, cutting costs for the student and the taxpayer. The first-in-the-nation Flexible Degree Program is a great step toward giving all students their chance at the American Dream.
Quick Hits:MEXICO CITY -- Henry Cejudo has seen the way the top of the pack at 125 pounds has jostled for position in recent weeks, with no one really stating a strong case for a shot at Demetrious Johnson's title.
And while he's still young in the sport, the undefeated Cejudo has a message for the top guys in the flyweight division: If you want to beat me, you better take your swing at me now.
"I'm ready for anybody," Cejudo (8-0) said. "If it's John Dodson, if it's Demetrious Johnson, if it's Joseph Benavidez, I'm ready for whichever one, whoever wants a piece of me."
Cejudo, who meets Chico Camus at UFC 188 on Saturday night, confidently proclaimed his skill set is going to give the top of the division trouble sooner rather than later.
"I think they know I'm an elite athlete, I'm not your average flyweight," Cejudo said. "I'm a really strong flyweight, I've got strong hands, if they want to take their shot they better take it now, because I'm only getting better."
Of course, Cejudo's detractors point out he's had trouble making the 125-pound limit. Cejudo made weight for his last fight, a UFC 185 win over Chris Cariaso, and he says this time out his weight is the lightest it's been on a fight-week Wednesday.
"I'm nine pounds over, that's the lightest I've ever been [on a Wednesday]," Cejudo said. "I had a bad fish taco last night, so I'm kind of getting that out of my system and I'm recovering. It was a little sketchy there."
Meanwhile, Cejudo, a Mexican-American, specifically requested to be on UFC 188 in Mexico City, and he was fired up after receiving a rousing ovation from the packed house at Wednesday's open workouts.
Cejudo went so far as to compare his UFC 188 fight week experience to winning his Olympic wrestling medal in 2008.
"This experience is crazy, this is like nothing else," he said. "I feel like I'm back at the Olympics winning the gold medal with all these cameras, all these people. It's something incredible, something you can't describe. I can't even fathom to think about it, these open workouts have been so amazing."11 Inexpensive Ways to Improve Magic Coverage
by SaffronOlive // May 16, 2016 Tweet
Coverage
Magic coverage has been a hot topic lately in the community. As a result, I've been thinking about it quite a lot. One thing that brought the topic to the forefront was the lack of coverage for Grand Prix New York last weekend. Normally, companies do everything they can to break into the New York media market. It's the biggest in the country, which makes it especially noticeable when Wizards has a Grand Prix in the city and decides not to cover it. After digging into it, only two of the next fifteen Grand Prix are scheduled to be covered. Although it later came out that ChannelFireball will be covering Grand Prix Los Angeles, it's still disappointing that Wizards doesn't view a Grand Prix in Los Angeles (another huge media market) as worth covering.
The second thing that brought coverage to the community's consciousness was a Reddit thread that (unfairly) blamed some of the on-air talent for problems with Magic coverage. While the original post was unnecessarily personal and offensive, the discussion that took place in the comments was enlightening. One of the things it reinforced was the fact that everyone knows Magic coverage has a problem. From the people doing coverage, to the players getting covered, to the viewers watching at home, everyone wants coverage to improve.
From talking to people who do coverage, one thing that's clear is that they want to improve coverage just as much as everyone else, but there are some issues holding things back. First, it's somewhere between hypocritical and downright insane for Hasbro to spout off about being Magic being a "Top 5 Esport Brand" to its investors, while not properly funding coverage. I don't know if the higher-ups at Hasbro are lying to themselves or everyone else, or just happened to come across the word "Esport" and decided to use it, even though they have no idea what it means, but the assertion that Magic is a top-five Esport is laughable. Secondly, the fact that Hasbro isn't interested in funding good coverage while the game is "stronger than ever" means the rest of this discussion is going to focus primarily on improvements that can be done without adding significant costs. While a couple more expensive items need to be addressed, a huge percentage of what we'll talk about will add very little to the budget.
This list is far from all-inclusive. If you have ideas, make sure to leave them in the comments. Be realistic or give your Magical Christmas Land suggestions—(almost) anything goes. The one thing I ask is that you refrain from attacking individuals. A ton of talented people work in Magic coverage, and the problems with coverage are not about the people doing coverage; they are systemic. Let's keep things positive and try to be constructive. Anyway, without further ado, here's my list of eleven (mostly) inexpensive ways to improve Magic coverage.
1. Have Coverage Every Weekend
This one is simple. Wizards needs to create an expectation that you'll be able to watch some high-level Magic if you sit down in front of your computer on a weekend. "Every" weekend is a little hyperbolic; there are weekends on the schedule without any events. That's fine. But if there's a Grand Prix (or multiple Grands Prix) happening on a weekend, one of them needs to be covered.
Just look at the NFL. If you want to watch a football game, when can you turn on your TV? Even if you're not a huge football fan, you know it's Sunday, Monday night, and now Thursday night as well. If I want to watch a football game, I don't have to ask Reddit or check the halfway functional Mothership webpage to find out when it's on. I already know when football is on. Imagine if, on some Sundays, you turned on your TV and found reruns of Futurama and cooking shows but no football. Then, the next Sunday, there was football again, followed by two random weeks without football, and so forth. How long would it take before the expectation of "Sunday football" was ruined? Not very long.
Wizards needs to (re)create this expectation. Having to guess whether or not a Grand Prix is being covered is unacceptable. Having to browse through Reddit threads to find that coverage starts at Round 14 is insanity. I can tell you from streaming on Twitch that consistency is key. It's how you grow an audience. So, this "sometimes we cover it, sometimes we don't" attitude is the biggest thing holding Magic coverage back. People love to point to Cedric Philips and Patrick Sullivan for the success of the StarCityGames stream, and while it is true they are special, I think the fact that SCG's coverage is consistent plays a large role in their success. Note that Grand Prix New York coverage was announced to start at Round 14, but actually started at Round 10.
Cost: Expensive, but necessary if the "we're-an-Esport" claim is to be taken seriously. Consistency will pay off in the long-haul.
2. Start Coverage on Round 1 (or Round 4)
I don't care if the broadcast starts at Round 1 or Round 4. I understand the reasoning behind waiting for big-name players to come off of byes, so do whatever works best. I will say that covering the early rounds is a chance to feature people who don't get covered very often, which is appealing to Wizards in its push for more diversity in the game. What I do know is that Round 10 is unacceptable.
To reiterate, this isn't a blow to ChannelFireball regarding Grand Prix New York. It shouldn't be its responsibility to make sure there's coverage. It should be Wizards' responsibility, and I'm thankful that ChannelFireball took the initiative to cover New York, as it did so at its own expense. However, Wizards simply can't have coverage of Magic tournaments starting on Round 10.
The problem with starting coverage at the end of the tournament isn't so much about the game itself but about the perception it creates. If Wizards wants Magic to be taken seriously, it needs to act like every other spectator sport. Could you imagine if a Yankees broadcast started on the eighth inning, or if we only got to see the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl? What message does that send?
Having a Magic tournament start on Round 10 sends a few messages, and none of them are good. It says, "We're too broke to cover the entire tournament." While there are substantial costs to setting up Internet in a convention hall, it's also incredibly scary. You mean that Wizards of the Coast, the company that runs Magic Online and makes hundreds of millions a year selling Magic cards, is basing its decisions around "Internet costs?" It's 2016! I live in the middle of nowhere, and for $60 a month, I can get Internet service that is good enough to stream, upload videos, and do basically anything I want, but Wizards of the Coast is basing its decisions around paying for Internet to broadcast an event?
The second message it sends is, "We're weak." Everything we've heard from the past five years says that Magic is doing great, but when I see coverage starting on Round 10, it makes me question whether any of this is actually true. If Magic is doing so well, why can't Wizards afford to cover an entire event? Companies that are "strong" and "doing better than ever" can afford to pay for coverage. Full stop.
Maybe most depressingly, it sends the message that "Hasbro doesn't care about coverage." While I can deal with bad decisions and poor choices, thinking that the issue with Magic coverage comes from an attitude of "I simply don't care" is far worse, because it means that fixing the problem will be impossible. Decision making can be improved, but making these types of changes is going to require some willpower, and if Hasbro simply doesn't care, it's not going to happen.
Cost: I don't know. There's a bigger cost (in perception) to starting coverage on Round 10.
3. Let Chemistry Develop with Consistent Caster Pairings
I tweeted about this one early in the week, but you don't end up with Cedric Philips and Patrick Sullivan (the gold standard of Magic broadcasting) by accident. You can't just run ten different people in and out of the booth on a seemingly random basis and expect them to live up to their potential. If you watch something like a Pro Tour, you get the feeling that decisions about who will be broadcasting any specific round is based on a coin flip, rather than on what's best for coverage. Rarely do we get the same people in the booth together for more than a round or two, and which individuals are in the booth at any given moment seems to be the product of happenstance, rather than well-reasoned decisions.
Pick teams of two or three casters, give each a specific role in coverage, and keep them together. I understand that an eighteen-round tournament may be too much for one group to cover, so make two different teams. Switch off every two rounds, and then reconfigure for the Top 8 so your A team is in the booth for Magic's biggest moments. From my perspective, the biggest flaw with the Reddit thread on coverage (apart from being poorly written) was underestimating the casters themselves. While I do believe that we need new blood, I also believe that every single person currently doing coverage is talented enough to succeed in the right role.
I mentioned teams, so let's break them down. In an ideal world, here's what I want to see. First, every team needs a professional, and by this I mean someone like LSV, Reid Duke, Efro, Kibler, or PVDDR. One thing that was abundantly clear in the Reddit thread was that many high-level pros are begging for this opportunity. And we're not talking, "I played on one Pro Tour in 2009," we're talking about faces of the game.
Second, every team needs a color person, and this is where people like Gaby, Numot, Tim, and Marshall come in. This isn't a knock against any of them as players, but their role in coverage shouldn't be to explain complex lines of play. Their job is to be entertaining, keep the conversation going, and bounce questions off the pros. Entertaining personalities add a ton to coverage, and we should always have one of these people in the booth. But the color casters should refrain from trying to explain the more technical aspects of the game, or worse yet, randomly guessing at what someone might do.
Third, we need the insider/historian. This includes people like Ian Duke, Randy Buehler, and Brian David-Marshall. These are people who either work (or have worked) in R&D and therefore have inside knowledge of things that neither the pros nor the color casters are likely to have, or they are people who have been around the game, covering matches, creating content, and running tournaments for a long, long time, which gives them the ability to add a historical context that may be missing from other casters. It's unreasonable to expect LSV, Reid, or Kibler to talk about how "New York 2001 was the greatest Top 8 of all time," while also explaining what's happening on the battlefield in a digestible manner. It's also unreasonable to expect Gaby or Numot to have all of the Top 8s in Magic's history memorized. This is where the insider/historian comes into play.
Finally, keep people paired up consistently. Figure out who works well together. If caster X and caster Y really click, keep them together! While having a full-time coverage team would be ideal, if Wizards can't pay for Internet in convention centers, paying a coverage team a reasonable salary is likely off the table. That said, keep good teams together as much as possible. The more the teams work together, the more chemistry they will develop. There will be less complaints about coverage in general, which is good for Wizards of the Coast. The casters will look better, and the finished product will be better for the audience.
Cost: Free!
4. Clearly Define (and Enforce) Coverage Roles
While it might sound harsh, the idea of having a coverage team means that everyone in the booth can't just say anything they want at any time. I don't mean any offense to anyone, but I really believe that whoever is running the coverage of an event needs to sit down with the coverage team and say, "Here's what you are allowed to talk about." For example, I don't want a color caster trying to explain in-depth lines of play. This is the "pro's" job, and we don't need two people trying to do the same thing and stepping on each other's toes. Second, this isn't the strength of people like Tim or Gaby. Third, Marshall, Gaby, Tim, and the other color-analysis types are really entertaining, so having them focus on trying to explain technical play is a waste of their talent.
In the same way, I don't want Tom Martell focusing primarily on being entertaining. Hearing Reid Duke on coverage last weekend led me to this revelation. I want someone in the booth who is really, really good at Magic and can explain Magic in a way that is not only digestible for new players but also enlightening for the enfranchised viewer. Now, putting this type of person into the booth isn't enough; you need to make it their job to explain Magic! Having a pro in the booth telling jokes is a waste of talent. The Rock says, let everyone know their role beforehand.
Cost: Free!
5. Have Some Sort of Critical Evaluation
Maybe this already happens, but someone should sit down with the casters between rounds and after the tournament to talk through not only what went well but what went poorly and can be improved. If the insider or color person was spending a lot of time breaking down lines of play, let them know! If the pro was being too in-depth and going over everyone's head, let them know! As someone who spends many hours each week talking on videos and streams, I can tell you that, at the end of a stream or video, I usually have no idea what I said. Sure, I might remember a couple of moments, but odds are I have no clue. I assume this is the same for people doing coverage at the Grand Prix or Pro Tour level. As a result, there needs to be someone on the outside who is watching and evaluating, and letting people know where they can improve! Just to be clear, Twitch chat doesn't count.
Cost: Free. Ideally, someone who is producing the coverage would be playing this role.
6. Let the Pros Do Commentary
No reason to go too in-depth here—many pros are literally begging to do coverage. Plus, things like the Grand Prix cap means there are windows where even some of the game's best don't really benefit from playing in an event. While being great at Magic doesn't necessarily mean you'll be great at commentary, we've seen enough examples of pros who are very good at commentary that it's worth giving these players a shot in the booth.
Cost: Unsure. Would it cost more to have a pro do coverage than it costs to have someone else do coverage? Probably not, but I have no idea how commentators are compensated.
7. Put Talent in a Position to Succeed
For me, the biggest example is the "Let's have BDM run around the convention center until it sounds like he is about to keel over" segment at Pro Tours. After talking to BDM about these segments on Twitter, it became clear that he is fine and his health is not failing. The problem is that whatever microphone Wizards uses for the segment is really, really good at picking up breathing noises, which makes it sound like BDM is about to keel over. At least for me, instead of focusing on these interviews, I find myself worrying that I'm about to see one of the game's great ambassadors collapse on Twitch. Apparently, the solution is as simple as getting a different mic. While it would be nice if Wizards saw the problem and fixed it before going on air, there's no excuse for having it happen again.
This thinking also applies to other on-air talent. Do you have someone who is really, really good at limited? Maybe they should broadcast the limited rounds. If a caster's primarily a constructed player, maybe having them analyze a draft isn't the best idea. The commentators aren't the problem. The problem is that Wizards is essentially drafting their seat poorly when it comes to coverage by miscasting the talent they do have outside of their comfort zones and strengths.
Cost: Mostly free. I mean, if the mic is making BDM sound like he is about to have a heart attack, there's probably some cost in changing the mic, but a lot of this is simply about putting the talent to the best use possible.
8. Embrace the Game's History
I strongly believe that the Reddit thread not only took the wrong approach, but it was also misguided. As I mentioned before, I don't believe that any specific member of the current coverage team is unfit to do coverage. As for the two people called out by name—Brian David-Marshall and Randy Buehler—I want these voices on coverage. The idea of skewing commentators to be younger sounds good, until you realize how much of the game's history we'll be missing out on. One of the things that differentiates Magic from other competing games is that it has been played for 23 years and has 100 Pro Tours under its belt. Much like baseball, Magic needs to embrace its past. Hearthstone doesn't have conversations about how a current Top 8 compares to the best of all time, or about LSV's mystical run at Berlin in 2008. History (and complexity) is Magic's competitive advantage. Brian David-Marshall and Randy Buehler have an immense knowledge of the game's history, and this knowledge is invaluable to coverage. It should be highlighted.
Cost: Free!
9. Make the Card Overlay Evergreen
One of the biggest complaints from people about Magic coverage in general (and this holds true for Magic Online) is that viewers don't always know the cards on the battlefield. The easiest solution is to have an overlay featuring various cards. Wizards does this overlay for the Pro Tour, but it hasn't really caught on at the Grand Prix or SCG levels.
Currently, it takes between two and three people to make the card overlay work. This means it is a significant expense, which is likely why we don't see it on the Grand Prix level. However, this begs the question: isn't there a better way? There has to be a way to make the overlay a one-person job. Watch the game; when a card hits the battlefield, click a button, and boom, you get an overlay of the card image. Better yet, perhaps there is a way to make this a zero-person job. I mean, Quiet Speculation has its card scanner program available for MTG finance purposes. Couldn't there be a way to adapt this scanner to Magic coverage?
Another interesting suggestion from @mattystudios is an app you can pull up on your phone that will show the cards, similar to AutocardAnywhere. While this is more of a long-term idea and likely prohibitively expensive, the idea itself is awesome and takes care of a really big hindrance for getting new players to watch Magic. Even better is some sort of virtual reality (from @largebrandon) to make the experience more immersive. Imagine watching a Grand Prix and literally being able to touch the cards, or at least zoom in on any part of the board for a better look. It would be amazing!
Cost: Between somewhat costly and very expensive. Obviously, there is an expense to the overlay and even more of an expense to an app or virtual reality program, both of which are probably no-goes in our current environment, unfortunately.
10. Fill the Gaps between Rounds with Content
This stuff all seems so simple. Anyone with a semi-successful Twitch stream has figured it out. When a round ends, putting up a blank screen with a twenty-five-minute countdown time is going to lose you viewers, especially less-enfranchised viewers. Think about it: you are some random person browsing through Twitch for something fun to watch. You click on Magic: the Gathering. You start watching, find the cards interesting and the casters entertaining, and then the round ends. Up pops a screen with some cheesy "on-hold" music and a clock telling you that coverage will be back in twenty-five minutes. What are you going to do? Click over to another game! Are you going to click back twenty-five minutes later? Probably not.
On the other hand, if this gap was filled with some sort of relevant content, especially focused on players, fans will be more likely to stay on the channel and keep watching. Wizards already does a decent job of this at the Pro Tour level, but at the Grand Prix level, the between-round content is severely lacking.
Cost: Minimal or free. I have to imagine that live interviews with players are free. Sitting down with some locals and asking them about the Magic scene in their city? Also free. Deck techs? Same deal. On the other hand, there's definitely a cost to producing the "Inside the ChannelFireball" or "Team EUreka House" bits we see on the Pro Tour, so we need to keep expectations realistic. That said, producing relatively high-quality filler content for a low cost is achievable.
11. Create a Sense of Place
Magic loves the slogan, "Play the game, see the world." The problem is that the sense of place hardly ever comes across during coverage. If you are going to spend the money to bring Grands Prix and Pro Tours to exotic locations around the world, take advantage of the location! Send a crew out with one of the teams to eat some New York-style pizza while in New York, or give us a shot of the Eiffel Tower while in Paris. Have you ever watched a professional sports event? Almost every cut-away is focused on the city where the event is taking place, whether it's some random fish market in Seattle, Buffalo wings in Buffalo, or the city's skyline. In 2016, it wouldn't cost much to take some video footage of the city to splice in between rounds. Showing only the inside of an often-crowded and noisy convention center takes away from the very thing Magic is trying to sell: the ability for Magic to take you places! It's not "Play the game, see the inside of a smelly convention center."
This goes for the actual coverage as well. The location of the event can and should be worked into the narrative. Talk about other events that have happened in the same city or state. Who won the last Grand Prix held in New York? What deck did they win it with? What famous pro players come from the area (which could also provide some nice filler segments between rounds)? Are there some big local gaming stores that are important to the local scene? Tell us about them!
Cost: Minimal. Yes, having a skycam from a blimp showing the convention center is probably outside of our budget, but adding a sense of place to coverage doesn't have to be expensive at all. Send someone outside with a video camera for an hour to take some shots of the location. If even this is too expensive, at least take a half hour to look up past events in the same location and work them into the coverage. Show the world that Magic is bigger than the inside of a convention center and that playing the game lets you see the world.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. This list is clearly far from inclusive, but I think it includes quite a few improvements that are either free or at least inexpensive that could massively upgrade Magic coverage. I'd love to hear some more ideas, and if there are enough good ones, we'll revisit the topic at some point in the future. So make sure to let me know how you think coverage could be improved in the comments!
As always, you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
Update #1: It has been pointed out that we used the term "color caster" incorrectly. The main Wizards coverage person (who we incorrectly called the color caster) is the play-by-play or the host. The guest pro player is considered the color caster.
Update #2: Grand Prix New York coverage was announced to start on Round 14, but actually started on Round 10.The Wu-Tang saga is a revolution that swarmed on the music industry like a pack of killer bees. Straight out of the slums of Shaolin, the Clan created an often imitated but never duplicated sound comprised of eerie beats mixed with puzzling stanzas and clashing kung-fu swords. The collective powers of RZA the Abbot, GZA the Genius, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Raekwon Shallah, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa, and Cappadonna have entertained and inspired legions with perplexing rhymes full of grit.
With this year's Rock the Bells line-up featuring Raekwon and Ghostface performing all of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... and GZA doing Liquid Swords, it's a perfect time for Complex to enter all 36 Chambers to unmask The 100 Best Wu-Tang Clan Songs. Don't forget: Protect ya neck, kid.
Listen to Complex's Best Wu-Tang Clan Songs playlists here: YouTube/Spotify/Rdio
Written by Gabriel Alvarez of @egotriplandArt Briles wasn't afraid to make a guarantee at Big 12 Media Days on Tuesday.
The Baylor head coach told the media that, if his team finishes the season with a perfect 12-0 record, the Bears will be headed to the playoffs.
"You can put that in ink," Briles told reporters at Omni Dallas Hotel.
But that may be a tricky thing to accomplish, with Baylor and co-conference champion TCU |
threads that would connect the world’s tapestry for me. Karui slaves brought me refreshments as needed - tender rambutan slices, seared strips of spiced meat, chilled carafes near overspilling with water and wine - Dominus’ writ ensuring utmost obedience.It might have been the happiest time of my life.It was during one of those lengthy sojourns that I met Captain Tempus for the second time. A lone candle illuminated my table, stacks of crumbling scrolls scattered over the scarred and pitted oak. I was trying to reconcile a second-hand account from a contemporary of Victario, known as the People’s Poet, though few of his works had survived to our time, with one found from a much earlier time, near the founding of the Eternal Empire. Both spake of beasts that moved without life, implacable monstrosities capable of felling even the strongest man.Both spake of corruption, shadows, the scrabbling whispers in the dark.I was jotting down notes on one of the many sheets of paper lying around for the purpose, when a shadow fell across my page. Annoyed, I looked up. A dancing smile below blue-dyed hair greeted me.“My lady. I thought it was a candle lighting this dismal bleakness, but I see now it was your radiant face.”“Captain Tempus. It is a pleasure to see you again. Perhaps you might move to the side, so as not to obscure my light?”I thought I saw a darkness flit across his eyes, but dismissed it as a trick of the dim illumination.“Of course, my lady.” He moved to stand behind me, one hand resting on the back of my chair. “What is it that you work so diligently upon?”“Ghosts of the past,” I responded, returning my gaze to the two scrolls. “There is something... something hidden on Wraeclast. I can sense it, lurking beneath these crabbed words and spidery runes. Are you a scholar of history, Captain?”“Only middlingly, my lady. I prefer the more combative spheres myself.”“Nevertheless, look here, and here.” I motioned to my notes. “It is not just this obtuse description of Victario’s writings, nor the nameless author of this other ruined piece. Here, in Icius Perandus’ Treatise on Civilization, he speaks of the ‘Tears of Maji,’ and their inevitable corruption, though details remain frustratingly vague. Here, another fragment from Icius, detailing ‘a darkness that swept the land from the Cradle,’ but again, we have no details. The bones we build upon, I fear they may be those of a being inimical to life.”“I have seen those bones, my lady,” he said slowly, a strange tone entering his words. “Our expedition - you have heard of it?”“Of course. I doubt there is a person in Theopolis who hasn’t.”“Ten years we were gone, in a land thought long forsaken by God. Hideous beasts stalked its shores, the very flesh of nightmare given birth, and it grew worse the further inland we traveled. I questioned the High Templar back then, questioned his wisdom, his judgement. Watching the soldiers under my command die to horrors I could have never imagined back here in Oriath... I tell you true, my lady, it was a test of faith the likes of which few men endure. But then...”His voice turned... rapturous. There is no other word to describe it.“But then, Dominus, he showed us the miracles. Miracles of flesh, miracles of mind, miracles of spirit. Oh, that I could describe to you what he found.”“Why can’t you, my lord?” I asked.His voice changed, the awe leeching out like faded dye in a threadbare shift.“It is not my place, my lady. Should Dominus deem you worthy, you will know.”Instantly my curiosity was piqued.“Am I not here under Dominus’ writ? Do I not search for that which he has declared important? I beg of you, my lord, tell me what you witnessed.”“Say that again, my lady.” Hungry words, ravenous. If only I knew then what I know now.“I beg of you, my lord.”His hand landed on my neck, not heavily, but the pressure still dug into my muscles.“Would that I could, my lady, but there is naught I can do without Dominus’ permission. Mayhaps, were we to know each other better, that permission might be granted.”I tensed inwardly, registering what his words implied, but then remembered Mother’s lessons. Everything, a weapon.“My lord, the hour is late, and I must be getting home, lest Mother worry. Were you to call upon me in a week’s time, however, I am sure there is much you could show me of the city, and much I could learn from a man of your esteemed talents.”The hand lingered on my neck, then slowly drifted away.“Of course, my lady. In a week’s time.”And thus began my courtship with Captain Corelius Tempus.-------------------------------------------------Mother approved, of course. The Captain was a member of the Great Houses, positioned to inherit well, and a decorated military officer no less. A marriage would bind Tempus House to ours tightly, our children beneficiaries of ever more increased power and influence. In addition, though she didn’t say it, I knew we needed allies wherever we could find them.After his return, Dominus was rapidly eroding his support among the Great Houses.Much of it was due to the increased troop levies, more and more soldiers needed for followup expeditions to Wraeclast, to secure whatever mysterious goals he pursued on that wretched continent. The Great Houses saw it as a means of weakening their power and strengthening that of the Order, particularly since Dominus would tell no one of his plans. Our fate was intertwined with his, courtesy of that unspoken bargain Mother and Father agreed to so many years ago, and were he to fall, our descent would be as swift.Thus, I convinced her that my courtship was of political necessity, and in truth, a small part of me recognized that necessity, and did not mind. The greater part of me, however, allowed the Captain to pursue me because of the knowledge he possessed.He was the key to what I desired above all else, or so I told myself. Whatever it was that Dominus had discovered on Wraeclast, I needed to know. The lack of that knowledge ate at my attention, like an abscessed tooth, and it was only through the most diligent application of will that I was able to continue the charade of my daily life.Years passed, courtship in Theopolis a drawn out affair, the Captain frequently away on mysterious affairs he would only hint at to me, much to my frustration. We attended the occasional ball, dancing the night away, but always retreating to our separate Houses at evening’s end. We strolled through carefully cultivated topiary mazes, fantastic creatures seeming to leap out at us from every corner, but Mother’s unbending gaze kept us from all but the most chaste displays of affection. We spun about each other, two stars slowly spiraling inward while the long years passed, and all I could think of was the day we would finally merge. The studies I would finally have the information to pursue, the mysteries I would solve.Throughout it all, I continued my other disciplines under Mother’s watchful eye, her demands for perfection never unwavering. Bow, sword, scalpel and quill, my constant companions in summer villa and winter retreat, until one day, everything changed.-------------------------------------------------I was at the slave market, seeking new specimens for my table on Mother’s orders, though I have to admit there was little left to learn at this point. Line after line of Karui stretched along the uneven cobbles, all clad in nothing but a loincloth, even the women. Their upper arms and shoulders lay bare of tattoos for the most part, these being bred slaves of Oriath, not islander natives, though there were some few of those captives scattered here and there. The clean shoulders of the slaves reflected their lives - blank, dull, meaningless. These Karui were born, lived, and died in Oriath, and as such, had nothing worth recognition.The sun beat down on my own bare shoulders, warming the deep blue of my summer dress, and the stench of the city hovered over the slave market like a physical force. I grimaced inwardly, angry at Mother for making me continue this charade of study when there were far more important matters to spend my limited time on. I had mastered haematology as a child, but Mother was insistent.How ironic it was, that her insistence led to all this.It happened while I was walking along one of the lines, the slave-master hovering obsequiously at my side. His constant prattling was not improving my mood, but then, as if from a dream, I heard the rough tongue of a non-native speaker.“Mistress. One converses you.”Shocked, I looked over at who had dared address me. One of the Karui straightened from his crouch, shackles clinking as he rose. He was a brute of a man, near two full heads higher than I, muscles rippling along his torso and arms like waves upon the sea. Chains draped his entire body, but he moved as if they were naught but gossamer. Beneath them, rivers of ink flowed across his skin, more than I had seen on any one person before.The slave-master sprang forward, whip in hand, and I forestalled him with a curt gesture. This slave’s tattoos spoke to me, what few I could read, so like the normal Karui tattoos I knew, yet somehow... different. The story they told was not the normal drudgery I had seen countless times before.No, this Karui was of warrior stock, forged in the fire of a hundred battles, and I marveled at the sheer ferocity he displayed, even chained as he was.“Hold your lash, slave-master. I would speak with this one.”“Are you sure, my lady? We barely received this shipment a month ago, yet he has escaped multiple times already. The last time, he crushed a guard’s head with his bare hands before he was subdued. I cannot guarantee your safety.”“I am a scion of Theopolis,” I sneered at him. “I will guarantee my own safety. Now begone, you sniveling cur.”Chastened, he retreated back to the small hovel that served as his quarters and office. I looked at the Karui, calculating how to approach such a savage, and it was then that the revelation hit me.Though I knew the inner workings of their kind to the utmost detail, I knew next to nothing about them as a people. What were their motivations, their desires, their urge towards life? I thought I could read their tattoos like scrolls in the Archives, but what were the stories behind this warrior’s dark ink strokes? I could speak their language, but what were the secret words hidden within his mind and spirit, so different than the others?It struck me that while I considered myself educated, in truth, I had examined only one side of a coin. How can one understand life purely through study of the caged? How can one grasp beauty through contemplation of merely the mechanical? Did I truly know the Karui at all?I made up my mind to pursue a different course of study, one Mother surely would not approve of.“Tala moana, warrior,” I greeted him, and nearly laughed at the surprise on his face. “You wish to converse? Of what shall we speak?”“How is it that you know the People’s tongue, little one?”“I have conversed with many of your people, warrior.” I did not mention the circumstances under which those conversations took place, as I felt it would merely upset him. “What is a man like you doing here?”He sneered.“You think me a slave, merely because I wear shackles? Pah. These wretches are the true slaves, cowering behind their fear.” He spat at the feet of another Karui, who hastily averted his head, seeming to shrink in upon himself. “See? They have forgotten how to live, forgotten the Ancestors, trapped on this pitiful island of stone and blood.”I was intrigued. I had never heard one of the Karui slaves speak in such a fashion before.“You feel no kinship with them? Are they not of your tribe?”His eyes flashed with anger.“Do not insult me, little one. I am a son of Ngakuramakoi. These are worthy only of Kitava’s dark blessing.”Something scratched at my mind, like seeing the first spoor of a particularly evasive beast. A mention of dark blessings... could it be? Did the Karui have knowledge of what I was seeking all along?“Ngakuramakoi, Kitava... I have not heard of them. Who are they?”He smiled ferally.“Release me, little one, and I will tell you.”“I could simply purchase you and make you talk.”Mocking laughter.“I told you, little one, I am not like these slaves. You cannot make me do anything. I will die first.”“Very well. Slave-master!”The slave-master came running at my shout, whip tucked into his rope belt next to a jangling ring of keys.“Yes, my lady?”I handed him several coins, five times what his best price for the slave would be.“I am purchasing this one. Give me the key to his chains.”“My-my lady?”“Have what little wits you once possessed deserted you? Give. Me. The. Key.”“At least let me fetch the traveling irons, my lady. For your own safety.”“I told you, my safety is my concern. Give me the key and take your fear elsewhere.”Hesitantly, he unhooked a key from the large ring on his belt, and then ran off, calling frantically for the city guards. I watched him go, then spat deliberately on the ground, much in the same fashion as the Karui. Letting my own smile edge my lips, I turned to him, key in hand. He regarded me impassively.click“There. Now tell me what I wish to know. It is important.”He did not respond immediately, slowly shrugging his way out of the myriad metal links crossing his body. It reminded me of drawings I had seen of volcanos birthing their way up from the sea, the implacable thrust of fire and stone. Finally, his massive body now unencumbered, he cracked his neck and looked at me, expression fierce.“Foolish little one. So confident. So arrogant, just like the rest of your miserable people. You wish to know of Kitava? Then meet him yourself!”Upon uttering the final words of his sentence, he swung a heavy fist at me, but I was already moving. I ducked beneath the blow, feeling the weight of its passing stir my hair, then carefully drove my fist into his lower back, directly above the kidney. He grunted, then spun on his feet, surprisingly agile for such a large man.“You are quick, little one, but your strikes bite like fleas. A true warrior does not fear pain.”He came at me again, this time arms spread wide in a crushing embrace. My own smile grew, and I slid between his legs, careless of the damage to my dress. Reaching the other side, I snap-kicked back, buckling one of his knees, and then sprung up, driving my fist into the same spot as before, twice this time. He growled and rolled away, climbing back to his feet, now favoring his right side. Blood trickled down my right leg through the tattered scraps of my dress, but I ignored it.“Were you not listening, warrior? I am not like the rest of my people! You are not the only one who does not fear pain. Now, tell me what I wish to know.”He didn’t respond, anger radiating from his craggy face. I smiled even wider, and settled into a Trarthan unarmed stance, left foot slightly forward, weight balanced on the balls of my feet. He advanced toward me in a low crouch, arms held wide, his hands broader than my head. I let him close the distance, reading the interplay of muscles beneath his skin, watching his nostrils flare with each indrawn breath. When his pectorals tensed, I was ready to move.Even so, he still almost caught me. Had he not been in chains for hours previously, I do not know that I would have made it out alive.His rush came quickly, like a striking snake, completely at odds with his earlier lumbering advances. I spun past his grasping hand like a top, knowing that to be trapped was to die. Several strands of my hair caught between his fingers, before ripping free in sharp bursts of pain. His follow up kick I deflected away from my midsection, my hand stinging like I had slapped a piece of granite, but then I was behind him once more. Three times I struck him, then, my clenched fist descending like lightning, once again targeting that same spot over his kidney.He dropped to a knee, involuntarily, coughing up blood, and I did not hesitate. Quickly, I grabbed one of the chains from the cobblestones and leapt onto his back, wrapping the cold metal links around his neck. I tightened it almost to the point of crushing his trachea and leaned down, my mouth next to his ear“Make your choice, warrior. I set you free from your chains. I upheld my promise. Tell me what I wish to know, or I will kill you myself!”His back rumbled beneath me, like a small earthquake, and I realized he was laughing.“Ancestors guide me, little one, but you were born in the wrong body! With a hundred like you, I could return the Karui to a glory even Kaom himself would envy.”I tightened the chain, the metal digging deeper into his skin, and he waved a hand, gasping.“Very well, little one, I submit. You have bested me, a blooded son of Ngakuramakoi, and I will not shame the Ancestors. You have my service.”“Good.”I let the chain loosen, and rolled away from his back. Groaning, he flopped over and lay on the cobblestones, hands unwrapping his almost noose in small twitches. I wanted to lie down as well, adrenaline shudders shaking my legs, but to show weakness in Theopolis invited death, or so Mother taught, and so I walled the pain away. It was at that point that the slave-master returned with a squad of Templar guards.“You see! The brute has... escaped... what?”I waved a hand imperiously at them.“Everything is under control. Do not worry about me and my property. I’m sure there are other areas of the city that require your attention.”The slave-master stammered and fell silent, his mouth agape. The guards stared back and forth between me and the Karui giant, their wide eyes taking in the unmistakable signs of our battle, then crisply saluted and jogged back up the street. I glared at the slave-master until he scurried back to his shack, confusion and shame warring equally across his features.“Do you have a name, warrior?”The Karui’s face went dark.“I am nameless until I kill the man who defiled the Ancestors and destroyed my family. ‘Warrior’ will serve.”“Very well. Come, we have work to do.”And thus, I met the man who would alter my life forever.-------------------------------------------------Three years passed, the Karui my constant companion to the Archives and expeditions outside the city. I told Mother he was my new bodyguard, a decision she did not take well. She relented, however, with a test. She sent four House guards at him at once. He broke each one’s neck in less time it takes to draw a breath, and thereafter she contented herself with her normal stern disapproval of everything I did.The Karui and I learned from each other constantly, him the common language of Oriath, as well as fighting styles he never encountered on his island, me the history of the Karui people, their myths and legends, as well as their community and bonds. I ceased my practice of haematology out of respect to my companion, though it was not a difficult choice to make, as I had reached the limits of study available to me on the human body.He spoke to me of Kitava, the Dark Beneath the World, He Who Feasts, one of the central figures of the Karui pantheon. I recognized commonalities with other accounts I had read over the years, and redoubled my efforts to link together the disparate threads underlying our history into a unified whole, but something was still missing. He spoke of endless corruption, a bargain with the Ancestors to protect the Karui people, and at night, my nightmares continued nonstop, sibilant shadow voices whispering words that promised comprehension if only I were to submit.I never did.Several times I asked the Karui of his quest, of the man he was sworn to kill, but that was the one secret he would not relinquish, and so I stopped asking, though I did not forget. Anything that could drive this human force of nature to forsake all other vows triggered my natural curiosity, and I was determined that one day I would solve that mystery as well.How little did I know that that day was approaching far sooner than I anticipated.I continued my sporadic meetings with Captain Tempus, though without the presence of my Karui companion. The first time he met the Captain, he warned me of a darkness in his eyes, and called him Kitava’s slave. Nettled, I forbade him from accompanying me when I was with Corelius, thinking at the time he was subject to the same jealousy as all other men when around a woman. Alas, I was a fool.In my twenty-first season, after close to seven years of courtship, though in truth we had seen each other not more than thrice a year at most, it was decided that the Captain and I should wed, a union approved of by Mother and the High Templar alike. General Gravicius, as the Captain’s deepest friend, would serve as the second for the ceremony, and Dominus himself would oversee the vows.The ceremony itself I barely remember, aside from a growing thrill that finally I would be able to learn what Captain Tempus had witnessed on Wraeclast. I felt his knowledge was the missing piece to my studies, and that once we were husband and wife, I would at last piece together the puzzle that had grown to consume my every waking moment. The underlying picture was almost within my grasp, its edges hovering tantalizingly out of focus, awaiting that last key to unlock its secrets.Thus I passed from child to woman.-------------------------------------------------I will never forget my wedding night. The hour had grown late, food and wine consumed by guests since departed from our summer villa, where the reception had been held. Slaves were busy clearing the tables, my Karui companion nowhere in sight, when came the moment that would give truth to the vows. Corelius, my husband, looked at me, and extended his hand. I took it and followed him up the stone stairs to our room, not the one in which I had spent my childhood and adolescence, but a larger, separate room.My heart pounded in my chest as we ascended. At last, I would finally experience the mysteries of the bedchamber, the secrets of life between man and woman. Mother had kept my virtue sacrosanct, and I was more than ready to learn this new lesson. I had seen beasts of the field and slaves rutting, had tutors describe the thirteen different positions of love, of course, but seeing and practicing are two different things.Two sets of dressers lined the white-plaster walls, a gift from Mother, and a dancing mechanical music box, a gift from Father, sat on the small table next to the oversized bed. Hesitantly, I followed Corelius inside, and he shut the door behind us with a click of the lock, doffing his rich silken cape to the floor.“At last, my darling, we are alone.”“I thought the guests would never leave.” Nervously, I slipped off the clinging lace of my wedding dress, leaving just my shift underneath. “What... what do you desire, my husband?”He turned away from me, fumbling at his belt.“Oh, many things, my bride, but first I have something to show you. Dominus gave me a wedding gift, something special, to commemorate our union. Would you care to witness it?”I sat down on the bed, shifting one leg over the other, the night air chill on my skin.“Is this the time, husband? Can it not wait for the morrow?”His shoulders shook, and I realized he was laughing.“Ahh, but this is what you’ve desired since the very first time we met, my lady. The knowledge of Wraeclast. The miracles Dominus revealed to us.”My heart beat even faster. I did desire the pleasures of the wedding night, but knowledge would always be my first love.“What is it, husband? Please, show me, I beg of you.”He turned, keeping his hands hidden behind his back, an odd look upon his face.“I do so love it when you say that. How you know your place, instinctively. Say it again.”“Husband?”He stepped closer, shadows covering his features.“Beg me. Beg me to hurt you, beg me to stop, beg me to treat you the way you need to be treated.”I frowned and straightened up, uncrossing my legs. Suddenly, his hand reached out and shoved me down, sending me sprawling onto the bed.“Yes, beg me, and maybe I’ll listen if you’re convincing enough.”I nearly swore. This was not how I envisioned spending my wedding night. This was a side of Corelius I had never witnessed at the dances, the long walks through moonlit streets.Did I truly know my now husband?“Excuse me, my lord, but I fear you have mistaken me for someone else,” I said in a chilly tone. “We are equals in this relationship, lest you forget.”His lips turned up, then, cruel, mocking.“Oh, I have not forgotten, my lady, but it is you who are mistaken. Witness a miracle!”His hand, kept until this moment behind his back, came forward, holding a fist sized jewel that glowed a sickly green. I stared at it, uncomprehending at first, but then slowly realization took hold.I had seen jewels like that in my studies, in the histories of the Eternal Empire, and in the warnings plastered across every alleyway and street corner by the High Justicar.“That... that is a Virtue Gem! Those are forbidden by the Templars, by your Order itself! Where did you get that?”Corelius chuckled, a nasty sound.“From Wraeclast, of course. Don’t be stupid, my lady. Did you think Dominus had designs there merely for the weather? No. He has discovered the secret behind the gems, and with it, we will claim our birthright to Empire!”I felt ill. The High Templar himself, consorting with the powers that brought forth the Cataclysm. How could I have been so blind?“My lord, it is late. Perhaps we should speak of this in the morning. I feel tired.”I tried to push myself upright, but he shoved me down again and leered at me.“Fortunately, your feelings are of no concern to me, wife. You wished to know what Dominus discovered. Well, here it is! He thinks you can be persuaded to join us, but I know you’re too weak. Just like that other whore, Piety. Now beg!”Light pulsed from the jewel, and suddenly it felt like a thousand knives were cutting into my flesh at once. The pain was overwhelming. I could not help myself. I screamed, a high, piercing sound. Seconds later, minutes, I do not know, the pain stopped, and I opened tear-filled eyes to see Captain Tempus breathing heavily over me, his pants halfway undone, the hideous jewel still held in one hand. Blood ran from hundreds of cuts on my arms to the sheets, staining the pure white a deep crimson.“Yes... yes, that’s it. Beg for me. Beg for the pain to stop, and the pleasure to start. No one will hear your screams, wife. There is only us and the slaves.”But that was where he was mistaken. One member of the household was not a slave, though he looked like one to all but mine eyes. With a rain of splinters, the door to the room burst open, my Karui companion outlined in the frame. He took in the scene with a glance, and rage contorted his features.“Spawn of Kitava,” he rumbled, hands clenching. “The Ancestors witness your corruption.”Corelius looked startled, but then raised the jewel up and laughed.“Marauder filth. Dominus always said your kind don’t know when they’re beaten.”At the mention of Dominus’ name, a wholly unfamiliar expression settled onto my companion’s face. I thought I had seen anger before.I was mistaken.Corelius ignored the blood rage now filming the Karui’s eyes, so caught up was he in the grip of the gem. He looked at me, sneering.“Ahh, yes, your pet Karui. I warned Dominus about this. I told him you had unnatural perversions. He didn’t want to believe me, but I knew, oh yes, I knew. I will enjoy this.”Light flashed from the jewel once again, and I could almost see the knives fly through the air, impaling deep into my companion’s limbs. He snarled, and then, impossibly, stalked forward, blood pouring down his body. Corelius clutched the jewel harder, and more knives sprang out, carving their way inward. With a groan, the Karui fell to his hands and knees, but still he kept on, crawling fist over bloody fist towards Corelius. Shouting, the Captain extended the gem directly towards his massive form, and I saw the knives homing in towards vital organs. Ugly green light seemed to fill the entire room, casting strange shadows along the walls.It was exactly like my nightmares.“No!”Yelling, I sprang from the bed, grabbing at Corelius’ arm. Distracted as he was, he did not see me until it was too late. We tumbled to the floor, and with a quick twist, I snapped his wrist, dropping the Virtue Gem into my grasp. When it touched my flesh, I nearly fainted.Knowledge sprang forth in my mind, the infinite possibilities of the gem branching through my vision like ice along a glass pane, chittering voices whispering their secrets to me. I could see exactly what it cost to summon forth the ethereal knives, how they could be manipulated to do my bidding, where they might intersect with other gems to modify their effects, and through it all, the scrabbling claws plucking at my sanity never ceased. My nightmares made flesh, the dark corruption I had been searching my entire life for, now inextricably linked with my mind and body. Groaning, I pushed myself to my feet, tottering unsteadily upright before collapsing back onto the bed, unwilling or unable to relinquish the jewel’s terrible hold upon my psyche.Across from me, Corelius rolled into a sitting position, cradling his wrist to his chest, pain twisting his features.“Give it back to me,” he hissed. “Give it back to me, and this can be forgiven. Dominus will explain.”He prattled on, but I ignored him, dragging my focus elsewhere.Next to him, sprawled on the floor, lay the Karui, blood pooling around his body. The slightest rise of his chest let me know he was still alive, and I felt relief surge through my body. I could not say why I cared for my companion so, but he was perhaps the only true friend I had ever had. He expected nothing from me other than a warrior’s strength, and after so many years in the twisting world of Theopolis, after so many years of Mother’s lessons, I think I found it refreshing.I also had an inkling of what his quest was, now, and I wished him success. It appeared both of us had been ill used by the High Templar.I gathered my thoughts and looked at Corelius, anger vibrating my entire body. The gem pulsed in my hand, once, like a heartbeat. His mouth shut with a click, and he quailed before my expression. In the corners of my ears, I could hear the whispers laughing.“One does not... treat a scion... of Theopolis... with such disrespect, my lord!”And then I took him apart, piece by agonizing piece, his screams ringing off the walls until it seemed the entire villa must collapse in on his writhing pain, but I did not let him die until the very end, long after every surface dripped red with his blood.Haematology always was my best subject, Mother.-------------------------------------------------And so I sit in the hold of this ship, awaiting the long journey to Wraeclast. It seems there are some crimes even a Great House is not immune to, after all. My companion has been sent to the fighting pits, though I suspect they will not find him a typical gladiator, whereas I am to be exiled for the crime of murdering my husband. For the crime of survival. Dominus claimed it was to keep me safe from the wrath of House Tempus, but I know different.My wedding night taught me the truth of Dominus’ lies.-------------------------------------------------I only wanted to please you, Mother. I only wanted to learn, to be the best that I could. That’s all I ever wanted. To make you happy.-------------------------------------------------We left Oriath last night, and for the first time in my entire life, the nightmares did not visit my sleep. I do not know what it means.-------------------------------------------------Goodbye, Mother. Last bumped on Mar 27, 2018, 8:44:14 AMThis information is added by users of ASN. Neither ASN nor the Flight Safety Foundation are responsible for the completeness or correctness of this information. If you feel this information is incomplete or incorrect, you can submit corrected information
18:01 UTC
Aerospool WT-9 Dynamic Private F-JUKE DY458-2013 Fatalities: 1 / Occupants: 1 0 Written off (damaged beyond repair) Cotopaxi Volcano - Ecuador En route Private Latacunga-Cotopaxi International Airport (LTX/SELT) Tabacundo in Pichincha province
A Swiss pilot, trying to circumnavigate the world in 20 months, crashed with his plane into the Cotopaxi volcano and died.
Flightradar24 tracking data shows the airplane departing from Latacunga-Cotopaxi International Airport (LTX/SELT) at 17:41 UTC and maneuvering near the Cotopaxi Volcano.
Last radar data show the aircraft at an altitude of 18,350 feet and an airspeed of 19 knots.
Sources:
Revision history:From the outside, Lucerne’s Spreuer Bridge looks to be a peacefully bucolic old-world span, the kind where medieval lovers might have met on a warm spring day, but hanging beneath the covered roof are dozens of historic paintings of skeletons and reapers collecting souls and reminding travelers that every second is one closer to death.
The gable-roofed bridge was built in the 13th century to connect a group of mill buildings to the mainland. During its initial usage the bridge was unique in that the mill workers could simply dump their waste into the river since they were so far downstream. The wooden bridge survived for hundreds of years retaining its peaked medieval style.
Then in the mid-1600s it was decided that the bridge would be spruced up a bit and a project was spearheaded to create a series of artworks forming a Dance of Death cycle, also known as a “Danse Macabre” or “Totentanz” in German. The object of such works was to remind everyone that death comes for us all, whether old or young, rich or poor. In the end 67 separate works were painted in the rafters of the covered bridge each featuring at least one skeletal harbinger of death (more often a number of them) coming to drag people to the afterlife. Monks, knights, nuns, and beggars are all seen being taken by death no matter their life.
Walks along covered rustic bridges are often symbolic of peaceful times of beauty, relaxation, and simple living, but the Spreuer Bridge really makes sure that people know they need to enjoy it while it lasts, which probably won’t be that much longer no matter who you are.Syfy’s push to re-conquer outer space with serious drama programming continues: The cable channel is going to adapt Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 3001: The Final Odyssey into a miniseries with Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) on board as executive producer.
The project will bring the never-before-produced final chapter of the legendary sci-fi book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey to basic cable. Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean, Collateral) will write the adaptation and serve as an executive producer.
Official logline: “An epic story of a man lost in time, Arthur C. Clarke’s final Odyssey book resolves the tale that was begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Beginning with the discovery of Frank Poole’s frozen body, floating in space, 3001: The Final Odyssey offers an extraordinary range of complex characters with conflicting agendas, stunning visuals, and dark thematic meditations on the final fate of all Humankind.”
Syfy released in a statement that the estates of both famed 2001 director Stanley Kubrick and Clarke have offered their full support for the project. “I have always been a fan of Clarke’s extraordinary Odyssey series, and certainly Kubrick’s adaptation of 2001,” Scott added in a statement. “I am thrilled to be part of bringing that legacy to audiences and continuing the great cinematic tradition that this story and its creators deserve.”
“Arthur C. Clarke is the father of modern science fiction,” said Syfy President Dave Howe. “We couldn’t be more excited to |
the engine in the Spyder, it’s sealed away. The only bit you can get to is the oil tank.
The same seven-speed twin-clutch transmission changes the gears, though, meaning rapid-fire upshifts and downshifts along with a delicious exhaust crackle. 0-100km/h is barely slower than the Coupe at 3.6 seconds. And if I was a betting man, I’d say that figure is a little on the conservative side.
It’s a brilliant engine, there are no two ways about it. Rev-happy, loud and obnoxious, it fits the Lamborghini bill. Here in the Huracan it’s great to listen to, with a messy bark on the downshift that sounds like a pre-ceasfire flurry of gunfire. As many of you know, this same engine rides in the back of the Audi R8 (in basically the same chassis) but it’s not nearly as much fun to listen to. Still fun, just not this much fun.
The rear wheels get their power through what Lamborghini calls “doppio frizione”, which sounds theatrical but just means twin-clutch.
Chassis
Aluminium and carbon fibre feature heavily in the Huracan’s space frame chassis, delivering a prodigiously stiff and strong car. Under here it’s not just a Huracan – it’s an R8 and the GT3 and GT4 race versions of both of those cars.
You can choose from three chassis modes – Strada (street), Sport and Corsa (Race). Some mode switches don’t mean much, but here in the Lamborghini Huracan, you’d have to be pretty thick not to notice.
Between the rear wheels is a mechanical limited slip differential. Those rear tyres are monsters, with standard 19-inch wheels (we had the gorgeous 20-inch wheels on our car) have 305 Pirellis while the fronts are rather more restrained 245s.
Lamborghini’s driving dynamics system has another cool-sounding name – the piattaforma inerziale – which translates to “inertia platform.” Someone described it to me once as 3D dynamics – it reads what the car is doing in three dimensions rather than the more usual two.
Driving
The Lamborghini Huracan is a terrific car. I’ve been lucky enough to drive it a few times before – on track and on the road – and every time I’ve come away loving it again. Let’s knock over a myth or two:
Myth 1: The Lamborghini Huracan Understeers
Yes. And no. Almost all road cars understeer, heck the Ferrari California T and 488GTB each has a smidge of turn-in understeer. I can tell you right now that both of those cars are brilliant and that the understeer is mild. So too is the Huracan’s. Now, not everyone gets to drive these, but internet and enthusiast wisdom tells you that understeer is always bad. It isn’t. If you need to swerve to avoid something – in low cars like this you have to do that a lot – turn-in oversteer is deeply undesirable. It’s how you back into hedges and it’s what made old Porsche 911s famous for backing into hedges and fences and deep ravines.
So, yes, the Huracan understeers, more so in Strada mode, but it’s controllable, consistent and very, very easily sorted. Does the 580-2 understeer as much? We’ll soon see…
So if you’re one of those people who says the Huracan understeers, you can either stop or you can accept the realities of making a car fit for the road. Feel free to argue with me in the YouTube comments.
Myth 2: It’s just an Audi R8 in drag
Yes. And no. While it’s true that the fundamentals of the Huracan and R8 are near-identical, it’s actually very difficult to put these two cars back to back and honestly say they’re the same car. The Huracan benefits greatly from Audi’s input into onboard electronics, switchgear and even sat nav, but that’s about it.
It feels like a Lamborghini, it feels related to the Aventador whereas the R8 really, really doesn’t. And that’s a great thing for everyone, because despite them being the same platform, they feel different because they are different.
Myth 3: The Huracan’s interior isn’t as good as the R8’s.
Yes. Guilty as charged. It’s not bad, but the Audi’s is better for less money.
And on with the show…
The Huracan looks tremendous in bright yellow. No, I wouldn’t own a car this colour if you paid me to, but honestly, it’s amazing. Obviously, without a roof, it’s much easier car to live with as far as getting in and out goes. The doors are basically the same as the Coupe’s and it’s obvious that this car was always designed to be a Spyder.
The fabric roof folds away pretty quickly and when you’re in, you don’t feel at all exposed. Well, if you’re under six feet tall you won’t feel exposed. Much taller and you’ll be peeking over the header rail. The seats are super comfortable and those speedster-style humps behind your head look magnificent but also add to the feeling that you’re in the car and not on it.
Fire it up with the switch hidden under that ridiculous (and fabulous) red missile-style guard and the V10 shrieks into life before settling down into a quiet, if busy idle. The fully digital dash actually arrived before Audi’s Virtual Cockpit and for the most part, it’s good if a bit crowded when you’re doing things other than threading it down your favourite road. And the (optional!) reversing camera, which costs an extortionate amount of money in my home country Australia is better only than the terrible McLaren one. And that McLaren reversing camera is the worse in any car I’ve ever driven.
The steering wheel is lovely to hold and like a Ferrari’s, holds the switches for indicator and wipers on the face of the spoke rather than on stalks. The paddle shifters are the best in the business – big alloy units (don’t ever specify carbon fibre shifters, they feel nasty), they’re fixed to the column. Without stalks, they’re easy to reach and don’t suffer from clutter.
The driving mode switch is on the lower spoke.
Strada is, in short, pretty awful. The throttle is too sloppy, the noise is close to non-existent and in cars with the magnetic suspension, it’s just too soft. Along with light steering, it’s best avoided. So I did. Probably drove it for five kilometres to make sure it was as I remembered it. People sniffily denounce the Spyder as a poser’s car, but even in this version, you don’t want Strada.
Corsa is all about getting the car straight and going very fast around a race track. Some people really like this mode – it’s stiff, focussed and delightfully noisy while searingly fast. It’s not as fun as Sport.
Sport mode. Yes.
Sport. Yes. That’s where the sweet spot is. Along with the road and the crackle, the rear wheel drive really does suit this car so much better. There’s little wrong with the AWD versions, but seriously, this is the one to have. It’s just that little bit pointy, the weight is not only a touch lower, but it’s in a better place. The understeer is gone with the flex of a toe.
Like the Toyota 86 and Mazda MX-5, Sport allows a bit of body roll, which means you’re more involved. The traction and stability systems are less interested in getting you straight and hooked up, keen to let you wag the tail and enjoy yourself. All the while that engine – so charismatic, operatic, symphonic – is delivering a metric ton of punch, with 540Nm ready and willing to fry the rear tyres if you punch the button to shut out the nannies. It is a spectacular car.
What’s eve better about this particular car is the fact that you can hear the engine so much more, almost feel the heat and pop-pop-pop of the exhaust against your ear as you hustle it through the corners. Straights are boring, the Huracan loves corners and is happy on bumpy roads, especially in Sport mode where the extra softness compared to the -4 irons out the imperfections a little better.
Most of all, this car will make you feel like a hero. The electronics are perfectly settled for the road, dealing with pretty much anything a bad road can throw at you. The steering weight is just about perfect – never too heavy but with plenty of feel, you know what those tyres are doing. And because those fronts aren’t stupidly wide, it doesn’t get dragged into ruts. Heck, you can even do a U-turn in one of these on some roads without causing a traffic jam.
Is it my favourite Huracan?
Well, that’s a good question. See that video up the top? Watch to find out…
Want to talk about it? You can find us on Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and Youtube (don’t forget to subscribe!).
All images by the inimitable Rhys Vandersyde from InSyde MediaPORTSMOUTH — Even before a fatal accident occurred at the Redhook Ale Brewery earlier this year, Tennessee brewer Chuck Skypeck began taking a close look at his supply of plastic beer kegs.
Skypeck's company, Ghost River Brewing, expanded its distribution quickly in the last three years, and it purchased plastic kegs to help meet the demand.
But after buying the kegs, the brewery owners decided to install a new safety feature at their facility in Memphis: a plexiglass shield.
Skypeck said Ghost River created an enclosure around its pressurized keg washer, with a locking door. He said it was “just a recognition that what can go wrong typically will.”
In a message on Twitter, Ghost River employee Joey Vaughan gave a more detailed explanation. It was accompanied by a photo of a broken plastic keg.
“This is why I stand behind a 1/2-inch thick Lexan blast shield when filling plastic kegs,” Vaughan wrote. “Sometimes, they blow up.”
Vaughan, who now owns a craft beer retail store in Mississippi, told Foster's he witnessed five plastic beer kegs rupture during his time as an employee at Ghost River, where he operated the keg washer.
It was only a few months after Ghost River installed the plexiglass shield that Ben Harris, a 26-year-old employee of Redhook Ale Brewery in Portsmouth, was killed by debris when a plastic keg exploded.
Harris, a newlywed expecting the birth of his first child, died April 24 when a keg he was cleaning with pressurized air exploded into two pieces. It broke apart at the seam, striking him in the head and chest.
Brewers were perplexed by the accident, which stood out as one of the only instances of a work-related keg explosion that many could recall.
However, since the accident, Foster's has learned of at least four other breweries around the country where plastic kegs have exploded while being cleaned in a pressurized keg washer.
In each instance, the breweries were using plastic kegs manufactured by a company called Plastic Kegs America.
In August, an unidentified brewery also submitted a report to the Consumer Product Safety Commission detailing explosions of two plastic kegs, with photographic evidence. Both were manufactured by PKA, according to the report.
The manufacturer of the keg involved in the Redhook incident has not been identified publicly, but a report set to be released this week by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration could shed new light on the mishap. OSHA faces a deadline of Wednesday, Oct. 24, to wrap up its investigation into the fatal keg blast at Redhook.
The tragedy in Portsmouth has also prompted the largest brewery trade group in the country to begin scrutinizing plastic kegs. The Brewers Association, which represents some 1,500 microbreweries, polled members this summer and received multiple reports about products made by Plastic Kegs America failing, according to director Paul Gatza.
The group is now soliciting information from keg manufacturers about how their products are designed and trying to determine which standards apply to beer kegs. Based on preliminary findings, Gatza said it appears there is no single manufacturing standard in use in the United States for either plastic or stainless steel kegs.
“We're not saying that plastic pressurized vessels aren't safe, but we're saying we don't have enough information about them — about how they're tested,” he said.
While plastic beer kegs have been in use in Europe for some time — ostensibly more than a decade — their introduction into the American market was largely spearheaded by a British company called CypherCo.
It opened a manufacturing operation for full-sized beer kegs in California under the name Plastic Kegs America, and has since established a headquarters in Texas.
Jim Holton, owner of Mount Pleasant Brewing Company in Michigan, said he's been using plastic kegs for about five years, ranging from the original European models to newer kegs designed by PKA when it opened in California.
“It was a great option for a startup brewery because stainless steel costs have skyrocketed,” he said.
The brewery was also suffering from theft of its kegs by people hoping to sell them as scrap metal. Mount Pleasant lost about 100 stainless steel kegs to theft in three years, he said.
Holton said he contacted PKA after the explosion at Redhook, and was assured of the product's safety.
Then on Aug. 6, one of the plastic kegs exploded while it was being cleaned on an automated machine, Holton said. One half of the keg soared upward, denting a 20-foot-high ceiling, and the bottom half slammed into the machine.
“If a brewer or a human being was standing over that keg when that happened, I see no reason why they would have survived that,” Holton said. “I think it would have been a catastrophic accident.”
After the accident, brewery workers inspected their equipment and discovered a pressure reducing valve wasn't working properly. As a result, the pressure being pumped into the keg could have reached as high as 100 psi, the maximum rating for the air compressor feeding the machine.
Plastic Kegs America indicates on its website that the product is designed to operate at a maximum pressure of 60 psi.
Holton said the brewery has now installed a double pressure relief valve and other safety components to prevent another keg from blowing out.
“Our incident was luckily that we lose a keg,” he said. “We don't lose a human life.”
At Marble Brewery in New Mexico, it was a brand new 15.5 gallon keg received with a shipment from Plastic Kegs America that exploded. The keg was being washed for the first time when it failed at the seam weld.
It burst with enough force to drive half of the keg into the 14-foot brewery ceiling, according to Marble Brewery President John Gozigian. The keg failed at the end of the wash cycle when the keg pressurizes to 30 PSI with CO2, according to an email sent by Gozigian to the Brewers Association earlier this year.
The brewery has verified that the keg washer's air and CO2 pressures were capped at 30 psi, and random tests showed kegs were reaching pressures below that level, he said.
Even if the regulators on the keg washer malfunctioned, Gozigian said, the pressure in the CO2 line tops out at about 100 psi.
Since the incident, Marble Brewery has started washing all kegs — metal and plastic — inside a steel cage, he said.
“This is a good example of what can go wrong, and in our case, it didn't cause any injuries, but it could have,” he told Foster's Friday, “so it's definitely spurred us to make some changes, and I think that all breweries really should look at their operations and make sure that their employees are safe.”
On Aug. 14, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission received a report from an unidentified brewery regarding plastic keg failures. It states a pair of 5.2 gallon kegs from PKA burst at the seams while being cleaned during this year. The most recent incident occurred on May 18, according to the report, which is available at SaferProducts.gov.
A photograph accompanying the report shows two black kegs with their top halves removed, sliced cleanly through the center.
“We had our instrumentation inspected and it was functioning properly,” the complaint states. “Apparently there is an installed'safety disc' that will fail prior to the keg exploding... the safety feature was never initiated. Fortunately no injuries were sustained. I have contacted PKA about this and they have been slow to respond. I know there are numerous accounts of this and one ended in death.”
Like some other breweries using plastic kegs, Cigar City Brewing in Tampa, Fla., has constructed a new blast cage around its keg purging station.
Founder Joey Redner said in 2009, a Plastic Kegs America product blew apart at the seam while it was being washed. The new cage was installed this year after the fatal accident at Redhook in April.
Redner said plastic kegs are fairly common in Florida breweries, and few have experienced problems, to his knowledge, but he still has concerns about the product.
“The thing is that there's not a whole lot of standards about what a keg should be, from a quantitative standpoint,” he said. “Like, how much pressure should it hold before it fails?”
Englishman Jeff Gunn has been involved in keg design for nearly five decades — long enough that his recent warnings about plastic kegs have generated a buzz among brewers.
Gunn, the president and CEO of IDD Process & Packaging, Inc., was personally involved in designing the Sankey keg system, a design widely used today by manufacturers of both stainless steel and plastic kegs.
Sankey kegs were developed as a recyclable, returnable aseptic container by a development team in England in the 1950s and 1960s. They were manufactured to withstand the rigors of international shipping.
When the product was introduced in America, Gunn claims a negotiation took place between some of the largest beer manufacturers in the country and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers regarding the safety standard for Sankey kegs.
ASME was pushing for keg manufacturers to build a pressure relief valve into the keg design, but according to Gunn, the group relented because stainless steel kegs were capable of withstanding at least 600 psi without bursting.
In the end, the ASME gave its stamp of approval to Sankey kegs, so long as they were rated with a max pressure of 60 psi, and were manufactured to withstand at least 10 times that amount of pressure.
However, since then, Gunn says knowledge of the compromise struck in the 1970s has been lost, and there's no mechanism to ensure modern kegs are being built to those specifications.
“That is what has turned out to be the mystery here,” he said.
Plastic Kegs America has declined multiple requests for comment since the Redhook incident. However, the company has been in communication with customers and the Brewers Association.
Foster's Daily Democrat obtained a copy of an Aug. 15 email message sent by PKA Sales Manager Darcie Symons to the Brewers Association's internal mailing list. The message indicates the company's products have a maximum working pressure of 60 psi and that the kegs will rupture at a minimum of 90 psi.
“Based on the information Plastic Kegs America has to date, in all instances of purported failure, the kegs have either been pressurized above 90 psi or have been damaged after being manufactured and sold,” Symons wrote. “We take every report seriously and investigate all claims. Plastic Keg America extends its deepest sympathies with regard to the accident in New Hampshire.”
PKA founder Simon Wheaton declined to comment on the Redhook investigation when he was contacted earlier this month.
“I think we both realize the direction that you're coming,” Wheaton said in a phone interview, “and I think on advice I have no comment to make at this time.”
Craft Brew Alliance Inc., which controls Redhook, announced this summer that it has hired an independent investigator to probe the cause of the keg explosion in April. One factor complicating the investigation is that there were no witnesses to the 7 a.m. incident, according to CEO Terry Michaelson wrote, who said in June the company might never be able to ascertain the cause. Redhook believes Ben Harris was in the process of emptying the plastic keg that exploded in order to stack it on a pallet when it blew apart. Michaelson said the same keg emptying procedure has been performed without incident at CBA breweries around the country for years. The company has said the keg involved in the accident was not owned by Redhook or any other brewery under the CBA umbrella. It was delivered to Redhook in error as part of a delivery of empty keg returns. The keg wasn't clearly marked with the manufacturer's name, but CBA is in contact with a manufacturer believed to have produced the keg, according to Michaelson.
Although some in the microbrewing industry are casting a wary eye toward plastic kegs in light of the tragedy at Redhook, several other brewers are standing firm behind Plastic Kegs America. Bryan Hermannsson, co-founder of Pacific Brewing Laboratory in San Francisco, said the brewery has been using PKA products for about nine months, and he has no complaints. “The only bad thing about them is their sort of perception on the market,” he said. However, that perception is starting to impact the brewery's bottom line. Hermannsson said contractors who brew the company's beer have stopped filling and cleaning plastic kegs. The brewery was also required to use stainless steel kegs at The Great American Beer Festival in Denver earlier this month. The Brewers Association, which sponsors the annual event, did not allow plastic kegs this year. Jeremy Pate, an Alabama brewery industry consultant, said he's been contacted by at least one client since the death at Redhook who was seeking advice about whether to use plastic kegs. “I said, 'Well, basically, I'm not afraid of plastic kegs,'” he remembered. “I understand, basically, how they're constructed. I understand that when manually washing kegs, I would have all of my safety regulators presets well below the safety standards of those kegs. If you have plastic kegs, you cannot run and treat them like stainless steel kegs.”Staggeringly prolific and responsible for some of the most forward-thinking music ever recorded, Brian Eno’s name – and, indeed, influence – courses through modern pop and rock. On 4 August, four Brian Eno solo albums will be released on remastered half-speed vinyl, charting his progression from art-rock icon to ambient pioneer in the best-quality audio yet.
For an artist as exacting as Eno, the half-speed master is the perfect way to experience some of his most important work. Released as double-albums to be played at 45rpm, they are, in the words of Miles Showell (the leading half-speed master expert who mastered the albums at Abbey Road Studios), “the ultimate for high-quality reproduction”. As Miles explains, “The faster the replay speed of the record, the higher the potential quality. Also, the shorter side times allow the level recorded to the master laquer discs to be increased, thereby improving the signal-to-noise ratio.”
In short, Miles says, “This artisan process results in cuts that have superior high-frequency response (treble) and solid and stable stereo images.” (Read more about the half-speed mastering process here.)
From his role as one sixth of the original Roxy Music line-up, to collaborations with David Bowie on the “Berlin Trilogy”, and handling production duties on Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music and U2’s The Joshua Tree, among countless other landmark releases, Eno can lay claim to having been a part of some of the most pivotal moments in music history. And that’s before you even get to his solo work.
After leaving Roxy Music, in 1973, Eno embarked on a run of albums that saw him further develop the art-rock experimentations he’d begun with his former band, before laying down the template for ambient music. In turns angular, flamboyant, hilarious and cryptic, Eno’s 1974 debut, Here Come The Warm Jets, threw down the gauntlet with a collection that merged conceptual creation with traditional songwriting, resulting in the like of ‘Dead Finks Don’t Talk’ and fan favourite ‘Baby’s On Fire’. It was “pop music”, but it was also a collision of sounds and theories that was postmodern before the music world even knew what that meant.
With an emerging set of theories, which Eno produced on a deck of cards collected under the title Oblique Strategies (example: “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”), Eno set about creating … Warm Jets’ follow-up, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Stripping back the large ensemble that had played on … Warm Jets in order to record with a smaller core group of musicians in effect presaged the paring-back that would take place on the epochal Another Green World.
When that album was released, in 1975, nothing like it had ever been heard in the realm of rock or pop. With an almost deceptive simplicity, songs such as ‘I’ll Come Running’ presaged dreampop by at least a decade, while the instrumental passages that wove their way through the album signposted Eno’s next groundbreaking move. Another Green World edged towards the ambient minimalism that he would soon embrace for the remainder of the 70s, and Before And After Science, released in December 1977, on the back of two collaborations with David Bowie, Low and “Heroes”, furthered that transformation.
Recorded over a two-year period, and whittled down to ten tracks from over 100, Before And After Science was, like Low, broadly split between art-rock songs on one side of the record, and minimalist instrumentals on the other. With contributions from Free’s Andy Fraser, the late Jaki Liebezeit of Can, Phil Collins and Robert Wyatt, it proved that, just as he had with Here Come The Warm Jets, Eno could create something truly unique out of disparate musicians and styles.
The half-speed masters of four Brian Eno solo albums, Here Comes The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World and Before And After Science, are due for release on 4 August and can be ordered here.A global Internet industry forecast released Tuesday contains a subtle message for the many Canadian Internet subscribers who’ve been billed “overage” fees after they unwittingly exceeded their monthly data allotment — get used to it.
‘The average Canadian broadband subscriber paid 3.9% more in 2011 than the average U.S. subscriber’
Canadian providers generally sell plans with lower bandwidth caps than their American peers, which drove percentage revenue gains higher here last year and widened a gap that has opened between Internet plans in the two countries, according to a new study from PwC.
And it is a trend expected to continue.
The international professional services firm said Internet access revenues generated by companies like Rogers Communications Inc. and BCE Inc, which include consumer wireline and wireless services, leapt by 17.5% in 2011. Much of the gain stemmed from fast-growing consumption through mobile devices.
Yet PricewaterhouseCoopers noted that moves by Rogers, Bell and others to introduce “tiers” that segment residential Internet plans into smaller and smaller buckets of bandwidth in recent years helped fuel overall higher revenue growth than in the United States.
“Canada’s broadband fees were lower than those in the United States in 2007–09, but as a result of large increases during the past two years, the average Canadian broadband subscriber paid 3.9% more in 2011 than the average U.S. subscriber did,” the report said.
The gradual implementation of bandwidth caps on monthly plans, sometimes called “usage-based billing,” has meant “Canadian providers can now charge premiums to high-bandwidth users,” PwC concluded.
[np-related]
Those who exhaust their caps also face costly overage fees, while rising use among all Internet customers “should continue to put upward pressure on pricing.”
Just how much? On a monthly basis, the PwC report suggested average bills will rise to $45 by 2016, up from the $38.43 paid on average in 2011.
On a compounded basis, “broadband access spending” for fixed Internet, which also takes into account new home starts, will grow by 9% to $7.5-billion by 2016. That compares with 5.5% annualized spending growth in the United States.
Large providers to the south, such as Comcast Corp., Verizon Communications and Time Warner Cable have faced greater difficulty implementing tiered pricing as consumer backlash and higher competitive intensity have thwarted their attempts. Comcast, however, moved this spring to impose tiers upon its customers.
Comcast’s initial cap starts at 300GB/month before additional fees apply. That equates to about 300 hours of web video, a cap still several times higher than average plans sold by Canadian operators.I was born in Mexico City, but I have lived just a few miles north of the Mexican border in San Diego for nearly 20 years. Yet the area between the part of the city where I was raised and the country I was born in is nearly off-limits to my family and I because of our immigration status.
Driving to the mall in San Ysidro (in the southernmost part of San Diego) or visiting the nearby city of Chula Vista for my mom’s job was always a risk because of Border Patrol presence.
Their agents are everywhere along California’s southern border. They can be seen at trolley stations, in the freeways, in grocery store parking lots. Their presence is a physical reminder of the constant threat of deportation felt by my family and my community.
Profile Who are the Dreamers? Show Hide Dreamers are young immigrants who would qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (Daca) program, enacted under Barack Obama in 2012. Most people in the program entered the US as children and have lived in the US for years “undocumented”. Daca gave them temporary protection from deportation and work permits. Daca was only available to people younger than 31 on 15 June 2012, who arrived in the US before turning 16 and lived there continuously since June 2007. Most Dreamers are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and the largest numbers live in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Donald Trump cancelled the program in September but has also said repeatedly he wants Congress to develop a program to “help” the population.
I have more protection than my mother, my aunts, uncles and other relatives and friends because of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which from 2012 to September this year protected me and about 800,000 people from deportation as long as we didn’t commit any crimes.
But our future is in jeopardy, because President Trump decided to terminate Daca. Trump says he wants to reach a deal that gives us Dreamers protection, but he is also pushing for more border security and immigration enforcement.
Politicians are using our lives as political bargaining chips in order to further militarize our communities.
This is what the hours after being deported look like Read more
The fact is that border states have become highly militarized throughout the years, with thousands of unaccountable agents who are able to stop, frisk and interrogate any community member without probable cause. Border agents that have committed murder have not been held accountable for their actions and continue to serve for the Border Patrol today.
Trump’s push for even more border agents makes us feel especially targeted, as an estimated one in five Daca recipients live in the border region, and half of all Dreamers live in the four southern border states – California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
To increase border security in exchange for a deal on Daca, presumably through the Dream Act being pushed by Democrats, could mean exposing our parents and family members to Trump’s already vast deportation machine on the border where I live.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dreamers on the US side of the border speak with relatives during the ‘Keep Our Dream Alive’ binational meeting. Photograph: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
The fear of being deported never completely goes away, but because of Daca I have been able to do things I never thought I’d be able to: pursue higher education, have a fulfilling career and get a driver’s license – all without the same level of crushing worry about being detained or deported.
Uncertainty about our fate as immigrant residents of this country looms large. But so does our faith in each other and the ability of people of conscience to defeat the worst of what Trump has proposed.
While I could have felt helpless on 5 September, when it was announced Daca was ending, I instead stood on stage with another activist and fellow Dreamer for a rally to show the White House we would not take this decision lightly.
The fight for the Dream Act is reaching its peak – but time is running out Read more
I felt so much energy from the people looking at us. You could see hope in their eyes as they chanted with us, screamed and yelled. That’s when I knew we had more love than hate.
As Congress continues to debate our futures, time continues to run out for us. Our ability to do good for our communities is weakening every day. It is unacceptable for our communities and our immigrant youth to back down now.
We have an opportunity and a duty to defend the lives and rights of people in our communities who are threatened by oppressive and immoral policies in a new age of hate and division. Standing down is no longer an option.
This is a moment crying out for moral leadership. Americans must do what is right, and listen to millions of immigrant youth and our allies calling for immediate passage of a clean Dream Act.
The time is now.
Itzel Guillen is an immigrant integration manager at Alliance San DiegoEveryone make mistakes, including scientists. Should we trust our science with those who admit to and correct them, or with those who deny and ignore them?
In the past week, two key examples have emerged illustrating how the two sides of the climate science debate react to mistakes. In both cases, the scientists made the same basic errors, but drew opposite conclusions (both wrong) about the near-term warming of the planet. The media responses to these miscalculations by each side show a sharp contrast.
An Argentinian environmental group called Universal Ecological Fund (FEU) released a report which incorrectly stated that the planet will warm approximately 1.5°C between now and 2020. In a contrasting article, Dr. Richard Lindzen (a prominent climate scientist who is skeptical that the consequences of global warming will be dangerous), argued that we are already over 80% of the way to the greenhouse gas levels that the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims will cause a 2-4.5°C increase in global temperatures. But global temperatures have only risen by less than 1°C, so, Lindzen argues, The IPCC predictions are wrong and we have nothing to worry about.
Both Dr. Lindzen and the FEU rely upon the IPCC's estimated range of values for the climate sensitivity, which is the factor that tells us how much the planet will warm in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. What both parties stumbled over is the fact that this factor tells us how much the planet must warm to reach an equilibrium in radiated power. When the greenhouse effect is increased, the Earth's heat radiation is impeded - global warming is the planet's way of restoring its full ability to get rid of heat. However, this warming doesn't happen instantly. The Earth is covered in oceans, and as anyone who has tried to make a hot beverage will tell you, water is slow to heat up.
Over 90% of the heating goes into warming the oceans. That means that even when we stop increasing the greenhouse effect, there will be a considerable delay while the oceans, lands, etc. warm to their respective equilibrium temperatures
The mistake made by the FEU was to assume that the full impact of the added CO2 would be reached within a decade: that was wrong, the lag is far greater. The mistake made by Dr. Lindzen was to assume that the full impact of the CO2 added to date was already being felt: that was wrong, for exactly the same reason. In fact, the planet has warmed approximately 0.8°C over the past century, and the IPCC estimates that if we were to freeze atmospheric greenhouse gases at today's levels, the planet would continue to warm another 0.6°C before reaching equilibrium.
Both the FEU and Dr. Lindzen calculated the amount of global warming we expect from all man-made greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, etc.). However, neither accounted for man-made emissions of aerosols (small particles from fossil fuel combustion which block sunlight and cool the Earth's surface), or other cooling effects.
By accounting for all human-caused warming effects but neglecting our cooling effects, Dr. Lindzen and the FEU both over-estimated how much warming we expect to see in the short-term. However, the two drew dramatically different conclusions from this mistake. The FEU, thinking that we should expect to see the full equilibrium temperature for our level of CO2 almost immediately, concluded that we should expect to see exceptionally rapid global warming over the next decade; whereas Dr. Lindzen, thinking that we are already experiencing the full equilibrium temperature for our level of CO2 now, concluded that continued global warming will be nothing much to worry about.
The response to the FEU errors has been straighforward and comprehensive. Several journalists, climate bloggers, and climate scientists informed the FEU of their mistakes prior to the report's release. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the report was released anyway.
In a strong showing of scientific and journalistic integrity, a number of media sources have devoted articles to noting and correcting the errors in the FEU report, including The Guardian, RealClimate, The Huffington Post, and many others. Rather than deny, ignore, or propagate the errors, scientists and the media immediately acknowledged and corrected them.
By contrast, former TV weatherman Anthony Watts' popular global warming skeptic blog, WattsUpWithThat, soon ran Lindzen's article with no commentary or analysis. As a result, Lindzen's errors and incorrect conclusions were propagated to a much larger audience, which, based on the blog comments, was very receptive to the article. The article was soon re-published by The National Review and numerous other blogs and media sources, with a distinct lack of analysis or commentary. Lindzen's errors continue to spread, unacknowledged and uncorrected.
Ironically, Watts' blog also ran a story which was highly critical of Scientific American for initially publishing an article containing the FEU errors. However, just a few hours later, Scientific American ran a new |
people do the shit that we should be doing."
"But isn't it a bit too late to get the proper training?" Wiggum asked.
"Have you seen the soldiers we've been watching? Do they look like they have any proper training?"
Wiggum pondered that for a second, "Well there's that one blue soldier."
"Which blue soldier?"
"That one blue chick."
"Which one?!"
"The light blue one."
"Which light blue one?!"
"Good point." Wiggum conceded, he sat back up in his chair looking worried for some reason but also with a renewed sense of hope. Maybe they could turn their lives around. His face lit up, "And hey, we could probably join them, they seem...well they don't seem nice but they seem tolerable."
"Yes! Now you're getting it!" the hope was back in Cid's face as well as this opportunity fell into their lap, "But don't we have to like, you know, send in paperwork and shit about our transfer?"
Wiggum shrugged, "I have no fucking idea how that works. I have no fucking idea how any of this shit works. I mean, how did we even get this job in the first place?"
"True." Cid agreed, "Alright then it's settled? New start?" He brought his fist up next to his partner and Wiggum looked at it. It wasn't certain whether he still had that doubt in his mind or he just didn't know what the fuck Cid was doing with his fist stretched out like that, but it took awhile for Wiggum to respond.
But finally he did. Wiggum smiled and bumped his partner's fist, "New start."
Elsa had practically been chasing Anna around her base for five minutes as she paced around aimlessly and to be honest she was getting pretty damn tired trying to catch up to-
"Hey what the hell?! I thought you said you didn't know where the specialist lady was!"
It was right then and there that Elsa finally noticed they had made their way to the room where she had her fight with Sloth and at first she panicked as she got closer to the door, but that emotion soon turned into exasperation when she went inside and saw Sloth sitting on a bed surprised to see the Red Base leader here.
What is she still doing here?! Has she been waiting for me this whole time?! Why?!
Elsa and Sloth stared directly at each other with that same look of panic, surprise and understandable shock at this entire situation. As if the redhead in between them didn't exist. The redhead in question was completely oblivious to the dilemma, much more concerned with the one thing that concerned her. She sighed, "You know what? It doesn't matter. I've got what I wanted and that is your complete and utter surrender."
Elsa snapped back into reality and shook her head, "Wait what? I haven't surrendered."
"You haven't surrendered yet." Anna pointed out.
"I'm not gonna..." Elsa sighed with complete exasperation. She pinched the bridge of her nose, "What do you even want anyway?"
"Getting to the point, I like that." Anna waved her hands all around her, "I want this."
"You want this room?" Elsa questioned.
"No, I want your base."
"I'm sorry I'm confused."
"Well I mean I don't know exactly how to explain this any further I mean I think I was being pretty clear when I said I want your base but I guess I'll try. I want this giant metal structure thingie with all these empty rooms except for that one storage room that is just full of a lot of stuff by the way, I mean I think I saw a throne in there and then I'll paint the base red obviously because blue sucks and-"
"Alright alright slow down! I meant why are you doing all of this?"
"All of what?"
Elsa slapped her forehead and groaned, "Why the fuck did you attack my base?! And why do you want me to surrender so badly?!"
"Oh, right!" Anna took a deep breath, "Yeah you see I didn't really take too kindly to you guys taking our flag, I totally knew it was you by the way I mean who else would it be, and I especially didn't like how you just up and sent a specialist out on us immediately afterwards- hi again, by the way." She waved back to Sloth and she, still confused, politely waved back.
"Anyway if that wasn't good enough you decided to take one of my soldiers as a hostage! Why?! Anyway I figured since you did all of that to us the least you could do is give us your base and since I knew you wouldn't just willingly give it up I hatched a plan in order for you to make...you...give it up. So I sent specialist lady over here to distract you guys while we snuck over to your base and opened fire." Anna took another deep breath as she continued, "And now we're here!"
Elsa had been busy registering this rapid flow of information coming from the redhead's mouth and was trying to find the best way to respond. "Look, I..." she started off, "I'm sorry about all of that but you have to believe me when I say that all of this, everything you just said, was all just a big misunderstanding."
Anna, needless to say, overreacted at Elsa's words and pointed her shotgun right at her face, "And why should I believe you?!"
Elsa's eyes widened at this action and raised her hands up in surrender, "Holy shit! What the fuck, look I'm telling the truth alright? If you just give me some time I can explain everything. Just...put the fucking gun down!"
"You're a coward! And a cheat! Kicking a man...woman...while she's down, who does that?! I don't wanna hear it out of you, I just want your goddamn base!"
Elsa couldn't believe what she was hearing. Why wouldn't this chick listen to reason?! Why was she being so goddamn stubborn?! This was frustrating, and unbelievable and...very very familiar. She looked over at Sloth who still didn't understand what was going on here and gave her a look of understanding and clarity.
This is what it felt like, huh? This is what it felt like when I just wouldn't listen to a single word you were saying? God, I...I'm such a bitch.
She looked back towards the furious red base commander and opened her mouth to say something but was once again cut off by noises coming from the outside. But it wasn't gunfire this time, no they were voices. And they seemed to be getting closer.
Six soldiers entered the room they were conversing in all talking over each other about some discernible topic and she heard one of them talking monotonously in a language she couldn't make out.
"What the hell are you guys doing here?!" Elsa said. Her voice pierced through the flurry of voices and shut them up as they all stared at the blonde soldier.
"Well hey there Elsa, when did you get here?" Duck asked.
Elsa didn't answer and instead asked her question once more.
"Short answer? I have no idea." answered Spacecati, "Long answer? We got bored."
"Your long answer can't be shorter than your short answer, dumbass." replied Hikari Oni who had a very good point.
"Shut up...blue person. I'm sorry I never got your name."
"It's Private Hikari Oni."
"Thanks. Now shut up, Private Oni."
Hikari Oni took offense to that and punched his shoulder hard.
"Stop flirting with the enemy, Spacecati."
"Shut it, Cupcakes. Your armor's pink."
"You already said that."
"Well it needed repeating."
"Yeah why is your armor pink?" Hikari Oni asked.
"We have no idea. We've been trying to find that out for awhile actually." Bubbles replied.
"Är det här en av de 'Fråga inte, berätta inte' typ av saker?" (Is this one of those "Don't ask, don't tell" kind of things?)
"Okay this isn't about me, alright? Why are we making this conversation about me?"
"Will you idiots shut up?! I can't even hear myself think!" Anna cried out with her voice booming over this pointless argument.
Elsa groaned and rubbed her temples, "I'm just...I'm gonna go outside where it's quiet. I'll let you guys sort this out."
And with that Elsa left the base amidst the sea of bickering, with Sloth unknowingly right behind her.I have learnt making kimchi via Maangchi two years ago.
Now, after perfecting the skills, I will make the kimchi almost every month. Now even my siblings also join in my love with kimchi.
Thank you Maangchi to share with us her easy kimchi recipe. I have made some variations to her recipe for my version of LAZY Kimchi.
Instead of flour porridge, I blend apples to make the kimchi paste less watery. Also as I use around 3 apples per making, I seldom put in sugar. I only use 1 vegetable which is the cabbage. No carrot, raddish and green leek. To save cost, I use blended dried chili (40c only and can be used for 4 batch of kimchi-making) instead of authentic korean hot pepper flakes (cost around $7 for 250g in Korean Mart In Singapore) No seafood and fish sauce.
My kimchi may not taste authentic but it suits my taste. I will usually eat the kimchi as snacks between meals or during watching TV.
If you are interested in the even simplified way, here is my modified recipe.
LAZY Kimchi by aearthr
Ingredients:
2.5 kg of China Napa Cabbage (I buy from NTUC and they cost around $2.)
A handful of dried chili (I can’t eat too spicy.)
2 – 3 big apples (Replace flour porridge)
Half cup garlic
Half cup onion
Teaspoon size of ginger
1 cup of water
Half cup of salt
Instructions:
Wash and cut cabbage to bite size. For a tub of cabbage, use around half tub of water to soak and half cup of salt for salting. To speed up process, add a heavy item to increase the osmosis process of cabbage. Eg. a big round wooden chop board. Wait for 1.5 hour. In the meantime, prepare the kimchi paste. Blend dried chilli, apples, garlic, onion, ginger, a dash of salt and water together. Sparingly amount of water to allow blender to work. Wash and drain the salted cabbage. Layer the cabbage alternatively with kimchi paste. If you still have some leftover sauce, just pour all over the cabbage. Some stirring and mixing will do. As I only use the container to mix the kimchi paste into cabbage, I cannot do much mixing. Usually, I just allow the cabbage to soak in the kimchi sauce. Store at dry and cool area for 2 – 3 days depending at your room temperature. Sunny season for 2 days and rainy season for 3 days in Singapore. Every day, stir and mix the kimchi. While fermenting, the kimchi will decrease in size, and the kimchi paste becomes more watery. Try to squeeze out the air in between the kimchi by pushing the kimchi flat into container. Taste the kimchi for the sour level. Once you are satisfied with the sourness, put the kimchi container to refrigerator. To prevent the kimchi smell polluting your whole fridge, wrap it with layers of plastic bags.
Related article: Kimchi Fried Rice
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0.000000 0.000000BEIJING (Reuters) - China tested emerging military technology aimed at destroying missiles in mid-air after an initial test in 2010, state media said on Sunday, in a move that will unnerve its neighbors.
A brief report by the official Xinhua news agency said the military carried out a “land-based mid-course missile interception test within its territory”.
“The test has reached the pre-set goal,” the report quoted an unnamed Defence Ministry official as saying. “The test is defensive in nature and targets no other country.”
It did not specify whether any missile or object had been destroyed in the test.
“Although no other detailed information about the test was released from the military authorities, weapon system experts said such a test could build shield for China’s air defenses by intercepting incoming warheads such as ballistic missiles in space,” the report added.
People’s Liberation Army officials and documents in recent years have said developing anti-missile technology is one focus of defense spending, which has grown by double-digits over many years.
The latest flexing of China’s maturing military hardware comes as Beijing is involved in increasingly bitter territorial disputes in the East China Sea with Japan and in the South China Sea with several Southeast Asian nations.
Beijing says its military spending is for defensive purposes and the modernization of outdated forces.Assessing where things stand for the Oregon football team entering the start of preseason camp Aug. 8.
OFFENSIVE LINE
Who's back: After the loss of three seniors from the 2015 starting five, Oregon's offensive line this fall will be anchored by two very experienced veterans. Senior Cameron Hunt is on track to be a four-year starter entering 2016; the only question is whether he slots at his familiar home, right guard, or moves outside to tackle. He hoped to get practice reps at tackle in the spring, but was held out for most of the month and so couldn't work on making the transition. The other returning starter is in a new home, after junior Tyrell Crosby moved from right tackle to left tackle in April. Crosby is a tough, athletic blocker who is on the preseason watch list for the Outland Trophy, and who figures to draw some NFL draft interest next spring should he continue to progress with the Ducks.
In the absence of departed seniors Tyler Johnstone, Matt Pierson and Matt Hegarty, the rest of Oregon's junior class is champing at the bit to seize their opportunity and break into the lineup. Doug Brenner, Jake Pisarcik and Evan Voeller have received spot duty over the past three seasons, but none has been able to capitalize and secure a full-time job. They'll have the chance to do so this fall.
Who's new: Standing in the way of those juniors will be a redshirt freshman class that dramatically asserted itself in the spring. The emergence of one, center Jake Hanson, was not unexpected. He was second on the depth chart behind Hegarty for much of the 2015 season, though the decision was made at midseason to hold him out as a redshirt. Hanson slid into the No. 1 spot during spring drills, and performed with aplomb. More surprising were the practice reps his classmates Calvin Throckmorton and Shane Lemieux got with the first unit. They rotated in with that group at mid-April and held fast to the jobs, spending much of the rest of the month with that quintet.
Yet another redshirt freshman, Zach Okun, also seemed to turn a corner in the spring, and could insert himself into the mix this preseason. But it's a newcomer from over the summer, graduate transfer Zac Morgan, who has the potential to make the biggest impact on the O line in 2016. Morgan was a two-year starter for Dayton before transferring to Oregon for his final season of eligibility, and any fifth-year transfer figures to have a solid shot at starting. Three true freshmen will be on hand in the fall, including Jacob Capra, who participated in spring drills, along with Logan Bathke and Samuel Poutasi.
ESPN's take: Good shape: "We're upgrading the Ducks from the 'We'll see' category from the pre-spring ranking because while all the specific positions might not be in place, the players are there."
ROB'S TAKE
Projected depth chart?
LT: Tyrell Crosby, Jr.; Evan Voeller, Jr.; Brady Aiello, RFr.
LG: Jake Pisarcik, Jr.; Shane Lemieux, RFr.; Davis Miyashiro-Saipaia, So.; Samuel Poutasi, Fr.
C: Jake Hanson, RFr.; Zach Okun, RFr.
RG: Cameron Hunt, Sr.; Doug Brenner, Jr.; Mike Miller, RFr.; Jacob Capra, Fr.
RT: Zac Morgan, Sr.; Calvin Throckmorton, RFr.; Logan Bathke, Fr.
What to Watch: It's going to be a revealing first day of camp Monday. The first question will be, where does Morgan slot into the rotation, and how does that impact Hunt? Morgan started at right tackle in 2014 and then left tackle last season, so he's got some versatility. If Crosby's new home is on the left side, Morgan and Hunt could provide a very experienced right side. The other question is, where do things stand between the juniors and redshirt freshmen vying at the other spots? No doubt the young guys were a pleasant surprise in April, but it's reasonable to think a message was being sent, too, to the juniors, about not getting complacent and assuming they're the "next man up." Figuring the veterans were motivated by the emergence of the freshmen, it was no doubt a very competitive summer in the weight room and on the practice fields.Another fantastic book to add to the holiday must. Julie Hasson’s Vegan Casseroles: Pasta Bakes, Gratins, Pot Pies, and More.
Casseroles are a fairly new occurrence in our house. They are completely opposite of Indian food. Indian food usually has multiple dishes served with freshly made flatbreads or rice or grains and some condiments. Sure they all can end up in a bowl like layers, but each dish is generally made separately.
Casseroles though are so much simpler. Just assemble them and bake. It works out perfectly when you dont want to use 4 pans and when you don’t want to stand in the kitchen the whole time while entertaining. The problem that can happen is that sometimes it can be difficult to predict what taste and flavor the final casserole will have. No worries there. Julie’s book helps you make the perfect casseroles every time!
MY LATEST VIDEOS
The book has chapters on Vegan Casserole Pantry, tips and tricks, One dish Appetizers, Skillet Casseroles, Old favorites and new Twists, Pasta Casseroles, Vegetable Casseroles, Dessert Casseroles and Sauces, Basics and Toppings. I decided to make the Spinach Florentine because it looks so perfectly creamy and dreamy.
I also made the Chili Mac casserole. who wouldn’t. The spicy chili and creamy Mac. I was planning on making the truffle Mac and cheese as well. It was one of those weeks where the only thing I wanted was some from of pasta. What can I say :). Clearly I was in a hurry to take pictures and eat it all because I missed adding crushed tortilla chips on top.
I am eyeing the Sundried Tomato Quiche with Hash brown crust (yum), Jambalaya, loaded nacho fries(every weekend!), Skillet Chilaquiles(made a variation of these for breakfast), Enchiladas, Tamale Pie, bumble-berry cobbler and so much more.
Julie covers the gravies, sauces and toppings in the last chapter and that chapter needs to be on the kitchen counter. The simple sauces work in many recipes in so many ways.
Julie is the author of Vegan Diner and Vegan Pizza, both are popular comfort food books.
The Publisher is giving away a copy of the book to one of the blog readers! Please enter the giveaway at the end of the post. Also get the recipe for the delicious Spinach florentine below.
This month is going to be full of giveaways 🙂
I added Julie’s buttery topping to our Vegan Spinach Florentine Casserole. The crisp buttery top also keeps the pasta moist.
Reprinted with permission from Vegan Casseroles © 2014 by Julie Hasson, Running Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Creamy Spinach Florentine
Ever since I was a child, I have adored creamed spinach. This casserole totally reminds me of the stuffed spinach crèpes I would order as a teenager at this little crèpe restaurant near our house. I could never get enough of them. This casserole doesn’t disappoint, with a luscious creamy sauce, spinach, and some dry sherry thrown in for good measure.
Serves 4
8 ounces dried shell pasta or macaroni
1 (10-ounce) bag frozen spinach, thawed
1 recipe Almost Alfredo Sauce (see below)
3 to 4 tablespoons dry sherry, depending how strong of a sherry taste you like
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes
1 teaspoon granulated onion
3/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 recipe buttery crumb topping
Method:
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Grease an 8-inch square glass or ceramic baking dish.
In a large pot of lightly salted boiling water, add the pasta and cook according to package directions until al dente. Don’t overcook the pasta, especially if you’re using one that is gluten-free. Drain the pasta well and transfer to a large bowl.
Drain most of the liquid out of the spinach by gently squeezing it, but don’t squeeze it completely dry. Add the spinach to the pasta, along with the sauce, mixing until the pasta is thickly coated. Add the sherry, Dijon mustard, nutritional yeast, granulated onion, and nutmeg, stirring well. Add salt and pepper, and adjust seasonings to taste. Scoop the pasta mixture into the prepared baking dish. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes, or until hot and slightly bubbly around the edges. Remove from the oven and serve.
Gluten-Free: Use a gluten-free oat flour in the sauce and gluten-free pasta (my favorite here is brown rice macaroni).
Almost Alfredo Sauce
Although this isn’t exactly a true alfredo sauce with loads of cream and butter, it is an all-purpose creamy white sauce, which works really well in so many recipes. There are a number of variations for it, from adding truffle oil to white wine. It’s so versatile, that it may just become your new secret sauce.
Makes about 3 cups
21/2 cups plain unsweetened soymilk
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup raw unsalted cashews, soaked for at least 2 hours and drained
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes
3 tablespoons oat flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
11/4 teaspoons fine sea salt, or more to taste
1 teaspoon granulated onion
Method:
In the jar of a blender, combine the soymilk, water, cashews, nutritional yeast, oat flour, cornstarch, salt, and granulated onion. Blend the mixture at high speed until completely smooth and no bits of nuts remain. If you don’t have a big blender, blend the mixture in two batches.
Transfer the mixture to a large saucepan and place over medium-high heat. Bring the sauce to a simmer, whisking continuously. Once the mixture comes to a simmer, reduce the heat slightly and cook, whisking continuously until thickened, about 5 to 10 minutes.
Tip: Use a good-tasting unsweetened soymilk for this sauce, as the flavor really comes through. If you’re using a high-speed blender, you can skip the soaking step for the cashews and just use them dry. Add a little extra water to blend if needed.
Variations:
To make a truffle sauce, to the blender jar add 1 to 3 tablespoons truffle oil to taste and reduce the granulated onion to 1/2 teaspoon. Add a few sprinkles of freshly grated nutmeg.
To make a white wine sauce, replace 3/4 cup of soymilk with an equal amount of white wine.
To make this sauce lower in fat, reduce the cashews to 1/3 cup.
Gluten-Free: Use a gluten-free oat flour.
Please enter the giveaway below to win a print copy of the book! (This is within US only). Giveaway is over.
a Rafflecopter giveawayParty reverses decision not to use internal canvass data that reveals people’s voting histories after three of the four leadership candidates raised concerns
Labour has agreed to check the voting history of new members and supporters after it came under pressure from the leadership campaigns of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall to step up its efforts to weed out suspected infiltrators.
The party reversed its decision not to use its internal canvass data that reveals people’s voting histories, after three out of the four candidates raised concern about the robustness of checks on new members and supporters.
It also backtracked on its previous refusal to publish the breakdown of how the three different sections of the membership end up voting – the 293,000 members, 148,000 supporters signed up through trade unions, and 113,000 registered supporters who paid £3 to take part.
The Guardian revealed last week that a meeting of the party’s procedure committee decided not to use the canvass data to conduct extra checks against legal advice on how to protect the contest against legal challenge.
But on Tuesday, the campaigns of Burnham, Cooper and Kendall all demanded that voting history should be checked in suspect cases, as it emerged that 56,000 new applicants were duplicates or not on the electoral roll, while around 3,200 were found to be supporters of other parties.
Labour would not reveal exactly how it would use the voting history of new members and supporters to determine whether that person genuinely supports the aims and values of the party.
But it is understood that people will not be automatically excluded based on how the canvass data says they have voted in the past. It is more likely that a new supporter found to have voted Conservative, Green, Liberal Democrat or for another party would be telephoned by party HQ to check whether they have just changed their political persuasion or are in fact an infiltrator.
A Labour spokesman said: “The procedure committee met today to receive feedback from yesterday’s candidates’ briefings. The following decisions were made: canvassing material will be used to inform work to establish whether participants are supporters of the aims and values of the Labour party.
“That as well as the one-person, one-vote overall result, the results of the leader and deputy leader elections will be broken down by party members, affiliated supporters and registered supporters. No other breakdown of the results will be provided.”
Labour has revealed that phone calls to samples of new sign-ups found a small proportion – 4.4% of registered supporters and 2.4% of union-affiliated supporters – were actually backers of other parties.
While Corbyn is still clearly the frontrunner in the contest, supporters of the other campaigns believe undiscovered infiltration could make a difference in a tight contest.
A source in one campaign team said there was particular concern that the party had only managed to identify the social media profiles of 45,000 people, meaning verification is largely reliant on MPs and local parties checking to see if they recognise any of the names on the voter list as prominent supporters of other parties.
Corbyn has dismissed fears about Tory infiltration of the process as a “lot of nonsense” and suggested that people barred from the contest should be given a right of appeal.
The move to exclude people deemed to be supporters of other parties has been condemned by many of those affected on social media as a Labour purge.
It emerged on Tuesday that Mark Serwotka, the leader of the PCS civil service union, is one of those who has been prevented from voting as a registered supporter.If you’re trying to find ways how to keep your house cool without spending a lot or having to do some major remodeling to accommodate a new HVAC system, there are things you can do to stay cool. They involve short-term and long-term solutions as well as things that are free or nearly free and things that involve a bit of an investment.
A complete HVAC system can cost thousands, and there are many of us who simply don’t have the money for something like that in our budgets. Many houses can’t accommodate them because of space restrictions either. Whether your air conditioning system has recently gone out and you’re learning to live without it or you never had one in the first place, you don’t have to suffer from the annoying and dangerous heat.
Learning how to keep your house cool is as simple as following these five pieces of advice:
1. Be smart about sunlight, openings and exhaust fans. Let’s start with the most obvious advice. Keeping light out and doors closed can dramatically cut the temperature inside when it’s hot outside. And running exhaust fans is a bad idea if you have any source of air conditioning at all because these extractor fans can pull all your cool air out, wasting it. If you have a window AC unit or a portable room air conditioner, make sure your home is sealed up so you don’t lose any of the cool air you’re able to generate.
2. Avoid cooking, especially using the oven. In generations past, people actually had outdoor kitchens to use in the summertime. That’s because cooking generates a lot of heat – even if you aren’t using the oven. Serve salads and cold foods on the hottest days. When you must cook, choose quick-cooking dishes you can do on top of the stove. Or better yet, set up your own outdoor kitchen with a barbecue grill. You can even heat casseroles and items in saucepans on a grill. Just don’t go in and out too many times and let out any cool indoor air you have.
3. Take full advantage of cool night air. When the temperature drops below 80 degrees outside, it’s time to open windows and doors. Just make sure it’s actually cool at night because it doesn’t always cool off when daytime temps soar over 100 degrees. But if it does, the air can be really refreshing. You can even open two or more windows and use a fan to create a wind tunnel effect to pull the hot air out of your home and the cool air in. Remember to close the windows before the outdoor air starts heating up again.
4. Switch to better indoor lighting. If you haven’t already ditched those old incandescent light bulbs but are already looking for information on how to keep your house cool, it’s time to get rid of them. Not only do they generate just as much heat as light but they also use lots of electricity you could be using to cool your home in some other way. While compact fluorescent bulbs were recommended until recently, skip those and move on to bright, ultra-efficient LED bulbs, which are getting more affordable with each passing day. You could see a dramatic difference if you’ve been leaving a lot of incandescent lights on.
5. Think about long-term home improvements. When looking for information on how to cool a room or an entire home, you’re likely to run across some really expensive suggestions. But some of them actually make sense in the long run. You can get a good return on your investment when you caulk and weatherstrip, and it might not hurt to add some awnings or trees around your property to block out some of the sun’s warming rays. If you can keep your home from absorbing warmth from the sun or letting in warm air through cracks or openings, you’re on your way to keeping your house cooler than ever before.
When you’re looking at how to keep your house cool, you’ll also see plenty of mentions of whole house attic fans. These are indeed one of the best ways to keep your home cool in the summer, but they aren’t cheap. The good news is that they’re less expensive than ever before. If you’re making changes and don’t plan to ever have central air conditioning, it might be worth considering adding an attic fan. You’ll get great results if you can manage it.
Whether you’re trying to learn how to cool a room where you spend most of your time or how to keep your house cool without having to spend much money or install air conditioning, you can benefit from these tips. I know they work because I use them myself.The Buckle Inc., a clothier that operates more than 450 stores in 44 U.S. states, disclosed Friday that its retail locations were hit by malicious software designed to steal customer credit card data. The disclosure came hours after KrebsOnSecurity contacted the company regarding reports from sources in the financial sector about a possible breach at the retailer.
On Friday morning, KrebsOnSecurity contacted The Buckle after receiving multiple tips from sources in the financial industry about a pattern of fraud on customer credit and debit cards which suggested a breach of point-of-sale systems at Buckle stores across the country.
Later Friday evening, The Buckle Inc. released a statement saying that point-of-sale malware was indeed found installed on cash registers at Buckle retail stores, and that the company believes the malware was stealing customer credit card data between Oct. 28, 2016 and April 14, 2017. The Buckle said purchases made on its online store were not affected.
As with the recent POS-malware based breach at Kmart, The Buckle said all of its stores are equipped with EMV-capable card terminals, meaning the point-of-sale machines can accommodate newer, more secure chip-based credit and debit cards. The malware copies account data stored on the card’s magnetic stripe. Armed with that information, thieves can clone the cards and use them to buy high-priced merchandise from electronics stores and big box retailers.
The trouble is that not all banks have issued chip-enabled cards, which are far more expensive and difficult for thieves to counterfeit. Customers who shopped at compromised Buckle stores using a chip-based card would not be in danger of having their cards cloned and used elsewhere, but the stolen card data could still be used for e-commerce fraud.
Visa said in March 2017 there were more than 421 million Visa chip cards in the country, representing 58 percent of Visa cards. According to Visa, counterfeit fraud has been declining month over month — down 58 percent at chip-enabled merchants in December 2016 when compared to the previous year.
The United States is the last of the G20 nations to make the shift to chip-based cards. Visa has said it typically took about three years after the liability shifts in other countries before 90% of payment card transactions were “chip-on-chip,” or generated by a chip card used at a chip-based terminal.
Virtually every other country that has made the jump to chip-based cards saw fraud trends shifting from card-present to card-not-present (online, phone) fraud as it became more difficult for thieves to counterfeit physical credit cards. Data collected by consumer credit bureau Experian suggests that e-commerce fraud increased 33 percent last year over 2015.
Tags: credit card breach, EMV, Experian, POS malware, The Buckle Inc. breach, VisaA public prosecutor referred Cumhuriyet daily Editor-in-Chief Can Dündar and Ankara Representative Erdem Gül to court with an arrest demand on Thursday for unlawful publications regarding the illegal search conducted on trucks belonging to Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Later on the same day, the two were arrested on grounds of supporting terror and espionage.
Dündar and Gül were charged with "providing documents regarding security of the state", "political and military espionage", "releasing secret documents" and "propaganda for terror organization."
The trucks were stopped in early January, 2014, in southern Adana province while they were carrying supplies to Turkmens of Bayırbucak region northern Syria's Latakia according to government officials. The raid against the trucks was allegedly carried out by officials linked with the controversial Gülen Movement with the purpose of undermining the government's reputation on international area.
An investigation was launched against the raid, and while the investigation was underway, Cumhuriyet daily, later joined by several other media institutions, unlawfully published the footage regarding the content found in the raid.
At the time of the raid, the footage regarding the operation and treatment of MİT officials were broadcasted, receiving heavy criticism from the government and the public.
Following Friday's cabinet meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş stated that arrests in such cases should be avoided until the final decision of the court.
The U.S. State Department also criticized the arrests through the statement of Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner released on Friday. "We are troubled by the pre-trial arrest yesterday of senior editors of the respected Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet. The investigation, criminal charges, and arrest raise serious concerns about the Turkish government's commitment to the fundamental principle of media freedom. These events are only the latest in a series of judicial and law enforcement actions taken under questionable circumstances against Turkish media outlets critical of the government. We call on Turkish authorities to ensure that all individuals and organizations – including but not limited to the media – are free to voice a full range of opinions and criticism, in accordance with Turkey's constitutional guarantees of media freedom and freedom of expression. This will ultimately strengthen Turkey's democracy." the statement said.U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Michael Rogers testifies at the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington March 11, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command said on Tuesday liability protection for corporations that share information with intelligence agencies is crucial in any new U.S. cybersecurity legislation.
“My sense is it’s a critical element in any legislation,” the nominee, Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, said at his confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.
“I believe to be successful, we ultimately have to provide the corporate partners that we would share information with some level of liability protection,” he said.
Rogers said companies would be “much less inclined” to share information with the intelligence community without blanket liability protection.
Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the panel is very close to agreement on new cyber legislation.
However, he said one sticking point is the issue of how to provide immunity and liability protection for companies.
The Obama administration, lawmakers and the private sector have been negotiating how the government and industry should protect against the growing threat of cyber attacks.
However, the conversation has sputtered amid disagreements about liability and privacy protections, the creation of new industry standards and other critical elements.The Senate easily confirmed former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) to be President Trump's ambassador to New Zealand on Thursday.
Senators voted 94-4 on their former colleague, who was considered a lock for the position. Democratic Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand Kirsten Elizabeth GillibrandWarren Buffett: I would support Bloomberg if he ran for president Warren vows to forgo 'fancy receptions or big money fundraisers' Dem Party chief defends initial response to Smollett incident: 'We acted on the |
Friedman's work on anarchy in Iceland. There's another book by Jesse Byock (sp?)on
legal institutions in pre-state Iceland.
I can't think of one example of government working well.
Your last point is also incorrect.
You think, like lots of people, that a cut in the government's revenue of x (from say a cut in or elimination of a certain tax) means that the lost revenue is made back somewhere else, by raising taxes on other people, etc.
Aside from the fact that it's not the government's money and in fact is stolen money belonging to taxpayers, that isn't how the revenue system works.
The crime state doesn't start with a topline revenue figure of X and work backward, adjusting someone's taxes upward by A to make up a cut after someone else's taxes are lowered.
Instead, the topline figure is simply the sum of all the stolen tax loot during an accounting/fiscal period.
While pundits and Congressmen talk about "revenue neutrality" in the tax law, that's simply a way of putting a moral figleaf, under the guise of a weird social science and accounting bs, on what is a monstrously criminal act, the act of tax robbery.
If the state lowers taxes by X and then seeks to raise them by X to maintain "revenue neutrality," (1) it can't actually do this, because there are too many variables for this to work in the real world, including the inherently unpredictable rate of econonomic growth; and, more to the point, (2) lowering taxes is always a moral act, while raising them is always immoral.
john crocker - 8/10/2006 I did not abandon any claim about the estate tax or its morality. It is no less moral than any other tax.
What I did was respond to your even more outrageous claim that anarchy is preferable to a stable government.
I see you failed to respond to the bulk of my criticism of anarchy.
The only military would be private militias.
Criminal and civil justice would be handled privately.
Contracts will be enforced privately.
No enforceable patents would exist.
All roads will be built privately.
How precisely do you think this would work?
Can you cite any example of anarchy working as a functioning ideology for any society?
PS - The estate tax even with its higher exclusion of 3.5 million per person is projected to raise 776 billion between 2012 and 2021. In the real world this money will come from somewhere and it will most likely come from people who are less able to afford it.
William J. Stepp - 8/10/2006 The dysfuntionality of Afghani institutions is not a mark against anarchy. If anything, it shows that the state, specifically US foreign policy, doesn't work.
I see you've abandoned your lame defense of the morality of the estate tax ripoff.
john crocker - 8/10/2006 So the only military would be private militias.
Criminal and civil justice would also be handled privately.
Contracts will be enforced privately.
No enforceable patents would exist.
All roads will be built privately.
How precisely do you think this would work?
If you want to see how well anarchy works in practice take a look at Afghanistan outside of the immediate viscinity of Kabul or much of Sub-Saharan Africa. There is a good reason that most people give up anarchism after they graduate and enter the real world.
William J. Stepp - 8/9/2006 Anarchy works at least as well as the state, which is a cesspool of theft, corruption, and war.
"Work is not a state function."
--Eric Brewer, libertarian physicist friend, recasting the 2nd law of thermodynamics in a libertarian light
Initially I said only that the estate tax should be abolished. I made the latter point in response to
something you said.
I should have said in my first post that all forms of taxation are theft, including the estate tax.
Government did 100% of what the government did before the estate tax was passed. This would remain true if the tax were to be jettisoned. It adds relatively little to the state's coffers. Repealing it would not entail raising other taxes--why not cut spending by the amount it reduces the state's tax-theft take?
Public financing of elections is a nonstarter. The courts have found a first amendment right to finance political campaigns privately, even if they have circumscribed that right with morally indefensible restrictions. Why should the taxpayers pay for this nonsense?
The way to separate politics and the economy--a laudable goal--is to get rid of politics. There would be no political elections under anarchy.
I agree with your comment about having the government stop enforcing patents and contracts; money production should be privatized, as it once was.
What's the problem with letting people give away their money to whomever they want? This is generally consistent with how the law works now, the estate tax aside.
john crocker - 8/8/2006 "While corporate backers must be perpetually involved in the electoral process, the powers that be in government bureacracies are lifers. Not only that, but, by controlling educational institutions, they assure a kind of intellectual hegemony that crystallizes their plutocratic position."
Did you seriously just call government bureaucrats plutocrats?
john crocker - 8/8/2006 "I am an anarchist; government-run/-financed infrastructure should be privatized, where it shouldn't be abolished."
So the only military would be private militias. Criminal and civil justice would also be handled privately. Contracts will be enforced privately. All roads will be built privately. How precisely do you think this would work?
"I merely said the estate tax should be abolished."
You have said a lot more than that. "All forms of tsxation are theft, including income, sales, and property taxes," is the comment I was responding to.
It is true that very few pay it and it costs the loss of virtually no family businesses or farms and it is also true that it raises considerable money for the government. Regardless of your desire for the dissolution of the government it will continue and the money to run it has to come from somewhere. If the estate tax is abolished the money will have to come from somewhere else and that somewhere else will be from people who can less afford to pay it.
"You can get rid of plutocracy by separating the state from the economy, the way we separate church and state."
The first step toward this would be public financing of elections. As long as more money means a louder voice in politics; the economy and the state will be entwined. Another step would be removing the government's hand in enforcing patents and other contracts. Yet another step would be for the government to stop producing legal tender.
"What matters is the right of the giver to give his money to whomever he wants."
Wow.
john crocker - 8/8/2006 "I am an anarchist; government-run/-financed infrastructure should be privatized, where it shouldn't be abolished."
So the only military would be private militias. Criminal and civil justice would also be handled privately. Contracts will be enforced privately. All roads will be built privately. How precisely do you think this would work?
"I merely said the estate tax should be abolished."
You have said a lot more than that. "All forms of tsxation are theft, including income, sales, and property taxes," is the comment I was responding to.
It is true that very few pay it and it costs the loss of virtually no family businesses or farms and it is also true that it raises considerable money for the government. Regardless of your desire for the dissolution of the government it will continue and the money to run it has to come from somewhere. If the estate tax is abolished the money will have to come from somewhere else and that somewhere else will be from people who can less afford to pay it.
"You can get rid of plutocracy by separating the state from the economy, the way we separate church and state."
The first step toward this would be public financing of elections. As long as more money means a louder voice in politics; the economy and the state will be entwined. Another step would be removing the government's hand in enforcing patents and other contracts. Yet another step would be for the government to stop producing legal tender.
"What matters is the right of the giver to give his money to whomever he wants."
Wow.
Jason Blake Keuter - 8/8/2006 It is better that the receiver of family income squander it than the government confiscate it and squander it. If Paris Hilton fails to capitalize on her advantages, then someone smarter who has inherited less money will fill the void (no pun intended -hard to avoid them when using Paris Hilton's name). And in using their money productively, they will benefit far more people than government tax and squander ever will.
Jason Blake Keuter - 8/8/2006 Nancy,
These distinctions can't be made. Paris Hilton is a Horatio Alger in reverse: hardly emblematic. If anything, history teaches that once you identify a class enemy, and then fool yourself into thinking that what's bad for them is good for everyone else, you will need to broaden those who are subject to confiscation. It wasn't long, after all, before a Kulak simply meant enemy of the state.
It is the height to put a dollar amount on what constitutes "legitimate" wealth. How is it that someone who makes $200,000 per year is not part of some movement of creeping aristocracy but someone who makes $300,000 is? How is it that someone who starts with $100,000 a year and shrewdly invests to create an inheritance for his children is not virtuous while some who squanders their way below the tax threshold is?
Further, if we wish to look at this as a question of principle, then shouldn't we tax all people who don't really deserve what they have at a higher rate? Aren't there a few professors out there shamelessly using thirty year old lecture notes that should pay more? And wouldn't some of their income go a long way towards paying for the government agencies charged with determining whose been naughty and whose been nice?
Jason Blake Keuter - 8/8/2006 Actually, the real Aristocracy is government aristocracy. Passing wealth on to family has always been more than perfectly compatible with democracy and liberty. Empowering government, however, has always been viewed as incompatible with liberty and democracy. While corporate backers must be perpetually involved in the electoral process, the powers that be in government bureacracies are lifers. Not only that, but, by controlling educational institutions, they assure a kind of intellectual hegemony that crystallizes their plutocratic position. In keeping with true aristocratic fashion, they produce little of tangible worth, are insular in outlook and relay on legal (not electoral) mechanisms to maintain their place. Further, in true aristocratic fashion, they pour derision upon the unthinking voters whenever they voice anti-government sentiment. To attack the government is to attack the very foundations of civilization and return us all to the Darwinistic barbarism of the 1920's!
Of course, this talk of class plutocracy is the same old Marxist cant: if the expropriators aren't expropriated it is inevitable that they will use their wealth to turn democratic government into their lap dog hand-maiden. Bullshevik.
William J. Stepp - 8/6/2006 I am an anarchist; government-run/-financed infrastructure should be privatized, where it shouldn't be abolished.
I don't propose going back to a pre-anything social structure; I merely said the estate tax should be abolished.
Presumably you're not naive enough to think the estate tax actually changes any social structure, even if you're doing cartwheels trying to show almost no one pays it, and it doesn't cause family-owned busiesses to be liquidated to pay the tax.
I get a kick out of the taxes proponents, who want to have it both ways. They think almost no one pays the tax and that it has no deleterious effects on business. On the other hand, they fly into paroxysms of rage against anyone who wants to abolish it, becuase doing so would be against their vision of a society founded on compulsory egalitarianism.
What's wrong with the "superrich" not paying taxes on money they made and which belongs to them? Lots of "superrich" give money to charity and don't want their wealth to go to their kids (Gates and Buffett, to name two).
In any event, it should be their call, not yours.
You can get rid of plutocracy by separating the state from the economy, the way we separate church and state.
As for your last crack, what did you
(and the state) do to earn it?
What matters is the right of the giver to give his money to whomever he wants. People give gifts every day to other people who did nothing to earn them. Do you have a problem with that?
If so, don't let me catch you giving a Christmas present to a friend or family member.
There are laws in thie country against giving money to terrorist groups, like
Middle Eastern terrorists. That should include the American state, the world's biggest criminal gang.
William J. Stepp - 8/6/2006 I am an anarchist; government-run/-financed infrastructure should be privatized, where it shouldn't be abolished.
I don't propose going back to a pre-anything social structure; I merely said the estate tax should be abolished.
Presumably you're not naive enough to think the estate tax actually changes any social structure, even if you're doing cartwheels trying to show almost no one pays it, and it doesn't cause family-owned busiesses to be liquidated to pay the tax.
I get a kick out of the taxes proponents, who want to have it both ways. They think almost no one pays the tax and that it has no deleterious effects on business. On the other hand, they fly into paroxysms of rage against anyone who wants to abolish it, becuase doing so would be against their vision of a society founded on compulsory egalitarianism.
What's wrong with the "superrich" not paying taxes on money they made and which belongs to them? Lots of "superrich" give money to charity and don't want their wealth to go to their kids (Gates and Buffett, to name two).
In any event, it should be their call, not yours.
You can get rid of plutocracy by separating the state from the economy, the way we separate church and state.
As for your last crack, what did you
(and the state) do to earn it?
What matters is the right of the giver to give his money to whomever he wants. People give gifts every day to other people who did nothing to earn them. Do you have a problem with that?
If so, don't let me catch you giving a Christmas present to a friend or family member.
There are laws in thie country against giving money to terrorist groups, like
Middle Eastern terrorists. That should include the American state, the world's biggest criminal gang.
john crocker - 8/6/2006 Are you an anarchist. How do you propose that a government should run without taxation?
Should all contributions be voluntary or should all roads and military be private?
Toqueville saw the US as more egalitarian than other places and earlier times. The US of the ninteenth century was perhaps more egalitarian than earlier times, but was less egalitarian than it is now. I don't think you would find many allies if you wanted to return to the social structure of pre 1916.
The attempted aboltion of the estate tax and capital gains taxes are blatantly aimed at ensuring that the super rich pay virtually no taxes and that this growing wealth can remain in the same small group of families. This combined with the system of patronage that has grown in our congress is creating a plutocratic system.
I don't see how paying taxes on inheritance over $2 million is such a burden. What did you do to earn it?
William J. Stepp - 8/5/2006 All forms of tsxation are theft, including income, sales, and property taxes.
I don't know if property taxes are the worst type of taxes, but they are probably worse than consumption taxes.
The author attributed the alleged equality of white men during the Jacksonian era to partible inheritance.
This no doubt made for a more equal distribution of wealth than under a system of primogeniture. It was also consistent with the rule of law and property rights. And all done without the estate tax, which didn't exist before 1916.
The estate tax puts more loot into the pot of the State, so it can commit more crimes, like killing people in Iraq.
john crocker - 8/5/2006 "...the estate tax is theft, and is an assault on the property rights of people who pay it."
How is the estate tax any more theft than any other tax. Do you consider income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes theft?
Property can be capital. Are property taxes also the worst kind of taxes?
"I wonder how all that great Tocquevillian civic stuff happened in America before 1916, the date of the passage of the estate tax ripoff."
Please clarify what you mean by this and I will respond.
William J. Stepp - 8/5/2006 How an inheritance is used has nothing to do with the meaning of capital.
The fact that the inheritance tax has exemptions (it goes away entirely in 2010, but only for that year), and that only a small percentage of estates pay the tax is irrelevant to the fact that the estate tax is theft, and is an assault on the property rights of people who pay it.
The exemption should have been indexed for inflation in the 1976 revision, but the state didn't do it in order to steal more property.
The Wall St. Journal had an article earlier this year about a family that is going to have to liqiudate a manufacturing business because it lacks the cash to pay the tax.
There have been other stories before about this.
Anyone who pays the tax (like my sister and I, who will eventually have to pay on our dad's estate) is getting ripped off by the government.
I wonder how all that great Tocquevillian civic stuff happened in America before 1916, the date of the passage of the estate tax ripoff.
john crocker - 8/5/2006 "1 a (1) : a stock of accumulated goods especially at a specified time and in contrast to income received during a specified period; also : the value of these accumulated goods (2) : accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods (3) : accumulated possessions calculated to bring in income"
The inheritance of Paris Hilton will be capital in the first sense, but your earlier comment ("The estate tax is a tax on capital, so it's one of the worst forms of taxation. It works directly against the employment of productive factors, such as labor.") clearly is refering to the second or perhaps third definition. How the inheritance is used does matter for the definition of capital that you originally used.
At this time the first 2 million inherited is exempt, soon the first 3.5 million will be exempt. The repeal of the estate tax will affect less than 1% of estates.
The example you cited is the only one I could find and it involved the selling of Dairy Queen stock (15%). 15% ownership of Dairy Queen is not a family business. The family was able to keep the auto dealerships which were the family business. Dairy Queen approached Buffet to buy the stock at a bargain price so the stock price would not be driven down by the open sale of 15% of its stock.
"The financial press has cited numerous examples of businesses having to be liquidated to pay estate taxes..."
Please provide citations.
William J. Stepp - 8/3/2006 One of the reasons Dairy Queen sold to Berkshire was that one of the owner's estates had an estate tax problem. My understanding is that he died intestate and that Berkshire got a bargain price.
Frederick Thomas - 8/3/2006
China is partly free-the economic part is freer than the average Latin American country, for example. It is not politically free, of course, but it has made a start in the economy.
Another interesting example is Vietnam. It went from major rice exporter pre-war to importer under Communism, to exporter again under the present more liberal regime.
William J. Stepp - 8/3/2006 The estate tax is a tax on capital.
It has nothing to do with how someone who inerits and estate uses it. A Paris Hilton can convert it to cash and have one big party, but the fortune she inherited was built up in the hotel business, which is certainly capital at work. Presumably Paris does have some of her stash invested in the market, even if only in low yielding money market funds.
The financial press has cited numerous examples of businesses having to be liquidated to pay estate taxes, which are due nine months after the estate holder's death. This is particularly true in recessions, when business values are depressed.
My father, a real estate investor, has told me about several people he knew personally who were in this situation.
Re: Buffett, the word I used is derived from "hypocrite." See a dictionary if you don't know what it means.
john crocker - 8/3/2006 "The estate tax is a tax on capital, so it's one of the worst forms of taxation. It works directly against the employment of productive factors, such as labor."
This presupposes that the heir will use the inheritance in a particular way. Inheritance is not capital unless and until it is used to generate income either by investing in a business or a different income property. Estate taxes are taxes on potential capital. All cash and goods are potential capital, so I guess in your view all taxes are "the worst kind."
"The estate tax sometimes forces small businesses to be sold for less than they are worth in order to raise the cash to pay the tax."
Cite an example please.
"Warren Buffett, who is wealthy enough to use foundations to avoid both estate and capital gains taxes, hypocritically advocates the estate tax, as his company has been able to buy some businesses over the years on the cheap thanks to it."
Yes let us all remember the cautionary tale of the selfish, coniving Warren Buffet.
john crocker - 8/3/2006 What is the value of your parents' farm?
Oscar Chamberlain - 8/2/2006 China is capitalist but not free. I find it intriguing that you consider a nation with a subjugated work force as a fit economic model for the United States to follow.
Frederick Thomas - 8/2/2006
"Inequalities are unfortunately the engine by which society advances, and all benefit. If successful members of the middle class advance, they create wealth in society which benefits the people as well."
Under these policies, the famines and bread riots of the ultra egalitarian terror years were reversed and the French economy blossomed.
This is why, of course, countries like the formerly free Hong Kong, with its 14% flat income tax, and no inheritance tax, provided a 12% compound GNP growth rate and about the same increase in per capita GNP, while Cuba, from the other standpoint, stagnated or went backwards (in '57 chevies, or on foot.)
An even better example is China itself, before and after its redirection to the capitalist path. It is now approaching Hong Kong in rate of improvement in per capita GNP.
We may not like human nature, or old Nappy, but he was right on this point.
William J. Stepp - 8/2/2006 The author is hung up with status, claiming it has to be earned rather than inherited. An aristocracy is characterized by inherited status. He overlooks the fact that in a society in which property rights and the rule of law are respected, people earn income contractually.
Wealth holders have a right to give their wealth away, including bequeathing it to whomever they wish, children for example.
In claiming that dead people don't have rights, he overlooks the right of bequest, which is the right of a living person to decide who gets his estate on his death.
The pining for compulsory egalitarianism is bizarre, at least outside the world of left-wing academia.
The estate tax is a tax on capital, so it's one of the worst forms of taxation. It works directly against the employment of productive factors, such as labor. How is that a good thing?
The estate tax sometimes forces small businesses to be sold for less than they are worth in order to raise the cash to pay the tax.
It's no wonder that the life insurance industry opposes repeal of the death tax, because selling second to die life insurance to pay estate taxes is quite lucrative.
Warren Buffett, who is wealthy enough to use foundations to avoid both estate and capital gains taxes, hypocritically advocates the estate tax, as his company has been able to buy some businesses over the years on the cheap thanks to it.
Jon Martens - 8/1/2006 Reducing estate taxes ensures that when my parents die, I might not have to sell the farm to pay the taxes on it.
Oscar Chamberlain - 7/31/2006 Nancy, concerning your cousin's business, if it is worth less than 2 million, he does not even have to file. That cut off goes up to 3.5 million in a few years.
See http://www.irs.gov/publications/p950/ar02.html#d0e317
John R. Maass - 7/31/2006 It is only polemical tripe, not sound reasoning based upon actual evidence, to state "The movement to repeal estate taxes is in reality nothing less than an effort to establish an American aristocracy," as this author does. Of course, it is no such thing, as any reasonable person can see. The vast majority of people in favor of repeal are interested in tax fairness, not the establishment of an aristocracy. In fact, the author's sophomoric assertions might be seen as his support for a leftist aristocracy--one of sanctimonious paternalism, in that its own members would be the aristocrats who decide how all of the rest of us get to keep and spend our money, what little they leave us.
I am seeing far too much partisanship from so-called scholars posting disingenuous "articles" with a light veneer of history used to cover purely political agendas. See Steve Conn's article of a few weeks ago about women as another splendid example.
William R. Everdell - 7/31/2006 You folks seem very young to me. When I first learned about progressive taxation, where the rich pay taxes at higher rates than the poor, Eisenhower was the Republican president and William Buckley was attacking him as a wishy-washy crypto-New Dealer. And the tax rate on the last dollar of the highest incomes was--wait for it--
Ninety percent!
I guess I miss the good old days, back when it was clear that overwhelming national prosperity was the result of the regular and predictable appropriation of excessive family income by the sovereign people, the money to be used for public goods that benefited everybody. The idea was first tried out here in 1862 (taxing of wealth and property at a flat rate was much older) and although it won the Civil War, it ran into a lot of opposition from New York where millionaires and corporate law firms were just beginning to appear arguing that an aristocracy of income was protected by the Constitution. The people decided against them in 1913 by amending the Constitution.
The argument was settled long ago, folks. We should all get used to it.
-WE
michael Randolph stephenson - 7/31/2006 This essay, while well written and interesting, says nothing new. For decades now we have seen countless attacks upon the inheritance tax claiming that it is establishing a new aristocracy. The main problem that I see here is that linking land with class superiority is an old construct. There is now and always has been an aristocracy here but nowadays it is linked to money, not land. If we can take steps to limit inheritance on land then inheritance on money will follow and then stocks, perhaps possessions next. Despite class rhetoric the wealthier classes still pay a higher proportion of taxes than the poor. If we want to follow Jefferson's lead then let us take a different part of his philosophy to emphasize. Jefferson also believed that education would help level the classes. Perhaps Congress should focus its efforts on improving education for all Americans and not rest its hopes upon taxation.Why and how to override Laravel’s built-in auth controller methods
Simon Hamp Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 5, 2016
Maybe like me you like to do things the ‘Laravel way’. So let’s say you’re still using the out-of-the-box Auth flow (can anyone recommend an easy, drop-in alternative?). You want to keep that flow without having to rewrite it, but you realise it doesn’t quite do everything you need.
However, as you’ll soon be aware, the logic for the full registration and login processes is quite fragmented. By the time you’ve followed the setup and got everything working, you find that your controllers are inheriting methods from Laravel core, but they don’t have all the functionality you want.
So you need to add to default functionality, but you don’t want to lose what you’re getting for free… and of course, you never want to edit core files!
Overriding should be simple though, right? I mean, we’re in the renaissance era of PHP, a fully OOP language and whatnot.
Let’s look at the getLogin() controller method as an example. It’s pretty simple: just load the right view.
Edit: This article was written around the time of Laravel 5.2. Sometime around the release of Laravel 5.3, this method got renamed to login(). Please bear that in mind and check the comments for the most up to date tips.
But this method is “inherited” from the AuthenticatesAndRegistersUsers trait (Edit: This trait is gone now), which probably inherits from the AuthenticatesUsers trait, which is buried within Laravel’s core.
The thing is this isn’t “inheritance” in the old-fashioned sense of the word — you can’t just override these methods. We can replace (or overwrite) them by creating the same method name in our class, but then we can’t use parent::getLogin() to call the upstream method, benefiting from all of the upstream functionality.
This will undoubtedly fail
This is because traits don’t exist in the traditional single-inheritance stack and don’t operate in the same way as extending classes — they’re more like class partials (or mixins), and any number of them can be combined within a class.
In that context, it’s better not to think of it as inheritance, but more as appropriation; we’re appropriating the methods in the trait (if they don’t already exist in our class!) and placing them in the context of the class that use s them. So they’re not “inherited”; they become part of the definition of the class that use s them.
As we’ve seen, this is problematic. But you’re in luck! There is a workaround.
Thankfully, the traits functionality built into PHP offers a 1920’s-neat workaround that still allows us to call the originally-defined function (the one in the trait), whilst “extending” it with our own functionality. Here’s how:
Here’s the ‘right’ way to do this. See the comments section for advice on doing this in Laravel 5.3+
As you can see, we’re basically aliasing the methods from the trait so that we’re not caught out for redefining methods. And then we can call the original method to still use that functionality. Beautiful. Thanks PHP devs!
It also shows great insight by Taylor and the other Laravel core devs — particularly with the focus on splitting this functionality into traits and method chaining. Without it, my example wouldn’t even be possible. Great work folks!
I’ve learned a lot from looking into the Laravel codebase over the years. It’s taught me some useful practices that have informed my coding style and improved the design of my applications. I highly recommend the occasional deep dive into someone else’s code, it can be very enlightening, especially if they’re a good developer.There’s nothing finer than a springtime shiner. At least, that’s what my bottle of Shiner FM 966 says. Shiner FM 966 is a farmhouse ale in style, a uniquely Belgian/French style of beer that is light, fruity, and spicy with distinctive yeast notes and high drinkability. In many ways, it’s similar to a fine white wine I think, and Shiner is certainly on track when they say that it’s a great beer for spring imbibing.
On the neck label, Shiner calls this a “spring provision ale”, but I’ve been drinking it over the summer and found it every bit as suitable as the weather warmed. Farmhouse ales actually encompass two sub-styles, saison or biere-de-garde. The distinction between the two is nebulous at best, although in my experience biere de garde is more suitable for lying down (biere de garde is French for “beer to keep”) while saison is a light seasonal brew best enjoyed fresh).
Shiner FM 966 seems to me more of a saison. The beer is only sold in spring and has an alcohol content of 5.7% by volume. I paid $8.49 for a six-pack. Shiner describes the beer further on the label:
A few centuries ago, during the cold winter months, farmhands in Europe brewed a “seasonal provision” Farmhouse Ale to be enjoyed once spring rolled around. In the farmlands of Shiner, TX that tradition lives on. Which is why our tribute to this style uses Golding, Sterling, and Meridian hops for a sweet yet lightly spiced flavor. Our incredibly refreshing Farmhouse Ale bears the name of the farm to market road just south of where our brewery has proudly stood for over 100 years.
Shiner FM 966 Farmhouse Ale pours to a pale golden color with a thick and creamy head formation and a tart and spicy nose. Taking a sip, the beer has a bright biscuit malt character up front followed by the peppery spiciness and bright citrus notes. There’s a tart quenching character to this beer and in the finish, some grassy, balancing herbal hops. Just a bit of them mind you, but enough to make this interesting. The underlying tartness and sourness from the pilsner and wheat malts and yeast used make this very refreshing, a perfect beer for the warming days but still cool nights.
Overall, much better than I thought it would be, and a credible stab at the style.
And remember, try a new beer today, and drink outside the box.
*Pricing data accurate at time of review or latest update. For reference only, based on actual price paid by reviewer.
(B)=Bottled
(D)=Draft
Erik Prince, the former CEO of Blackwater USA, in 2008. Private security company Blackwater was used by the U.S. State Department, and came under investigation for its activities in Iraq. Gerry Broome/AP
PHILADELPHIA – Erik Prince – the founder of the private security firm once known as Blackwater – embarked on a publicity tour here on Friday, defending mercenaries as intrinsic to the birth of the United States and lashing out at the federal government that he believes unfairly persecuted him. In a talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia to promote his new book, "Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror," Prince seemed uninterested in image rehabilitating, preferring instead a dose of bravado and score-settling. If Prince's Blackwater still existed and had been in charge of U.S. diplomatic security in Libya, he said, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens would not have died in the September 2012 attack on the consulate in Benghazi. Prince said mercenaries are invaluable and as old as America – a country "founded by private companies." "The Jamestown colony was actually a publicly traded company on the London stock exchange, and they hired a guy like John Smith, who was a professional soldier, to come and protect the colony," he said. Prince has never acknowledged that Blackwater was at fault for controversies that arose during its troubled but lucrative run during the 2000s providing protection to U.S. diplomats, training Afghan police for the Pentagon or, in Prince’s own words, acting as "a virtual extension" of the CIA. In recent interviews, he has evinced unapologetic pride in his company’s work, which boomed after the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, earning Blackwater billions of dollars in government contracts. Blackwater became infamous after its contractors killed at least 14 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad intersection in 2007. On Friday, the only outward sign that one of the most controversial figures in modern U.S. warfare had arrived in town was the half-dozen protesters braving the early morning chill in scarves, skull masks and Vietnam War veteran shirts to greet Prince. "This guy is a person of interest in homicide, money laundering and trafficking of women," said Jody Dodd, 56, a paralegal at a Philadelphia law firm who was among the protesters. "This city on a regular basis detains young African-American men on less of a basis than this guy."
Unfairly maligned
Since leaving Blackwater in 2010, Prince has launched the Frontier Resource Group, an Abu Dhabi-based private equity firm that he said would focus on logistics and mining. He has also recently surprised some observers by calling for cuts to the same "bloated" U.S. defense budget that helped make him rich. Prince, whose father founded an auto parts company and died unexpectedly soon after Prince became a Navy SEAL in the 1990s, said on Friday that Blackwater was his attempt to spur innovation in the private security industry in the same way his father had responded to more efficient Japanese companies decades earlier. "No one had ever done it on an industrial scale," Prince said, comparing Blackwater to an assembly line. "It was almost a Toyota-(style) linear flow." By Prince's metric, Blackwater performed flawlessly at keeping U.S. government officials safe – even as its employees, in his view, received little acknowledgement for the dangers they faced. No government employee or VIP under Blackwater’s protection was ever killed, Prince said, though 41 of its own employees died in action and hundreds were wounded. Shortly before Prince left, in 2009, Blackwater renamed itself Xe Services, then changed its identity once again, in 2010, to Academi. Only around 10 instructors from the Blackwater era |
, the electrons travel through a circuit to power devices. Oppositely, the inside of an electron battery is connected by an electrical conductor that only allows electrons to be transported from the negative to the positive electrode, while the ions flow through ionic cables and are transported externally to create a circuit of ions. When these two types of batteries interact with an ionic system where the charge carriers are cations and anions, their electrochemical behaviours significantly differ. The charge carriers in an electrical system are electrons and holes, which cannot be transported in an ionic system. When the positive and negative electrodes of a traditional battery connect with an ionic system through electrical cables, there will be no current flow without the occurrence of electrochemical reactions. Since each electrochemical reaction has an onset voltage (V E ), before the applied voltage reaches the onset voltage, the current is close to zero (Fig. 2b). When the voltage reaches or exceeds the onset voltage, the redox species will be reduced at the negative electrode and be oxidized at the positive electrode. During the electrochemical reaction, electrons exchange at the corresponding electrode–electrolyte interfaces and cause the current to increase (Fig. 2b). However, the electrochemical reactions can make the ionic system unstable, which is especially fatal for a living biosystem where the electrochemical reactions can cause the decomposition of cells, tissue or water.
Figure 2: The intrinsic differences between the traditional battery and the electron battery when interacting with an ionic system. (a) Schematics of a traditional battery (left) and an electron battery (right). For the traditional battery, the anode and cathode are separated by an ionic medium that allows ions to diffuse while electrons travel via an external circuit. For the electron battery, an electrical medium is used to conduct electrons internally and the ions are transported through the external circuit. (b) Illustration of I–V curves where a traditional battery and an electron battery interact with an ionic system. The curve of the electrical electrode exhibits an onset voltage (V E ), where the electrochemical reaction occurs. The ionic electrode shows a different behaviour (following Ohm’s Law) where the current changes linearly with the potential. Full size image
Considering that most ionic processes in biosystems involve both low currents and voltages, the electrical power from the conventional battery cannot act as a source for the ionic system. When an electron battery connects with an ionic system through ionic cables, the ionic charge carriers will drift along the electrical field. Since both the ionic cable and ionic system can transport ions, the ionic charge carriers can cross the electrode–electrolyte interface and travel into the ionic system freely (Fig. 2a). For this case, there is no threshold voltage for the electrochemical reaction, therefore, the ionic current will follow Ohm’s Law, where the current is linear with the applied voltage. The slope of the I–V curve is determined by the ionic resistance of the system (Fig. 2b). The linearity will allow for fine control and tuning of the ionic current by adjusting the voltage from zero instead of V E for traditional batteries. Even with a small voltage bias, a non-zero ionic current can be achieved (Fig. 2b), which is especially important for applications in biosystems where the living cells and tissues are delicate.
Grass ionic cable
Similar to the electrical cables that conduct electrons, ionic cables facilitate the transport of ions. Many materials, such as metals, carbon and doped semiconductors are excellent electrical conductors. However, ionically conductive materials are limited and their conductivities are much smaller than electrical conductors. Among the most common ionic conductors (that is, conductive polymers, ionically conductive ceramics, ionic liquids and salt solutions), liquid phase salt solutions typically have the highest conductivity, around 10–700 mS cm−1 at room temperature16,17. However, the solutions have no mechanical strength to form continuous stable shapes.
Here we developed a flexible ionic cable composed of a natural grass stem soaked in an aqueous salt solution. To create a cable-like conductor, mechanically robust materials, such as a cotton string or grass, are required to contain the liquid electrolyte. Note that a cotton string and natural grass are structurally different and thus, liquid electrolyte is stored in distinct ways. The soaked cotton string stores the electrolyte around the material (Supplementary Fig. 1a), while the natural grass possesses vertically aligned microchannels that can hold the electrolyte (Supplementary Fig. 1a,b). Therefore, the natural grass retains the liquid electrolyte while maintaining flexibility, which is advantageous for ionic cables. The grass stem is from the Poa pratensis, a common lawn grass on the University of Maryland campus. The inset of Fig. 3a displays the 30–50 cm long grass stem with a relatively uniform diameter of 1–2 mm, which can be directly used to fabricate ionic cables after the leaves are removed. The ionic cables were fabricated by soaking the grass stems into a saturated LiNO 3 aqueous solution under vacuum to enhance infiltration. The surface of the ion soaked grass stem was then covered by a thin thermal shrink tube to prevent the solution from evaporating. After the fabrication process, the ionic cable maintains the original grass’ features. Figure 3a,b exhibit scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of the cross section and longitudinal views of a grass stem. The stem of natural grass is full of micro-vessels, which are vertically aligned across the entire blade of grass. The size of the micro-vessels varies from several micrometres to several tens of micrometres (Fig. 3a,b), which is suitable for absorbing and containing the electrolyte solution due to capillary effects. When these longitudinally continuous vessels are filled with the aqueous salt solution, they act as an ionic cable. The aligned structure facilitates guided transport of ions along the longitudinal direction (Fig. 3c). Figure 3d shows Nyquist plots used to determine the conductivity of the ionic cables at different lengths. The intercept of each curve with the real axis is used to estimate the resistance of the ionic cable. According to Fig. 3e, the resistance increases almost linearly with the length of the ionic cable, indicating a relatively constant ionic conductivity. The conductivity of the ionic cable (∼80 mS cm−1) is then calculated based on the slope of the resistance-length curve. This is comparable to a pure LiNO 3 aqueous solution (∼150 mS cm−1)18 and almost one order of magnitude higher than organic-based liquid electrolytes17,19. Due to the excellent mechanical strength and flexibility, the grass ionic cable can be bent into random shapes in a similar manner as a conventional electrical cable, yet, its ionic conductivity is nearly constant (Fig. 3f). The stable ionic conductivity can be attributed to the structure’s long continuous micro-channels, which retain the liquid electrolyte when bent.
Figure 3: Characterization of the grass ionic cable. SEM images of the (a) cross section and (b) longitudinal-section of a grass stem. Scale bar, 50 μm. The inset is a digital image of the long grass stems. (c) Schematic of the ionic cable made by soaking a grass stem in an aqueous lithium salt solution. The lumens of grass provide continuous channels for the transport of the ions. (d) EIS spectra and (e) the corresponding resistances of the grass ionic cables with similar diameters (∼2 mm) and different lengths (1–10 cm), which indicates that resistance has a linear relationship with length. (f) EIS spectra of a 10 cm grass ionic cable before and after being bent around a 1′′ glass tube. Insets correspond to bent and straight grass ionic cables, respectively. Full size image
Electron battery
The electron battery is composed of a lithium metal anode and a vanadium oxide (V 2 O 5 ) cathode (Fig. 4a). Both the anode and the cathode are sealed in glass tubes filled with organic electrolyte. One end of the glass tube is sealed with the ion exchange membrane (IEM) which retains the electrolyte and allows ions to pass through (Supplementary Fig. 2; Supplementary Methods section for IEM selection rules). The electrodes are connected with an electrically conductive wire that allows the transport of electrons and serves as the internal circuit. Two LiNO 3 soaked grass ionic cables are attached onto the IEM of each electrode to conduct ions and serve as the external circuit. To achieve further enhancements in performance, the cathode consists of V 2 O 5 nanowires synthesized by a previously reported hydrothermal method20. The diameters of the V 2 O 5 nanowires are around several tens of nanometres, while their lengths are several micrometres (SEM image in Supplementary Fig. 3). The high aspect ratio allows the nanowires to form a network structure, which can decrease the distance of lithium-ion diffusion and facilitate the transport of electrons. To characterize the electrochemical performance of the electron batteries, multiple discharge voltage profiles were taken at different ionic loads. Unlike the conventional battery set-up, the voltage profile of an electron battery cannot be recorded from its anode and cathode directly, since they have already been electrically shorted by the electrical conductor. Instead, a lithium metal reference electrode was placed close to the cathode to record the voltage profile between them. The inset of Fig. 4b depicts the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) spectra of two electron batteries with different ionic cables. Their ionic resistances are calculated to ∼30 kΩ and 135 kΩ, respectively. The voltage profiles of these two batteries are shown in Fig. 4b, where the battery with the lower resistance discharges much faster than the one with the higher resistance. Thus, the electron battery exhibits similar electrochemical behaviour to a traditional battery. Since the battery with the higher resistance discharges at a slower rate, the voltage profile displays clear plateaus at ∼2 V and ∼3 V, which corresponds to V 2 O 5 (refs 21, 22, 23).
Figure 4: Characterization of the electron battery. (a) Schematic of the electron battery with a lithium metal anode, V 2 O 5 nanowire cathode and grass ionic cables. (b) Discharge profiles of electron batteries controlled by ionic cables with different ionic resistances. The inset is the EIS spectra of the corresponding electron batteries. (c) A digital image of the electron battery demonstration to drive blue copper ions along a LiNO 3 solution soaked cotton string (∼1 mm thick and 8 cm long). Digital images of (d) the initial and (e) moved state of blue copper ions before and after being driven by the electron battery. This indicates that the electron battery can cause ions to migrate in an ionic system. Digital images of (f) the initial and (g) diffused states for the control experiments. In the control experiments, no current was applied and the blue copper ions randomly diffused along the cotton string in both directions. Full size image
To demonstrate the interaction with an ionic system, the electron battery was used to drive the migration of ions in the ionic system. To visually see the process, blue coloured copper ions were selected to demonstrate the migration along a LiNO 3 solution soaked cotton string (∼1 mm thick, 8 cm long; Fig. 4c). When the electron battery is connected to the cotton string by two grass ionic cables, the lithium ions will diffuse from the anode to the cathode through the external ionic circuit to form an ionic current. The flow of Li+ will create an electrical field, where the blue coloured copper ions will drift towards the cathode. Initially, the blue coloured ions were placed at the centre of the string, which is marked as shown in Fig. 4d. After the electron battery is connected to the two ends of the string and discharged at a current of ∼100 μA for 10 min, the blue coloured ions diffused towards the cathode side of the battery (Fig. 4e). In the control experiment, when no current was applied to the string, the blue ions randomly diffused along the string from the centre (Fig. 4f) towards the ends in both directions (Fig. 4g). This behaviour is drastically different from the electron battery’s driven process. This simple yet straightforward method demonstrates that the electron battery can directly interact with the ionic system without causing electrochemical reactions, which significantly differs from traditional batteries.
Electron battery for biological applications
As a proof-of-concept, we selected cultured living cells as a simple biosystem to demonstrate the interaction between the electron battery and a biosystem. Here, the electron battery was used to stimulate the movement of calcium ions (Ca2+) inside the living cells by generating a continuous ionic current. Figure 5a is a schematic of the stimulation experiment, where the electron battery applies an ionic current to the cells through the ionically conductive cables and tips. To make the ions compatible with the living biosystem, the grass ionic cables were soaked with NaCl solution instead of a lithium salt solution. Small electrode tips were specifically constructed using syringe needles to enhance the contact between the cells. Two syringe needles (inner diameter, ∼0.5 mm) filled with 150 mM NaCl in a 1% agarose hydrogel were attached to the grass ionic cable to ensure reliable contact with the cells. The electrode materials are sealed in a lithium organic electrolyte-filled glass tube by an IEM and thus, ion exchange occurs at the interfaces between the electrodes and the grass ionic cables.
Figure 5: Demonstration of the electron battery in the biosystem. (a) A schematic of the experimental set-up and the mechanism for calcium wave propagation through HEK293 living cells when stimulated by ionic current from the electron battery. The green fluorescent images of calcium waves produced in HEK293 cells (b) with and (c) without ionic current stimulation at different time intervals. The fluorescent areas at 0 min are the initial calcium waves mechanically stimulated by the tips of the ionic cables. Full size image
The ionic current of the drifted Na+ ions will generate a continuous electric field to stimulate the cells. When the cells are stimulated, the calcium ions will be released from the endoplasmic reticulum, the intracellular calcium storage pool, through Ca2+ channel24. Meanwhile, some messengers will diffuse from the stimulated cell to its neighbouring cells through gap junctions. These messengers will cause the internal Ca2+ release process to occur in neighbouring cells. As shown in Fig. 5a, a calcium indicator, Fluro-4, exhibits enhanced green fluorescence on Ca2+ binding. Note that this indicator is used to identify the Ca2+ concentration in the living cells. Figure 5b shows the fluorescence intensity changes of the calcium indicator in the living HEK293 cells after stimulation from the electron battery using ∼30 μA of ionic current. The initial fluorescent area at 0 min (Fig. 5b,c) was due to mechanical stimulation from the electrode’s needle tip breaking the monolayer of cultured cells25,26,27. After the ionic current was applied to the cells, the electrical stimulation caused the release and accumulation of calcium ions within the living cells. The binding of calcium ions to the fluorescent indicator leads to an increase in the fluorescent intensity. Moreover, due to the interaction between cells, the fluorescence intensity spreads along the cells to form a wave-like fluorescent image. After 30 min of continuous stimulation from the electron battery, the fluorescence signal reaches nearly all areas surrounding the living cells (Fig. 5b).
To further demonstrate that the fluorescence intensity changes were due to the ionic current, a control sample was stimulated by the same electrode tips from the electron battery without an applied ionic current (Fig. 5c). Similar with the sample showed in Fig. 5b, the cells showed initial fluorescence around the tip-touched areas due to mechanical stimulation. However, without further stimulation from the ionic current, the mechanical stimulated fluorescence became dim over time instead of spreading out or getting brighter, which agrees with the literature26,27.
Therefore, the ionic current of the electron battery can successfully interact with living cells to stimulate the Ca2+ wave. Moreover, during the stimulation process, the ionic current from the electron battery did not cause electrochemical reactions in the biosystem. If a traditional battery were used to stimulate the cells, the water within the biosystem would undergo electrolysis to generate a continuous ionic current, which would harm the living cells.by
The message went out to a thousand phones on Monday morning, the 3rd of October: the first of the arrests from the Parliament blockade had taken place. Four undercovers snatched him up as he left his house. A protest was called for the same day, at 7 o’clock in the evening, Plaça Catalunya. Two more arrests soon followed. The news quickly spread via telephone, internet, and word of mouth. Several meetings are called to share information and organize the response. By the time people started gathering in the hundreds for the protest, a fourth arrest had occurred.
Back in June, the popular rage that has been growing in Barcelona, in tandem with other parts of the world, coalesced once again as 200,000 people blockaded the Catalan Parliament in an attempt to prevent the passage of the latest austerity laws. These laws cannot accurately be called cutbacks, for in addition to slashing healthcare and education, they augment the ranks and arsenal of the police and continue the urbanization projects that tailor the city to the needs of tourism and social control.
This was not the first round of reforms to hit Catalunya, and in fact the Socialist Party was already voted out of power for inaugurating the crisis measures, so now it’s the conservatives’ turn to continue the same policies. Half of the people never voted for any of them, and an increasing number of these have been taking to the streets to win back control over their lives in an escalating series of strikes, protests, occupations, and popular assemblies that have spread across the Spanish state. The media and the academics have referred to this phenomenon as the movement of “indignados,” the “Real Democracy Now” movement, or the 15M movement, but in reality the feeling on the street is increasingly closer to rage than to simple indignation; its politics are much more heterogeneous and in large part more anticapitalist than a narrow, naïve call for a “real” democracy, whatever that means; and the activity ascribed to it predates the 15M—or 15th of May—plaza occupations. Threads of the ongoing defiance run continuously back through the joyful Mayday riots in the wealthy neighborhood of Sarrià, the January 27 general strike that was called only by anarcho-syndicalist and far-left minority unions, in an unprecedented move demonstrating a new boldness, the September 29 general strike that reached massive proportions on a countrywide level and in Barcelona erupted in a daylong insurrection, which itself evoked references to and drew on experiences from an entire history of struggle against dictatorship and against the democracy that replaced it, a struggle that not everyone has forgotten.
On June 15, for the first time in much too long, politicians remembered the taste of fear as people blocked their path and harangued them, assailed them with insults, spat on them, threw trash, and in at least one case, attacked them with spraypaint. Many lawmakers had to be flown in by helicopter, and only in the face of undeniable public opposition and with the help of an army of riot police were they able to pass the reforms. For at least one day, the lies of democracy were put in their place, and the curtain masking the reality of social war was parted.
People who participated in the blockade, who got to reap just a brief moment of revenge against the wealthy, hypocritical politicians who are intent on taking everything, went home that day with a general feeling of jubilation. All that changed as soon as they tuned back in to the official reality, and checked out the news the next day.
In the stateless, communal majority of human history, shame played an important function in upholding community norms, based generally on ideas of mutual aid. The person who did not share, the bully and would-be authoritarian were shamed and prevented from spreading social relations based in competition or domination. In a postmodern, media-driven world, shame is instrumentalized by the mass media and used to uphold the relations and values that benefit the owners of society.
Pacifism, as it has arisen in the Real Democracy Now movement, is little more than an uncritical reliance on the media of the ruling class and a reproduction of the shame and values they inculcate. People who had been participating in social struggles here for years were surprised, in May and June, to suddenly find that other protestors would throw themselves in front of banks to protect them from vandalism, or in front of riot cops to protect them from insults and the throwing of trash. Evidently, breaking the windows of a bank or fighting with the police is more shameful than the homelessness, the hunger, the debt slavery, the murders, and the torture the banks and police are responsible for.
By July, after newcomers had had to face off with police to defend occupations or block the eviction of neighbors who couldn’t pay their mortgages, more and more people were dismissing nonviolence as a hopelessly inept tool for accomplishing goals that were not compatible with those of the ruling class, and what’s more, they began to see it like the rest of us, as an indignity and an insult to the history of revolutionaries here who have fought bravely and on their feet against fascism, against capitalism, against power in all its forms.
But in June, many people were still hypersensitive to what the media were saying about us. The same people who went home with a smile on their faces awoke with a frown to encounter the media’s predictable hysterics. The forceful protest of the day before was presented as a travesty, a source of profound shame for some fictive national community that included, altogether in one happy, democratic family, those who consumed the news and were losing access to healthcare, and those who broadcast the news and had private healthcare. People began to backpedal, to deny what was being signalled as shameful, in a word, to betray themselves.
The police took advantage of the boom in video footage at protests and the dissolution of the line between journalists and protestors, with the proliferation of alternative media. They gathered and seized all the footage they needed, and began identifying suspects. The media cried out about impending arrests. But curiously, the arrests never came.
On inspection, the police strategy is tried and true: make the people police themselves. As long as the two primary ingredients—pacifism and sensitivity to the media—exist in abundance, the mobilization of shame and fear by the press will divide a movement and redirect it towards dialogue, leading it straight back into the hands of the politicians whom it rejected at the very moment of its birth. Where heavy-handed arrests might have strengthened the movement’s resolve and united them behind the bravest sector—those who had gone face to face with riot cops and politicians—the soft hand of the media sowed doubts and handed legitimacy to the most cowardly and opportunistic.
Needless to say, it came as a shock when the police began their wave of arrests in early October, nearly four months later. But the underlying motives soon came to light. The order to make the arrests did not come from the Catalan police, but from higher up—all the way from Madrid, in fact. In response to the supposed inaction of the Catalan authorities, Manos Limpias—a fascist organization—brought a suit to the Audiencia Nacional, a supreme court in Madrid that often metes out political repression. The Audiencia Nacional then ordered the Catalan police to arrest all twenty-two people they had identified in footage, charging them with various offenses under the statute covering “assaults on democracy.” Possible sentences range from six months to eight years in prison. Curiously, this seems to be the first use of the law protecting democracy, which was passed after an attempted military coup in 1981. Yet another example of progressive laws used for political repression, like hate crime laws used in the US against those protesting the police or homophobic churches.
By the second day, ten people had been arrested. In each case, they were taken to a facility on the outskirts of town, near the immigrant prison, booked, and given a citation to appear at court in Madrid. Lawyers in Madrid soon got the list of all twenty-two suspects, and those whom police had not yet been able to locate went to the Barcelona courts to see if they could get their citation without being arrested. They were stonewalled, and after hours of waiting, went downstairs to a café. Suddenly, riot police surrounded the café and arrested the other people on the list. Like all the others, they were subjected to biometric photos, to be added to police databases for automatic and remote facial recognition.
As the arrests became known, a pattern quickly emerged. Whereas the media had previously trumpeted the certainty that protest “leaders” and those involved in convening the Parliament blockade would be charged in addition to the worst of the troublemakers, all of those arrested were people from the grassroots, acting outside of any organizational framework, and nearly all of them were anarchists. But because the arrests had been imposed by higher authorities and had not been immediately accompanied by any PR action on the ground, the media did not have any strong directions from police regarding how to report on the occurrences, and they fumbled and did their best to explain the arrests, in their typically cloudy, sophomoric, and professional way. As such, the detainees were labelled as members of the movement of indignados, rather than being singled out as “bad protestors” and “antisistema.” (Given that anarchism has not been erased from Spanish history, the media cannot use “anarchist” as a depoliticized, pejorative, and scary term; thus they invented the label “antisistema” or “anti-system” to refer to people who reject dialogue with the political system, though the connotation is overwhelmingly one of rebels without a cause).
Not only were the police and media caught flat-footed in carrying out and justifying the arrests, what’s more, the situation was stacked against them. Radicals are harder to isolate in today’s political climate, at least in Barcelona. Within the neighborhood assemblies, workplace struggles, and occupations of the hospitals facing cutbacks or closure, the old political divisions have lost much of their meaning. Anarchists and other radicals who were once easy to isolate now form an integral part of new networks of neighbors and coworkers acting together in solidarity.
The October repression has deepened the practice of solidarity among a wider group of people. The thousands who have taken to the streets to protest austerity measures are returning to the streets out of a shared loyalty and a growing awareness of the mechanisms of social control. At Monday’s spontaneous protest, called the same day as the arrests began, nearly one thousand people gathered in Plaça Catalunya and then marched down Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s principal commercial street and tourist attraction. That night, the spectacle of consumption was interrupted by the forceful chants of the protestors, and every single bank and chain store along the route was decorated with graffiti against capitalism and against the police. Those who automatically whipped out their cameras to film the crowd, unwittingly drawing a line between participant and spectator, were yelled at: “haven’t you learned anything? Twenty-two people are facing prison because of your photographs!”
Three days later, another protest was held. This time, perhaps 3000 people showed up, some of them having marched all the way from their neighborhoods, blocking all the streets along the way. Again, energy was high, and the chants that rang through the air showed a greater political maturity than was common back in May. “It’s not a crisis, it’s capitalism!” “Slashing healthcare is murder!” “No one represents us!” “Politicians go to hell!” “Not one step back! Against repression, direct action!” “The cops kill and torture!” “The media aim, the police shoot!” “We were all at Parliament!” And my personal favorite, “Let’s burn down Parliament!” Mustapha, a Saharan immigrant who was killed by cops in a nearby town just a short time earlier, was also remembered in many of the chants. People were drawing connections between the political system, the economic system, and the repression, and calling for unmediated action.
Only twice did I hear someone sing out the old, leftist favorite that used to predominate at protests: “They call this democracy but it’s not,” but every time the radical refrain of “Yes it is!” arose in response, louder than the original chorus. Finally, the march arrived at the Interior Ministry, where cops were booed and insulted, and kept on their toes with a loud firecracker. At one point, an alternative journalist filming inside the crowd was physically ejected. He claimed that by filming what the police might do he was protecting us, but this old line fell on deaf ears. There’s already one person in Barcelona in prison for defending himself against a cop, arrested and convicted with the help of a journalist’s footage, and now there are twenty-two more people facing prison. Meanwhile, for all the busted heads, all the cases of torture, all the killings, and all the independent journalists on the scene with cameras rolling, there isn’t a single cop doing time.
People are starting to wake up. What has always been obvious is starting to become visible. Twenty-two people have to travel to Madrid to go to court this Tuesday for doing what most of us dream about. The politicians who got spit on, and the bankers standing behind them, are hoping to make an example out of those twenty-two. But for us, the assault on power they stand accused of is an example of bravery, an example of truth, an example of hope.
Those in power who want to lock them in a cage for years just for challenging their authority are losing their hold on us. Those who favor dialogue with the powerful have lost their credibility. Those who fear to attack them have lost their relevance.
When thousands of people here and in other cities around the world took up the call once more for “revolution” and for “freedom,” governments, spectators, and opportunists expected this would exhaust itself in the same old reforms. But there’s a growing number of us who mean what we say.
When all the old rules are rejected, everything becomes possible.
Peter Gelderloos is the author of How Nonviolence Protects the State (South End Press) and Anarchy Works (Ardent press). He currently resides in Barcelona.There is a lot of money and influence at stake for the GOP presidential candidates this week…
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, alongside up-and-coming rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, will bring their campaign ideas back to Washington, D.C. Thursday. That's where they'll attend the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) Presidential Candidates Forum downtown at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.
One wrong word could cost a candidate millions.
For example, Chris Christie got into a lot of trouble at the RJC in the spring of 2014 when he reminisced on time he spent in the Middle East. Christie noted that he'd taken a helicopter from "occupied territories" that helped him "understand the military risk that Israel faces every day." The "occupied territories" to which Christie referred, however, were the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land the Israeli government and many of its supporters believe it has a right to.
While the story was intended to forge commonality with the present donors to whom Christie was speaking, his use of the term "occupied territories" upset members of the crowd. To them, it validated "Palestinian challenges over Israel's presence," reported Politico on March 28, 2014.
One attendee, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, told Politico that he considered Christie's mistake exemplary of a noncommittal candidate who doesn't know the issues. Which begs a few questions about the 2016 presidential candidates set to attend Thursday's event:
Should GOP presidential hopeful and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson attend, considering his infamous lack of knowledge about sensitive foreign policy/affairs issues? Could attending the conference hurt Trump, whose gregarious speeches sometimes border on racially inappropriate projections? Will the RJC provide notably well-spoken but lagging-in-polls candidates Sen. Marco Rubio (R- FL) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) an opportunity to gain headway?
Here's how we expect Republican support will shift following Thursday's RJC battle…A publicly traded affiliate of the Carlyle Group said yesterday that lenders were seizing its assets, sending the fund, Carlyle Capital, into insolvency.
The collapse of Carlyle Capital is the first time a Carlyle Group fund has failed and is a stinging embarrassment for the District private-equity powerhouse, which has built an international reputation with a client list that reaches around the world.
The high-profile downfall, part of the broad turmoil in credit markets worldwide, followed a week of frantic negotiations between the Carlyle Group and a number of lenders. Carlyle Group's three founders as recently as Monday were considering injecting cash into the fund as a way to usher it through the credit crisis.
By yesterday the fund had defaulted on $16.6 billion of debt and said it expected to default soon on its remaining debt. The fund's $21.7 billion in assets were exclusively in AAA mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, traditionally considered secure and conservative investments, which it was using as collateral against its loans.
In a statement, Carlyle Capital said that it had been unable to meet margin calls in excess of $400 million over the past week and that it expected its lenders to take control of its remaining assets. The lenders, headed by Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan Chase, began selling the securities last night, according to a report on the Wall Street Journal's Web site.
The problems at Carlyle Capital have preoccupied the top leaders at Carlyle Group. The firm's founders, David M. Rubenstein, William E. Conway Jr. and Daniel D'Aniello, had been in meetings with lenders in an effort to resolve Carlyle Capital's problems, not only to protect their own investment and that of employees who have put millions of dollars into the company, but also to preserve Carlyle's Midas-touch reputation.
Forbes magazine last year estimated Carlyle's three founders to each be worth about $2.5 billion.
Carlyle Capital is incorporated on Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, and is traded on Amsterdam's Euronext exchange.
The fund was set up in August 2006 with roughly $670 million in cash from Carlyle's owners and other investors, and about $300 million in additional capital raised from a public stock sale.
The capital allowed the fund to go to banks and borrow far more, leveraging its cash investment some 20 times into the portfolio.
Carlyle Capital's prospects were dimmed by the same doubts that have upended securities linked to riskier subprime mortgages, namely whether the underlying assets were losing value and whether the homeowners would continue to make their payments.
As the market value of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities has dropped, Carlyle Capital's lenders asked it to increase its cash equity from what was 1 percent to as much as 5 percent. An increase of that amount on $20 billion in loans amounts to several hundred million dollars.
The Carlyle Group last summer loaned Carlyle Capital $150 million to cover debt obligations.
Conway and Rubenstein were in New York much of this week, accompanied by a team of Carlyle Group insiders, including the company's chief financial officer, negotiating a "standstill" agreement with lenders as they tried to work out a financial solution.
The agreement would have stopped lenders from foreclosing on loans they made to Carlyle Capital.
Carlyle Capital stock closed at $2.80 in Amsterdam yesterday before the announcement, off 89 percent from its peak.While the country’s been focusing on the Presidential election and the euro crisis, Bobby Jindal and Louisiana Republicans are about to execute their plan to privatize the state’s public schools in a massive voucher mess that will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions. The real crime is that the “schools” that will profit tremendously from this little voucher scheme writ large are…surprise!…religious-based:
Far more openings are available at smaller, less prestigious religious schools, including some that are just a few years old and others that have struggled to attract tuition-paying students. The school willing to accept the most voucher students — 314 — is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition. The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding. At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution. “We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children,” Carrier said. Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.
And Louisiana tax dollars are going to this. It’s insanity…and yet, Republicans now dominate the state. This is the “future” of American education that will make us “competitive” in math and science with Europe and Asia. Awesome.
Meanwhile, the students left in Louisiana public schools lose more and more funding for every student that takes advantage of this “more efficient approach to education”, necessitating more vouchers as students and parents flee a doomed system that eventually goes under a critical mass point and collapses. Lotteries determine who gets into the posh schools, and who gets into the windowless cubicles with the textbooks where evolution doesn’t exist. It’s a grift that would make the best cons grin from ear to ear and everyone’s lining up to open a school to get in on the action.
Everything about this is a complete disaster waiting to happen that will almost certainly collapse the state’s schools where major private charter outfits will have to step in and “save” the state of education in Louisiana. And the GOP will gladly hand that control over to for-profit outfits.
Which of course is the point. |
1966.[3] The students believed that the criticism of the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was a political issue and needed greater attention. The group of students, led by Zhang Chengzhi at Tsinghua University Middle School and Nie Yuanzi at Peking University, originally wrote the posters as a constructive criticism of Tsinghua University and Peking University's administration, who were accused of harboring intellectual elitism and bourgeois tendencies.[4]
Red Guards in 1966
The Red Guards were denounced as counter-revolutionaries and radicals by the school administration and fellow students, and were forced to secretly meet amongst the ruins of the Old Summer Palace. Nevertheless, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that the manifesto of the Red Guards be broadcast on national radio and published in the People's Daily newspaper. This action gave the Red Guards political legitimacy, and student groups quickly began to appear across China.[5]
Due to the factionalism already beginning to emerge in the Red Guard movement, Liu Shaoqi made the decision in early June 1966 to send in Communist Party of China (CPC) work teams.[3] These work groups were led by Zhang Chunqiao, head of China's Propaganda Department, and were the attempt by the Party to keep the movement under its control. Rival Red Guard groups led by the sons and daughters of cadres were formed by these work teams to deflect attacks from those in positions of power towards bourgeois elements in society, mainly intellectuals.[5] In addition, these Party-backed rebel groups also attacked students with 'bad' class backgrounds (these included the children of former landlords and capitalists).[5] These actions were all attempts by the CPC to preserve the existing state government and apparatus.[3]
Mao, concerned that these work teams were hindering the course of the Cultural Revolution, dispatched Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and others to join the Red Guards and combat the work teams.[4] In July 1966, Mao ordered the removal of the remaining work teams (against the wishes of Liu Shaoqi) and condemned their 'fifty days of White Terror'.[6] The Red Guards were now free to organise without the restrictions of the Party and, within a few weeks, on the encouragement of Mao's supporters, Red Guard groups had appeared in almost every school in China.[7]
Role in the Cultural Revolution [ edit ]
Mao expressed personal approval and support for the Red Guards in a letter to Tsinghua University Red Guards on 1 August 1966.[8] He gave the movement a more public boost at a massive rally on 18 August at Tiananmen Square. Mao appeared atop Tiananmen wearing an olive green military uniform, the type favored by Red Guards, but which he had not worn in many years.[8] He personally greeted 1,500 Red Guards and waved to 800,000 Red Guards and onlookers below.[8]
The rally was led by Chen Boda, and Lin Biao gave a keynote speech.[8] Red Guard leaders led by Nie Yuanzi also gave speeches.[8] A high school Red Guard put a red arm band inscribed with the characters for "Red Guard" on the Chairman, who stood for six hours.[8] The 8-18 rally, as it was known, was the first of eight receptions the Chairman gave to Red Guards in Tienanmen in the fall of 1966. It was this rally that signified the beginning of the Red Guards' involvement in implementing the aims of the Cultural Revolution.[9]
A second rally, held on 31 August, was led by Kang Sheng and Lin Biao also donned a red arm band. The last rally was held on 26 November 1966. In all, the Chairman greeted eleven to twelve million Red Guards, most of whom traveled from afar to attend the rallies[8][10] including one held on National Day 1966, which included the usual civil-military parade.
Attacks upon the "Four Olds" [ edit ]
The 11th Plenum of the CPC Central Committee had ratified the 'Sixteen Articles' in August 1966, a document that stated the aims of the Cultural Revolution. It also highlighted the role students would be asked to play in the movement. After the 18 August rally, the Cultural Revolution Group directed the Red Guards to attack the 'Four Olds' of Chinese society (old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas). For the rest of the year, Red Guards marched across China in a campaign to eradicate the 'Four Olds'. Old books and art were destroyed, museums were ransacked, and streets were renamed with new revolutionary names and adorned with pictures and the sayings of Mao.[12] Many famous temples, shrines, and other heritage sites in Beijing were attacked.[13]
The Cemetery of Confucius was attacked in November 1966 by a team of Red Guards from Beijing Normal University, led by Tan Houlan.[14][15] The corpse of the 76th-generation Duke Yansheng was removed from its grave and hung naked from a tree in front of the palace during the desecration of the cemetery.[16] Attacks on other cultural and historic sites happened between in 1966 and 1967. One of the greater damages was to the Ming Dynasty Tomb of the Wanli Emperor in which his and the empress's corpses along with a variety of artifacts from the tomb were destroyed by student members of the Red Guard. Between the assaults on Wan Li and Confucius' tombs alone, more than 6618 historic Chinese artifacts were destroyed in the desire to achieve the goals of the Cultural Revolution.[17]
Individual property was also targeted by Red Guard members if it was considered to represent one of the Four Olds. Commonly religious texts and figures would be confiscated and burned. Other times items of historic importance would be left, but defaced, with examples such as Qin Dynasty scrolls having their writings partially removed and stone and wood carvings having the faces and words carved out of them. Re-education came alongside the destruction of previous culture and history, throughout the Cultural Revolution schools were a target of Red Guard groups to teach both the new ideas of the Cultural Revolution; as well as to point out what ideas represented the previous era idealizing the Four Olds. For example, one student, Mo Bo, described a variety of the Red Guards activities taken to teach the next generation what was no longer the norms.[18] This was done according to Bo with wall posters lining the walls of schools pointing out workers who undertook "bourgeois" lifestyles. These actions inspired other students across China to join the Red Guard as well. One of these very people, Rae Yang, described how these actions inspired students. Through authority figures, such as teachers, using their positions as a form of absolute command rather than as educators gave students a reason to believe Red Guard messages.[19] In Yang's case it is exemplified through a teacher using a poorly phrased statement as an excuse to shame a student to legitimize the teachers own position.
Attacks on culture quickly descended into attacks on people. Ignoring guidelines in the 'Sixteen Articles' that stipulated that persuasion rather than force were to be used to bring about the Cultural Revolution, officials in positions of authority and perceived 'bourgeois elements' were denounced and suffered physical and psychological attacks.[12] On August 22, 1966, a central directive was issued to stop police intervention in Red Guard activities.[20] Those in the police force who defied this notice were labeled "counter-revolutionaries." Mao's praise for rebellion was effectively an endorsement for the actions of the Red Guards, which grew increasingly violent.[21]
Public security in China deteriorated rapidly as a result of central officials lifting restraints on violent behavior.[22] Xie Fuzhi, the national police chief, said it was "no big deal" if Red Guards were beating "bad people" to death.[23] The police relayed Xie's remarks to the Red Guards and they acted accordingly.[23] In the course of about two weeks, the violence left some one hundred teachers, school officials, and educated cadres dead in Beijing's western district alone. The number injured was "too large to be calculated."[22]
The most gruesome aspects of the campaign included numerous incidents of torture, murder, and public humiliation. Many people who were targets of'struggle' could no longer bear the stress and committed suicide. In August and September 1966, there were 1,772 people murdered in Beijing alone. In Shanghai there were 704 suicides and 534 deaths related to the Cultural Revolution in September. In Wuhan there were 62 suicides and 32 murders during the same period.[24]
Intellectuals were to suffer the brunt of these attacks. Many were ousted from official posts such as university teaching and allocated manual tasks such as "sweeping courtyards, building walls and cleaning toilets from 7am to 5pm daily" which would encourage them to dwell on past "mistakes".[25] An official report in October 1966 reported that the Red Guards had already arrested 22,000 'counterrevolutionaries'.[26]
The Red Guards were also tasked with rooting out 'capitalist roaders' (those with supposed 'right wing' views) in positions of authority. This search was to extend to the very highest echelons of the CPC, with many top party officials, such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai being attacked both verbally and physically by the Red Guards.[27] Liu Shaoqi was especially targeted, as he had taken Mao's seat as Chairman of the People's Republic following the Great Leap Forward. Although Mao stepped down from his post as a sign of accepting responsibility, he was angered that a capitalist roader like Liu could take the reins of communist China.
Clashes with the PLA [ edit ]
The Red Guards were not completely unchallenged. The Red Guards were not permitted to enter Zhongnanhai, the Forbidden City, or any military facility which was tasked with classified information (i.e. special intelligence, Nuclear Weapons development). Several times, Red Guards attempted to storm Zhongnanhai and the 8341 Special Regiment, which was responsible for Mao's security, fired upon the Red Guards.[28]
When Jiang Qing promoted the idea that the Red Guards should "crush the PLA" and Lin Biao being seemingly supportive of her plans (such as allowing Red Guards to loot barracks) while at the same time oblivious to the ongoing chaos the PLA had to deal with, several military commanders disregarded their chain of command and attacked Red Guards whenever their bases or people were threatened. When Red Guards entered factories and other areas of production, they encountered resistance in the form of worker and peasant groups who were keen to maintain the status quo.[28] In addition, there were bitter divisions within the Red Guard movement itself, especially along social and political lines. The most radical students often found themselves in conflict with more conservative Red Guards.[10]
The leadership in Beijing also simultaneously tried to restrain and encourage the Red Guards, adding confusion to an already chaotic situation. On the one hand, the Cultural Revolution Group reiterated calls for non-violence. On the other hand, the People's Liberation Army was told to assist the Red Guards with transport and lodging, and help organize rallies.[10] By the end of 1966, most of the Cultural Revolution Group were of the opinion that the Red Guards had become too much of a political liability.[10] The campaign against 'capitalist-roaders' had led to anarchy, the Red Guards' actions had led to conservatism amongst China's workers, and the lack of discipline and the factionalism in the movement had made the Red Guards politically dangerous.[29] 1967 would see the decision to dispel the student movement.
Factionalism within the Red Guards [ edit ]
"Enveloped in a trance of excitement and change", all student Red Guards pledged their loyalty to their beloved Chairman Mao Zedong.[1] Many worshipped Mao above everything and this was typical of a "pure and innocent generation".[30] Excited youths took inspiration from Mao's often vague pronouncements, generally believing the sanctity of his words and making serious efforts to figure out what they meant. Factions quickly formed based on individual interpretations of Mao's statements. All groups pledged loyalty to Mao and claimed to have his best interests in mind, yet they continually engaged in verbal and physical skirmishes all throughout the Cultural Revolution.[citation needed]
Youth from families with party-members and of revolutionary origin joined conservative factions. These factions focused on the socio-political status quo, keeping within their localities and working to challenge existing distributions of power and privilege.[31] Those from the countryside and without ties to the Chinese Communist Party often joined radical groups who sought to change and uproot local government leadership.[32]
The primary goal of the radicals was to restructure existing systems to benefit those of poorer backgrounds, as supposed capitalist roaders were corrupting the Socialist agenda. Primarily influenced by travel and a freer exchange of ideas from different regions of China, more joined the radical, rebel factions of the Red Guards by the second half of the Cultural Revolution.[32]
Some historians, one being Andrew Walder, argue that individuals and their political choices also influenced the development of Red Guard factions all across China. Interests of individuals, interactions with authority figures, and social interactions all altered identities to forge factions that would fight for new grievances against "the system".[31]
Suppression by the PLA (1967-1968) [ edit ]
By February 1967, political opinion at the center had decided on the removal of the Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution scene in the interest of stability.[33] The People's Liberation Army (PLA) forcibly suppressed the more radical Red Guard groups in Sichuan, Anhui, Hunan, Fujian, and Hubei provinces in February and March. Students were ordered to return to schools; student radicalism was branded 'counterrevolutionary' and banned.[34] There was a wide backlash in the spring against the suppression, with student attacks on any symbol of authority and PLA units. An order from Mao, the Cultural Revolution Group, the State Council, and the Central Military Affairs Committee of the PLA on 5 September 1967 instructed the PLA to restore order to China.[35]
The PLA violently put down the national Red Guard movement in the year that followed, with the suppression often brutal. A radical alliance of Red Guard groups in Hunan province called the Sheng Wu Lien was involved in clashes with local PLA units, for example, and in the first half of 1968 was forcibly suppressed.[36] At the same time the PLA carried out mass executions of Red Guards in Guangxi province that were unprecedented in the Cultural Revolution.[36]
The final remnants of the movement were defeated in Beijing in the summer of 1968. Reportedly, in an audience of the Red Guard leaders with Mao, the Chairman informed them gently of the end of the movement with a tear in his eye. The repression of the students by the PLA was not as gentle.[37] After the summer of 1968 some more-radical students continued to travel across China and play an unofficial part in the Cultural Revolution, but by then the movement's official and substantial role was over.
Rustification [ edit ]
From 1962 to 1979, 16 to 18 million youth were sent to the countryside to undergo re-education.[38][39]
Sending city students to the countryside was also used to defuse the student fanaticism set in motion by the Red Guards. On December 22, 1968, Chairman Mao directed the People's Daily to publish a piece entitled "We too have two hands, let us not laze about in the city", which quoted Mao as saying "The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty." In 1969 many youth were rusticated.[40] Many students could not deal with the harsh life and died in the process of reeducation.[41]
Historiography [ edit ]
The Red Guards and the wider Cultural Revolution are a sensitive and heavily censored chapter in China's history. Official government mentions of the era are rare and brief.[42]
In popular culture [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Da beauties are back.
Da Beauty League — a four-on-four summer hockey league that brings together some of the state’s top pro and amateur hockey talent — returns on Wednesday, July 12 for its sophomore season.
Based out of Edina’s Braemar Arena, the star-studded beer league debuted last summer and features a who’s who of Minnesota-based hockey talent.
The action runs through Wednesday, Aug. 23, while each session features three games scheduled to begin at 5:10 p.m., 6:35 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Wednesdays in July and every Monday and Wednesday in August.
Dustin Byfuglien (Winnipeg Jets), Ryan McDonagh (New York Rangers), Alex Goligoski (Arizona Coyotes), Drew Stafford (free agent), Paul Martin (San Jose Sharks) and Brock Nelson (New York Islanders) will captain this year’s teams.
They’ll be joined by a roster of players that features both NHL veterans and rising stars, including Woodbury native and Stanley Cup-winner Jake Guentzel, former Gophers star Nick Bjugstad and former Minnesota Wild forward Stephane Veilleux.
The group will once again play for the John Scott Cup, a keg-like trophy and “big mug of prestige” named for the retired NHL enforcer, who became an unlikely All-Star in 2016 after winning the league’s fan vote.
Scott will once again serve as the league’s honorary commissioner and is “a true beauty,” according to Da Beauty League’s website.
The league has been rolling out this year’s roster via Twitter, and has confirmed that the following players will take part this year:Ferrari sparked controversy before the race by electing to incur a five-place grid penalty on the Brazilian’s car in order to bump championship hopeful Fernando Alonso up one place to seventh.
Crucially, that put the Spaniard on the clean side of the grid, a big advantage at the brand new Circuit of the Americas, where the track is still slippery in places.
The tactic worked beautifully as Alonso climbed to fourth on the first lap and finished the race third, ensuring that the title race went on to Brazil this weekend.
Ferrari’s move was praised and condemned in almost equal measure by race fans. Some were impressed by the ingenuity and logic, while others felt it was against the spirit of the regulations and unfair on those drivers who had to move to the dirty side of the grid.
The Scuderia have tended to favour one lead driver down the years and have been unapologetic about doing so. In a statement issued yesterday they said that the decision had been approved by both drivers, although Massa later admitted that he had not been happy about it.
McLaren's Whitmarsh stressed that he was “not criticising” Ferrari, but added that it was not the way he believed race teams should be run. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it was quite a tough thing to do personally. I’m not criticising anyone for what they do. Team principals have to decide how they run their teams and it’s very clear that Ferrari are very focused on Fernando.
“In fairness it works for Fernando because, lest we forget, when Fernando was with us it was not doing those things that meant that Fernando left us.
“You all have to go racing the way you see fit. I think the toughest thing is that it put a number of people on to the slower side of the grid. Sadly, it didn’t impact on us at all. We were on the slow side of the grid and we stayed there.
“But I think if I had qualified on the fast side of the grid and then been moved to the slow side I would have been very p----- off. But it didn’t so I will just enjoy [Lewis Hamilton’s] win today. It was an epic race and Lewis drove beautifully.”The southernmost segment of the Silver Line is a mecca of used-car lots, RV dealerships and auto parts stores — some of the very industries that the bus service hopes to make obsolete.
It wasn't always that way, said Tim Cochran, city planner for Wyoming and a member of the Interurban Transit Partnership board, which operates The Rapid. And it doesn't have to stay that way, he said.
"Before the construction of U.S. 131, Division Avenue was a main commercial corridor," Cochran said. "But when 131 came in and 28th Street was developed, it pulled a lot of the vitality out of Division."
The exodus of retailers along Division created a niche opportunity for the car dealerships, which could lease or own large lots at bargain prices.
"We think that now the tables are going to turn with the (Silver Line) coming through," Cochran said. "It's going to re-energize the corridor. The car dealerships are certainly welcome to stay there as long as they would like to, but we think opportunities will make themselves available where they will sell their properties and allow them to be redeveloped for more intense uses."
Sam D'Angelo, owner of Autoxsell Sales and Marketing LLC, already is repurposing his former used-car lot on Division Avenue into a retail center called Fisher Station, which is set for an early summer opening.
"If you asked me that five years ago whether we needed more retail in this area, I would've answered 'no,' " D'Angelo said of his project, which he expects to cost more than $1 million.
"The Silver Line does factor in a little bit, but probably a bigger factor is that a Wal-Mart is going in just around the corner from us."
D'Angelo already has signed a Biggby Coffee franchisor and another company as tenants, and he is negotiating with two other potential occupants of the 6,000-square-foot retail center — an expansion of about 3,200 square feet over the original Autoxsell building.
"Would somebody be taking a bus down to buy a car?" D'Angelo said. "Probably not."
The Silver Line, he said, "lends itself to a retail center more than a car lot — a coffee shop, a cellphone company, some other type service business or retail business."
Cochran said another major catalyst should boost redevelopment from roughly 56th Street to 60th Street: the extension of a sanitary sewer system, which will allow more intensive residential development along that stretch of Division Avenue.
With a shared boundary of roughly two miles down the middle of Division, the cities of Wyoming and Kentwood hope to break ground next year on the sewer project, whose cost easily could exceed $1 million. The engineering is still being done and plans aren't completed. Federal funds that will pay for the bulk of construction already are earmarked.
"That area has a number of large, underutilized properties, mainly because everything out there had to use septic fields," Cochran said. "That is really going to open up that section for development."
Terry Schweitzer, community development director for Kentwood and another member of The Rapid's board, said he expects residential density to increase after the improvements are finished. But he cautioned that the change "is something that will evolve over time."
To goose along that evolution, Wyoming and Kentwood are collaborating on the use of form-based zoning codes that will encourage redevelopment by allowing changes such as reduced setbacks for construction of buildings closer to the corridor. Form-based codes address characteristics such as the types and mixes of building in an area and the number of floors, while conventional zoning codes address characteristics such as the density use, parking and setbacks.
Kentwood is benefiting from the experience of Wyoming, which created such codes for the development along 28th Street, Schweitzer said. Wyoming may have something for its City Commission in about six months.
"We are meeting with property owners there now because we are discussing the reconstruction of Division from 54th to 60th Street, so we are also asking for input on code changes," Schweitzer said. Among those discussions is reducing the requirement for a 35-foot building setback.
There's another reason that The Rapid is optimistic about filling Silver Line buses with riders right out of the gate in August: The authority has purchased a lot for 200 cars on the southern end of the route, providing free parking on a first-come, first-served basis.
"We are trying to capture the 'choice rider,' the commuter — and who exactly that is remains to be seen," Venema said. "Is it someone driving in from Kalamazoo, or is it someone more local?"
One likely rider is a student trying to get downtown to attend classes at Grand Rapids Community College. Free parking and a 27-minute commute time could act as powerful incentives for students accustomed to the "massive pileup" that sometimes results in hourlong waits at the main GRCC ramp during peak times of 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., Venema said.
The Silver Line loop downtown stops at GRCC as well as Mercy Health St. Mary's Campus; the "Medical Mile" — made up of Spectrum Health facilities, the Van Andel Institute and the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine — and two stops downtown before ending at The Rapid's Central Station.
With all the factors in play, The Rapid hopes by the end of next year to entice an average of at least 5,000 riders per weekday to take the Silver Line — making it the second-busiest route in a system that covers nearly 500 miles.
"Whenever you launch a new service, it takes time for people to acclimate or try it," Venema said. "We'll know a lot more in fall this year."Bats are some of the most fascinating and misunderstood creatures in the world, and few know this better than Merlin Tuttle, the world’s leading bat biologist and photographer. If you’ve ever seen a fantastic photo of a bat in a newspaper article, book, or anywhere else, chances are that Tuttle took it. The founder of Bat Conservation International, Tuttle has spent nearly his entire life working for the conservation of bats, who are often hunted and feared despite playing a vital part in nature.
His passion sprouted as a teenager living in Tennessee in the 1950s, when Tuttle managed to prove that gray bats are migratory, contrary to what textbooks and scientists said at the time. Since this first breakthrough, Tuttle has gone on to become a top ecologist who has captured and banded well over 40,000 bats in order to identify and track them for research purposes. Part of his work includes photographing bats in an effort to positively depict their harmless–and often adorable–nature. Among his most eye-catching images are these portraits of bats with their faces covered in pollen and their long tongues sticking out as they feed on flowers and fruits. The winged mammals are responsible for the pollination of over 500 plant species, including different types of mango, banana, cocoa, durian, guava, and agave. Without bats, say goodbye to treats like chocolate and tequila, as well as a balanced and healthy ecosystem.
One of the photographer’s goals is to debunk common misconceptions about bats by showing them in a new light–a noble objective that means making sure a bat’s clean, silky fur is always spotless during a photo shoot, as well as upholding his personal policy of never photographing a bat snarling or making a scary face. Tuttle wrote to us in an email: “Seen in proper light, bats are just as fascinating and important as any other animals. Contrary to traditional misperceptions, they’re vital to healthy ecosystems, provide billions of dollars of benefits to human economies and have one of our planet’s best records for living safely near humans.”
How does Tuttle manage to get so close to his nocturnal subjects with his camera and flash? “Most of my action photos are taken in my portable, walk-in studio at distances of just 1 to 1.5 meters. Four to eight high-speed flashes are required,” Tuttle told us. “Acclimation typically takes from one to five nights, after which bats view me as a source of tasty treats, often learning to come to my hand on call to be fed. Once a bat overcomes its fear of me, I can photograph it going about its normal activities in sets that I build to be indistinguishable from what one would see in the wild. That doesn’t mean that I don’t often have to work all night, several nights in a row, with thousands of tries to get just one perfect image! When possible, I also work in the wild.”
Tuttle documented his lifetime of whirlwind adventures in his new book The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World’s Most Misunderstood Mammals, which will be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers starting October 20, 2015.
Merlin Tuttle: Website
My Modern Met granted permission to use photos by Merlin Tuttle.Former President Barack Obama has urged Americans to “stand up to hate” at a time when the political landscape is deeply divided.
“Everywhere we see the refuge of falling into tribe and clan and anger at those who don’t look like us, or have the same surnames, or pray the way we do,” he told an audience as he accepted an award from the late President John F Kennedy’s family.
Mr Obama did not make partisan attacks or mention his successor, President Donald Trump, who has often criticised the previous administration and has worked to undo a number of the Democrat's initiatives
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
“At such moments courage is necessary," Mr Obama said on accepting the Profile in Courage Award. "At such moments we need courage to stand up to hate. Not just in others, but in ourselves.
“At such moments we need the courage to stand up to dogma. Not just in others, but in ourselves.”
The award recognises displays of courage similar to those described in Mr Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage, which is given in recognition of individuals risking their careers or lives acting according to their conscience.
Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of Mr Kennedy, who presented Mr Obama with the award, said: “Today, when many doubt the integrity of our elected leaders, this award is more important than ever.”
Mr Obama also used the speech to make his first public comments since leaving office on the push to repeal his signature health care plan, imploring members of Congress on Sunday to demonstrate political courage even if it rails against their party's positions.
The former president recalled members of Congress who voted to pass the Affordable Care Act during his presidency, only to lose their seat in later elections.
“They had a chance to insure millions,” he said. “But this vote could also cost them their seats, perhaps end their political careers.”
Mr Obama made no direct reference to Thursday's House vote to dismantle much of the health care law, but said that while it did not take courage to help the rich and powerful, it does require courage to help the sick and vulnerable.
“It is my fervent hope and the hope of millions... such courage is still possible, that today's members of Congress regardless of party are willing to look at the facts and speak the truth, even when it contradicts party positions,” said Mr Obama, whose appeal seemed to focus on wavering Republicans.
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, one of the few Republicans to attend the dinner, told reporters the Senate would write its own version of the legislation and he did not expect the House bill to survive intact.
The former President focused much of his address on the legacy of President Kennedy, as the library prepared to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth later this month. Mr Obama noted the Kennedys had long advocated for health care reform, and in particular, the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who died of brain cancer before passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Among the guests who made their way down the red carpet into the library for the event were representatives of the Kennedy family, members of Congress, former Obama staffers and celebrities including former late-night talk show host David Letterman. Former Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State John Kerry also were in attendance.
US Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Obama earned the award by meeting many challenges that faced him during his presidency.
“It's about understanding the challenges we face as a country and as a planet and mustering the political will to do what is right even if what is right at that moment isn't necessarily popular,” said Mr Kennedy, a harsh critic of the Republican health overhaul plan.
Mr Obama travels to Italy this week to give a keynote address on climate change and food security at Tuesday's Seeds and Chips Global Food Innovation Summit in Milan.
Associated Press contributed to this report
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At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowWAYNESBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A western Pennsylvania police officer has resigned and been charged with drunkenly breaking into an apartment and beating a man the officer thought was dating his ex-girlfriend.
Twenty-nine-year-old Asa Winters resigned as a Waynesburg officer Monday night and was charged Tuesday with burglary, simple assault and public drunkenness.
The state attorney general is prosecuting because the incident Dec. 31 took place in the Greene County borough where Winters worked.
Prosecutors say Winters mistakenly beat up the wrong man -- the roommate of the man he sought.
Defense attorney Brian Gorman didn't deny the charges, but says Winters is a "good man" who made mistakes not related to his police job.
Gorman is hoping for an "amicable resolution" to the charges and says Winters has "owned up" and "taken steps to correct" his mistakes.
READ MORE Pennsylvania crime news here.By Jake Baskin (@baskincase)
*Find the preview for Team Canada here
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And I’m not talking about whatever winter holiday you celebrate. I’m talking about the World Junior Hockey Championship, which has been a part of my family’s holiday tradition for over half my life now.
It’s probably been in your family’s tradition for longer if you’re reading this, but I have lived my entire life south of the border, and the tournament was first televised in the States in 2007, on a Dish Network pay-per-view channel. I luckily enough got that channel, and was hooked from Day 1.
Being an American, I gravitated toward the country of my birth when deciding who to root for. I had watched many of the US National Team members play for and against my favorite college team, the University of Minnesota, and had recognized a few more of the names from the NHL Draft. The World Junior alums quickly became my favorite players when they reached the NHL, and it wasn’t long before I started to pay attention to the evaluation process as well. By this point, I spend way too much time watching, writing about, and discussing the American prospects eligible for the tournament.
I came into this roster announcement buildup with a great deal of skepticism, and maybe I shouldn’t have. Surely USA Hockey had learned from the disaster that was the World Cup of Hockey, or from their frequent omissions of talented scorers every year in favor of grinders, or undersized, undrafted “energy” guys. But USA Hockey had never put together a “plug in the 23 best players and sort the lineup from there” kind of roster before, and I didn’t think management was ready to finally get rid of Herb Brooks’s outdated methods. As Americans, we all like to glorify the gold medal-winning teams, but they had their share of players who shouldn’t have been there, just in 2010 Canada was missing too many top players and in 2013 goaltending saved our bacon.
But this year, watching the roster announcement on television for the first time ever, something feels different. Maybe this will be the team that learned talent alone can win you a short tournament. Looking at the roster, this is what I and many USA Hockey fans have been calling for since 2011, and I have to congratulate Jim Johannson, Bob Motzko, and Gavin Regan for finally putting the US in the best possible position to win the whole thing.
Is it a perfect roster? No, absolutely not. But between injuries and players NHL teams simply wouldn’t release, this is the best roster the US could put forward, and no matter what color medal, if any, Team USA wins at the World Juniors, I can be satisfied with the way the team was put together.
With one defensive cut and three forward cuts to be made, here is what the team looks like.
Goaltenders
The US has put together a string of good goaltending performances at the World Juniors recently, with John Gibson, Jon Gillies, Thatcher Demko, and Alex Nedeljkovic being Team USA’s four most recent starters. Gibson and Nedeljkovic allowed the Americans to go further into the tournament than they deserved. Goaltending is going to be more important than usual this year, with the lack of defensive depth on the team. The US brought three goalies who are capable of starting at this tournament, but one has a clear leg up on the other two as camp gets underway.
Tyler Parsons, London Knights (CGY): Parsons may not be the best of the three goalies five to ten years down the line, but he comes into camp as the starter, and he deserves it. The Chesterfield, Mich. native was perhaps the most underrated member of the Knights’ American-heavy lineup last year. Parsons posted a.921 save percentage during the regular season and a.925 during the OHL playoffs as London took home the Memorial Cup. He then had a great showing at the Summer Showcase, starting the game against Canada and making 35 saves in a 5-1 win. He missed a little over a month with a leg injury earlier in the season, but hasn’t missed a beat since returning; he’s second in the OHL with a.920 save percentage in 13 games.
Jake Oettinger, Boston University (2017): I’m one of the biggest Oettinger fans in the world, and I have been for about four years now. He has been one of the youngest players at every level he’s been at, but has also been one of the best goalies at every level he’s played. The only 2017 first-time Draft-eligible player on this roster, Oettinger spent two years with the National Team Development Program and had the program’s best two-year career since the team moved from the NAHL to the USHL in 2009. His NTDP career save percentage was.911, tied with John Gibson for eighth all-time. The Lakeville, Minn. native took his talents to Boston University this year as part of their all-time great recruiting class, and has already established himself as one of the |
’s “The Purge: Election Year” rounded out the top five, adding $11.7 million to its $58.1 million domestic haul.
Steven Spielberg’s “The BFG” now definitively ranks as one of the year’s biggest flops. The $140 million children’s book adaptation only managed to pick up $7.6 million in its second weekend, bringing its domestic total to a disastrous $38.7 million.
In limited release, Bleecker Street debuted the Viggo Mortensen dramedy “Captain Fantastic” to strong reviews and $98,451 from four theaters. That translates into a $24,613 per-screen average. The film, which screened at Cannes and Sundance, will expand next weekend to 11 new markets, including San Francisco, Boston and Seattle.
After struggling at the beginning of summer, as sequels such as “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” failed to gain much traction, ticket sales are on the upswing. Receipts this weekend are up roughly 2% over last year when “Minions” debuted. The hope is that upcoming releases such as “Jason Bourne,” “Star Trek Beyond” and “Suicide Squad” can continue to forward momentum.
“There’s a lot of breadth in the marketplace,” said Aronson. “I think summer is shaping up to finish strongly with some of the tentpoles left to come.”Remember the Ecce Homo restoration fail?
Well, something quite similar just happened to a Our Lady of Guadalupe sculpture in Mexico:
The San Pedro Cholula municipality from Puebla already has its own “Ecce Homo restored”. It’s the Lady of Guadalupe which is in the Royal Chapel of Naturales, which, according to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), received an intervention “with no expert technique”.
According to the online publication E-Consulta, the INAH performed an expert assessement of the sculpture, which revealed that tweaks on the workpiece were performed without any expert technique and dismissed that the original sculpture had been replaced by a copy.
E-Consulta reports that an INAH document, obtained through the IFAI, informs that due to the type of damage “it’s not possible to recover what was lost. It may be possible to try and copy the way it looked like, and through more accurate decoration techniques than those used in colonial times, the sculpture could resemble the way it looked before it was intervened”.Government officials have considered “suspending” the arrival of asylum seekers from Greece and Lebanon due to “critical” capacity issues in accommodating relocated refugees, documents seen by The Irish Times reveal.
In 2015 the State undertook to accept 4,000 asylum seekers from Greece, Italy and Lebanon as part of relocation and resettlement programmes agreed with European Union counterparts.
Some 1,400 people, predominantly Syrians, have so far arrived in Ireland with more due to be accepted in 2018 and 2019. But internal Department of Justice records over recent months reveal an mounting anxiety over the State’s ability to deal with this influx.
A briefing prepared for the Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan in July outlines that 32 centres operated by the Reception and Integration Agency are at 91 per cent capacity with some of the leftover beds unavailable “due to family configurations and maintenance”. The agency provides accommodation and related services for refugees and asylum seekers,
The Government also sought to establish Emergency Reception and Orientation Centres to cater for new arrivals.
Commenting on the three centres opened so far in Kildare, Waterford and Roscommon, an earlier briefing describes the lack of available beds as a “critical issue”. It also confirms that the 210-person facility in Ballaghaderreen which opened in March was filled to capacity within two months.
‘Suspending arrivals’ The notes reveal frustration at poor responses to repeated public tenders for new reception centres, with Government officials giving serious consideration to “suspending” arrivals from Greece and Lebanon “until appropriate accommodation is found”, according to a briefing from April.
The “limited” market supply for new centres was again written about internally in the department in July, when officials said the State is now “struggling to get asylum seekers from Greece to Ireland”.
The Irish Refugee Council warned that suspending relocation and resettlement programmes would leave people living in “substandard conditions in Greece and Lebanon”. It said the State’s struggle to meet accommodation commitments under the Irish Refugee Protection Programme was “indicative of the wider housing crisis in Ireland and the failures of successive governments to properly address this issue”.
Fiona Finn, head of Nasc, the Irish Immigrant Support Centre, criticised the Government’s “flawed policy” of using large reception centres as temporary housing for asylum seekers. She also questioned why the State had not moved immediately to accept pledges of accommodation from the public.
“The State had an opportunity to depart from the direct provision-type system, with all its inherent flaws... and instead chose to continue to utilise a system that they themselves had already recognised as broken and in need of reform,” said Ms Finn.
Suitable housing The Irish Red Cross, which was chosen by the Government in 2015 to manage the more than 800 public pledges of accommodation, goods and services for refugees, said it was only given access by the department to work with “a percentage of the overall cohort of refugees” in early 2017 followed by a larger group in June 2017.
The charity said it began placing refugees in suitable housing “as soon as they received their refugee status” and that 65 refugees had been settled in housing across nine counties. It added that the responsibility for housing refugees arriving from Greece and Lebanon lay with the Government.
“The focus of the Irish Red Cross in particular has been on a group of migrants with refugee status identified by the Department of Justice. This group is comprised of some families, but mainly single people, and the Irish Red Cross is utilising the pledged accommodation and private rented sector accommodation to house these refugees.”
The charity highlighted that it had been unable to contact “a significant number of pledgers” by phone or email and asked that anyone who signed up to the register contact the charity.
The Minister has said Ireland will fulfil its commitment to accept 1,089 refugees from Greece under the EU-wide relocation programme by early 2018 following repeated delays.RSS ideologue M G Vaidya (Express Archive)
As RSS’S all-India prachar pramukh Manmohan Vaidya’s remarks over reservation continue to generate controversy, his father and senior RSS ideologue M G Vaidya on Saturday questioned the provision of reservation for certain castes such as Marathas that are not “backward”.
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The RSS called M G Vaidya’s statement on reservation his “personal opinion”.
“The SCs and STs must continue to get reservations, but the Marathas are not a backward caste,” Vaidya told The Sunday Express. “There have been chief ministers, governors, vice-chancellors etc from the community. But there are poor among the Marathas, too. The government should decide how they can be accommodated in the reservation regimen.”
The BJP government in Maharashtra has promised reservation for the Maratha community, which had carried out a long silent agitation across the state for the provision.
Vaidya said, “The government should also appoint a non-political committee to find out who have benefitted from caste-based reservations and who have not, because it is found that while some have benefitted for more than two generations, some (sections) have not at all. They should also be brought under the quota umbrella.”
Before the 2015 Bihar elections, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had also demanded a review of the reservation policy.
As M G Vaidya’s remarks created another controversy, the RSS on Saturday went on the defensive and both Manmohan Vaidya and Sahsarkaryavah Dattatreya Hosabale issued separate statements clarifying the Sangh’s stand on the issue.
“An attempt is going on to create a controversy over the opinion of RSS on reservation. We strongly oppose it. I had clarified the RSS’s view on reservation at Jaipur Literature Festival and during a subsequent press conference,” Hosabale said. “The RSS does not agree with that. The RSS’s stand is clear that reservation supported by the Constitution for SCs, STs and OBCs must continue. It is still needed today, it should be implemented in totality.”
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Manmohan Vaidya said, “Reservation is necessary as long as caste-based discrimination continues in Hindu society. The Sangh has repeatedly clarified…this.” He also said that reservation to minorities on the basis of religion is “not sanctioned by the Constitution, and is not appropriate either. These two issues are different. Please don’t try to create an illusion by mixing both”.Developer has big plans for dated Macy's Plaza in downtown L.A.
Wayne Ratkovich, who bought the mammoth complex for $241 million, plans to invest $160 million to restore its lost luster.
The dramatic makeover of the 2.4-million-square-foot property is in the hands of Los Angeles developer Wayne Ratkovich, who has made a career of renovating well-known historic properties. He overhauled the former headquarters of aviation titan Howard Hughes near Marina del Rey, as well as the Art Deco-era Wiltern theater and office complex in Koreatown.
The mammoth complex can reclaim star status, its new owner said, but only after several multimillion-dollar improvements and radical surgery to open its fortress-like exterior. The moves would reverse discredited 20th century planning theories that called for keeping shoppers contained in sterile malls, safe from unsavory streets.
These days, however, Macy's Plaza has devolved into a dated, downscale relic and gets little love, even at the busy intersection of 7th and Flower streets.
It was hailed as a crowning achievement for Los Angeles in the early 1970s — an indoor shopping mall that filled an entire downtown block and also boasted a plush hotel and a high-rise office building. For years, tourists flocked to the premier address.
"It's larger than anything we have ever done before," Ratkovich said of the Macy's Plaza project, "and a huge amount of responsibility."
In one of the largest Southern California purchases this year, Ratkovich bought Macy's Plaza for $241 million and announced plans for a $160-million transformation. The renovation involves removing the mall's glass atrium roof and ripping out ground-level brick walls to bring stores and restaurants to the adjacent sidewalks.
Ratkovich also plans a sunken, sunlight-filled public plaza — directly connected to a planned subway station — and significant upgrades to the 23-story, 485-room Sheraton hotel.
Construction is expected to begin early next year and be finished in the fall of 2015, when the complex would be renamed the Bloc.
The moribund mall lies near the middle of a building boom remaking the south side of downtown Los Angeles, said real estate broker Richard Schnell of Colliers International.
Two blocks to the west on Figueroa Street, the former Wilshire Grand Hotel is being razed to make way for a $1-billion hotel and office skyscraper that will be the tallest building in the West. Three other hotels are under construction nearby, and nearly 1,000 apartments are being built within two blocks of the mall, according to the Los Angeles Downtown Center Business Improvement District. Several other downtown hotel and residential projects are in the planning stages.
Two years ago, Ratkovich identified Macy's Plaza as a key site in the development wave and made an unsolicited offer to buy it from Jamison Properties, his broker, Schnell, said. The deal was completed last week.
Los Angeles architect Scott Johnson of Johnson Fain has been working for months on plans to modernize the mall. Among its largest drawbacks is the way it turns its back on Flower Street with a block-long brick wall, Johnson said.
Such inward focus for an urban shopping center was in vogue in the '70s. Planners today strive to make sidewalks inviting with well-lighted storefronts, outdoor cafes and greenery. But back then, many builders tried to create oases where people could escape from the noise, heat and perhaps danger found on the streets. Mall builders also liked boxes that kept shoppers contained inside, where they would presumably keep spending; some mall owners even resisted putting benches in their shopping centers because people who were sitting weren't buying.
Today, the fortress format has become unwelcome in cities.
"It's so egregious now," Johnson said. "Paradigms have changed since then."
His design calls for punching a big hole in that wall and putting two stories of shops and restaurants on the sidewalk, as modern city planners prefer. Shops would also be added to 7th Street, and entrances would be created or expanded on other sides of the mall as well.Print Email Font Resize Font Resize Longmont woman arrested for allegedly groping TSA agent in Phoenix
A Longmont woman was arrested Thursday after she allegedly groped a female security agent at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, according to Fox 10 in Phoenix.
Fox reported that court records show Yukari Miyamae, 61, squeezed and twisted the left breast of the agent Thursday at a security checkpoint.
An officer with the Phoenix Police Department said Miyamae was released Thursday on her own recognizance. She faces a charge of felony abuse.
Officers told Fox that Miyamae admitted to the crime, though they do not know why she touched the agent.
According to court records, Miyamae lives in Longmont and is self-employed. A neighbor told Fox 31 that he was shocked to hear of the report and that it was not like Miyamae.
Miyamae did not return a phone call seeking comment Friday.
A Longmont woman was arrested Thursday after she allegedly groped a female security agent at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, according to Fox 10 in Phoenix.Fox reported that court records show Yukari Miyamae, 61, squeezed and twisted the left breast of the agent Thursday at a security checkpoint.An officer with the Phoenix Police Department said Miyamae was released Thursday on her own recognizance. She faces a charge of felony abuse.Officers told Fox that Miyamae admitted to the crime, though they do not know why she touched the agent.According to court records, Miyamae lives in Longmont and is self-employed. A neighbor told Fox 31 that he was shocked to hear of the report and that it was not like Miyamae.Miyamae did not return a phone call seeking comment Friday.The NDP always sees Alberta from the bottom up: from the street rather than the executive suite.
That simple fact explains how Premier Rachel Notley’s government behaves. It’s a useful lens for those still deeply disoriented by the first non-conservative government since, oh, early 1935.
The dispute over power purchase agreements is a classic case.
Conservatives of all stripes tend to see the government lawsuit against utility companies as an attack on investment, the sanctity of contracts and the free-enterprise ethic that built the province.
For Notley’s NDP, though, the corporate attempt to dump PPAs is proof that consumers are getting shafted by companies that made huge profits but now exploit a contract loophole that ensures they never risk anything.
The New Democrats don’t believe their actions will cause investors to flee. Nor do they expect the companies to shift their losses (estimated at anywhere from $600 million to $2 billion) to power consumers.
Then where does that loss go?
A top government official replies firmly: “To the companies — they’ll have to eat it. They’ve made billions under these rules. Now they have to eat this loss.”
That includes Enmax, in the NDP view, even though it’s owned by the City of Calgary.
New Democrats believe the companies can absorb the loss and continue to thrive. Whatever happens, their key goal is to protect both the provincial treasury and the consumer.
They believe economic power starts at the bottom. They would rather see an extra dollar in a single mom’s purse than a million in a CEO’s portfolio.
The PPA dispute is just the most dramatic example of this instinctive sympathy for the underdog. More than a dozen policies reflect this, in every area from the workplace to the marketplace, from worker safety and consumer ripoffs to relations with First Nations.
The list includes minimum wage hikes; strict new controls on predatory payday loans; child tax benefits; investigating the Alberta Motor Vehicle Industry Council; the controversial farm safety bill; a review of condo deals; allowing victims of family violence to break residential leases; an apology to victims of mistreatment in residential schools; recognizing gender identity and expression; and a post-secondary tuition freeze.
There’s more, a lot more, but a couple of these moves stand out.
The attack on payday lending practices was quick, tough and long overdue. Allowing companies to legally charge huge annualized interest rates, often 10 times the 60 per cent ceiling under federal law, not only caused hardship, but worked against anti-poverty efforts of cities and the provincial government itself.
Remarkably, the industry had legal exemptions in most provinces, including Alberta, from the federal law that set the standard for criminal usury.
The NDP ended that exemption, while fostering reasonable “micro-loans” from reputable institutions.
Now the province is going after the Alberta Motor Vehicle Industry Council, which has long been accused of lax oversight of vehicle sales practices.
The PC government was concerned about this, but, true to form, vowed to “work with” the industry council.
The NDP has now appointed a formal examiner, after promising to amend the Fair Trading Act to give the government new powers over such industry bodies. If the council has been nonchalant about shady practices, its days are numbered.
I’ve talked to industry veterans who say some sales tactics used with low-income car buyers are as aggressive as the old payday loans, including credit at very high interest rates and mandatory purchase of high-margin add-ons.
The review of condo deals may not be so pressing in this market, but there are too many stories of buyer deposits being held captive even when builders miss multiple deadlines for completion of their units.
That’s how the NDP sees the world — from down below. After decades with a government that was more comfortable with a corporate view, it takes getting used to.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald
dbraid@postmedia.comBlack holes are some of the most amazing cosmological structures in the universe. We are drawn to them. Perhaps this is because they stand as a kind of sublime horror; they are super massive objects that consume entire worlds. Plus, their awesome size and power is unutterably amazing. Although we don’t know everything about black holes, we have uncovered some pretty amazing facts. Here, in no particular order, are some of the coolest and biggest black holes we’ve ever discovered.
4 NGC 3842
This black hole with masses equivalent to ten billion Suns could easily swallow five Solar Systems whole. The black hole lurk in the bellies of the elliptical galaxie, NGC 3842, 320 million light years away in the constellation of Leo. This contenders are at least 9.7 billion times more massive than our Sun, and possibly even larger.
Furthermore, the event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which nothing can escape these black hole’ immense gravity – not even light – is estimated to be five times the orbit of Pluto, and it’s gravitational influence would extend over a sphere 4,000 light years across.
Saying that it’s “big” is a bit like saying that the Sun is “warm”—it’s an astronomical understatement. Really, it is.
For comparison, The Small Magellanic Cloud (a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way) has a diameter of some 7,000 light-years and contains several hundred million stars… which is nowhere near 3284’s 9.7 billion solar masses. So this black hole puts an entire galaxy to shame (…a dwarf galaxy, but still).Zuma shocked by Cape Town shacks
Cape Town - President Jacob Zuma on Friday told shack dwellers near Cape Town he was shocked to see the conditions in which DA rule had left them.
"When the DA speaks in Parliament they say things have improved," Zuma told a crowd of a few hundred people in Imizamo Yethu in Hout Bay.
"I came to see for myself, and I have been shocked to see my people live in these conditions."
The president went from door to door, talking to residents at length, and repeated the exercise in the nearby fishing community of Hangklip.
Media were crowded out of homes he visited by a massive security contingent.
But staff reported that Zuma commiserated with neighbours of a woman who died days ago when her dwelling caught fire.
He asked another why the DA was in power there.
She retorted that she had voted for the ANC, and invited him to check on that.
An unemployed, but qualified nanny, Pumla, said she planned to vote for the ANC next year, and had come to see Zuma because his visit had brought some hope.
"It's just promises probably, but even if the promise is empty you still want that hope," she said.
ANC spokesperson Keith Khoza said the visit was part of the president's grassroots campaign for the 2014 elections, now 10 months away.Many Muslims believe that donating blood is against their religion Young British Muslims are being urged to mark the holy month of Muharram by giving blood in Manchester. Muharram is a period of mourning to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad. In an extreme demonstration of their faith, devout Shi'a Muslims makes themselves bleed on the festival day of Ashura. But the Islamic Unity Society is appealing for young Muslims to back its blood donor campaign instead. Saving life The climax of Muharram is the tenth day when many Shi'a Muslims around the world mark the festival of Ashura (16 December this year) by ritually cutting themselves. Some even take part in flagellation ceremonies in which men beat themselves with a bladed whip until they bleed. But the Islamic Unity Society (IUS) a national organisation for Muslim students and young professionals, is encouraging Muslims to give blood instead. Devout Shi'a Muslims take part in flagellating ceremonies Four years ago, it launched the National Imam Hussain Blood Donation campaign in Manchester. Its founder Dr Marwan Al-Dawoud said donating blood was a way for Muslims to show their devotion as well as saving lives. "If people want to self-flagellate, it's up to them," he said. "What we're saying is that this is a time when we feel that Imam Hussein gave something of himself. "Use that message and give blood because it's something that is good for society. "It's saving life at the end of the day and there is no greater gift from God." Blood groups Only 4% of the UK population gives blood on a regular basis. That figure is even lower among British Muslims, with many believing wrongly that is against the teachings of Islam. In 2009, 230 people came forward at special sessions across the UK. GIVING BLOOD Donors must be between 17 to 65, in good health and over 50kg (7st 12lbs) Donors can give 470 ml of blood (just under a pint) up to three times a year The NHS needs 7,000 donations of blood daily
National Blood Service In an effort to encourage new donors, Dr Al-Dawoud said the campaign had the backing of senior Muslim clerics. "The Islamic community, they're not sure if it's OK to give blood," he said. "So what we've done as part of this campaign is we've asked the scholars - we're trying to get people to give blood - do you back it or not? "And we've got a lot of the major scholars around the world saying, 'this is a fantastic campaign!' "So, not only is it Islamically OK to give blood, but they're behind it 100%," he added. Theo Clarke, donor relations manager for the NHS Blood & Transfusion Service (NHSBT) welcomed the campaign saying it was important to have blood stocks that reflected the wider population. "Often, rare blood groups are more common within certain ethnic groups, so encouraging people with rarer blood types to donate is a constant challenge." The IUS blood donor session is in Manchester on Monday 20 December. To sign up, call the National Blood Service on 0300 123 23 23 and state that you wish to donate with the Islamic Unity Society. For more information, go to www.ius.org.uk/giveblood
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“It was a damn near-run thing,” said the Duke of Wellington.
The Iron Duke was speaking of Waterloo.
And for the United States, it was a damn near-run thing that we are not now in a major war — with an enraged Arab and Muslim world viewing sickening videos of dead and dying Syrian women and children from U.S. missile strikes.
Next time, we may not be so lucky. Next time, we may not have Vladimir Putin to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, as he did by seizing on yet another gaffe by John Kerry and converting it into a Russian plan to have Syria identify and surrender its chemical weapons.
Putin pulled President Obama back off the ledge. He saved Obama from having either to ignominiously climb down from his “Assad must go!” and “red line” bluster — or act on his ultimata and plunge us into a war the American people and U.S. military do not want to fight.
Putin was acting in Russia’s interests. But in preventing a U.S.-Syrian war, Putin’s interests and ours are one.
Russia does not want a confrontation over U.S. missiles falling on its Syrian ally. Do we? Russia does not want a wider Mideast war, which is what a U.S. strike would bring, with Russia and Iran racing to support and re-equip their stricken Syrian ally. Do we want that wider war?
Russia does not want Assad to fall, not only because that would mean a defeat for Russia, but because of the awful consequences.
Is Putin wrong when he writes in the New York Times of the rebels:
“The United States State Department has designated Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations.
“Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.”
Is Putin wrong? Even Obama seems to fear what Putin fears.
Thus Obama says any U.S. strike would not be intended to bring down Assad. But if he does not want regime change, why is Obama funneling weapons to rebels who are fighting for regime change?
Almost no one fears Assad would use chemical weapons on the United States.
But if he falls, some of these weapons would surely fall into the hands of jihadists who would relish dispatching suicide bombers with nerve gas against Americans.
Putin’s policy makes sense. It is Obama’s policy that is incoherent.
We demand proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” before we hang murderers. Yet we threaten to kill Syrians for war crimes no one has yet been able to pin directly on Bashar Assad.
Why not prove he ordered the strikes, before we start the war?
John McCain comes out of a meeting with Obama boasting a robust attack is coming. Other senators say they have assurances no such attack is in the cards.
One day John Kerry is facing down Hitler in the Rhineland. The next he is promising the world that any U.S. strike will be “unbelievably small.”
Obama has to correct him: The U.S. military does not do “pinpricks.”
Yet, no one seems able to point to a strategic benefit America will derive, other than feeling better about ourselves, from launching missiles into the middle of what Obama calls “someone else’s war.”
The natural instinct of the American people — Keep us out! — is correct.
Yet the War Party, though temporarily routed, has not given up on its goal — war on Syria, followed by war on Iran.
Lindsay Graham is urging Obama to attack Syria even without Congress’s authorization. Bibi Netanyahu, after a call from Obama, is pushing Congress to back a U.S. strike on Syria. Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor have saluted and signed on to war.
Neocon apparatchik William Kristol is urging Republicans to give Obama a blank check for war on Syria — and for war on Iran. Daniel Pipes of The Mideast Forum has an op-ed in the Washington Times and the title says it all: “Forget Syria, Target Iran.”
“We have scorched the snake, not killed it.” The War Party is not dead.
House Republicans who oppose a U.S. war on Syria speak for the people and should seize this moment to dump Obama conscripts Boehner and Cantor and replace them with leaders who will stand resolutely against Obama’s war, against Obamacare, and against amnesty.
The House should then pass a resolution instructing the president:
—Absent an attack on this country, you have no authority to take us to war against Syria, Iran, or any other nation.
—We are taking back from you the war powers the Fathers gave us.
—We are going to restore our constitutional republic.By Robert Romano
Trust but verify. That appears to be the approach that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is taking when it comes Republican leaders’ promises to repeal Obamacare—a key campaign promise from the 2016 election.
Leading a gaggle of reporters on March 2 to where he thought was the office at the House office building in Washington, D.C. where the health care law repeal draft legislation was being kept, Paul demanded to see the bill but was turned away.
“I think there’s a bill in there. It’s the secret office for the secret bill,” Paul told reporters.
Paul has a point. S. Con. Res. 3, the budget resolution that lawmakers promise will be the vehicle for repealing Obamacare via the reconciliation process, still does not contain the text of the repeal. When will we see it?
Last year, the Congress passed, and former President Barack Obama vetoed, H.R. 3762, which include ending Medicaid expansion, premium subsidies, cost-sharing subsidies, the individual and employer mandates, reinsurance, risk corridors and risk-adjustment, and the taxes and spending from the health care law.
But now Paul warns that not even all the parts that were repealed last year may be included in this year’s version, warning that provisions ending the individual mandate and the Cadillac tax might be stripped. Yet, those are clearly budget provisions and could be included, just like last year.
Being a budget bill, there are rules that do not include everything, which is why H.R. 3762 left out the so-called essential health benefits, pre-existing conditions, or allowing younger Americans to remain on a parent’s plan until the age of 26.
In a statement Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning called the reconciliation process “flawed,” declaring, “the inevitable outcome will be more federal regulation with minimum coverage standards imposed on states that will once-again be robbed of decision-making, driving health care costs upward for all Americans.”
To deal with that problem, Manning said if Obamacare could not be repealed in full via reconciliation, then the Senate should simply eliminate the legislative filibuster — the same way the filibuster for executive branch and judicial nominees was — that requires 60 votes in that chamber to pass a bill.
This would allow the health care law to be repealed in its entirety, and “passing a replacement that returns health care governance to the states from where it was stolen by the previous Administration.”
On that count, Manning pointed to a proposal by the Texas Public Policy Foundation that Manning said could be a template for replacing the system set forth under Obamacare.
“The Texas Public Policy Foundation has set out key principles that Congress really ought to consider for repealing Obamacare while respecting the role of states to meet the needs of their own citizens,” Manning said, adding, “It is time to let state laboratories work. Drawing up a new health care law that does not eliminate all of the national mandates behind closed doors robs states and the people from having a role in this process.”
But, Manning warned, getting this issue wrong would have political ramifications, “Any attempts to simply fix Obamacare using the reconciliation as a dodge as to why they could not do more will not succeed either politically or from a policy perspective. Republicans get one real bite of this apple. They should return to their core principles by repealing Obamacare and respecting the states’ Constitutional role in health care.”
Otherwise, voters who supported President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans in 2016 may wind up with buyer’s remorse.
Sen. Paul is right. This is why everyone needs to see the bill before it’s voted on. Before it’s declared the final product. So that the American people can offer input and if some provision or another is a non-starter, they can say so — before it’s too late.
Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.A federal judge on Monday refused to block President Donald Trump's advisory panel from demanding that the states hand over their registered voters' full names, political affiliations, addresses, dates of birth, criminal records, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, and other personal identifying information, including whether they voted in elections the past decade.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which wants to make the data public, has been met with stiff resistance, including from at least 44 states which say they cannot comply with the complete demand because laws in their individual states prohibit them from doing so.
But in a lawsuit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which challenged the demand on privacy and other grounds, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the District of Columbia said Trump's commission is exempt from the usual requirement that agencies consider privacy impacts of their new databases. She said the commission—which at Trump's urging wants to study voting irregularities such as whether dead people have been voting—is not an agency. Therefore, it is exempt from a 2002 law requiring a privacy impact statement for newly created government data systems.
What's more, Judge Kollar-Kotelly ruled that "The mere risk of disclosure stemming from the collection and eventual, anonymized disclosure of already publicly available voter roll information" is not enough to get her to block the commission.
The judge limited the commission to collecting only what each state could provide according to its own privacy laws.
"Defendants have represented that they are only collecting voter information that is already publicly available under the laws of the states where the information resides; and Defendants have clarified that such information, to the extent it is made public, will be de-identified. All of these representations were made to the Court in sworn declarations, and needless to say, the Court expects that Defendants shall strictly abide by them," she wrote. (PDF)
Kris Kobach, a Republican who is the Kansas secretary of state and vice-chair of the commission, said the decision was "a major victory for government accountability, transparency, and the public’s right to know about the integrity of our elections processes."
As many as 44 states have said they couldn't provide all of the data the commission had asked for, saying they could, at most, only give what their individual laws allow.
Voter fraud
Trump signed an executive order creating the election commission in May. He has claimed there was voter fraud on a massive scale during the 2016 election. Trump alleged that millions of votes were cast illegally.
"The Commission is putting at risk the privacy of millions of registered voters, including military families and victims of stalking, whose home addresses would be revealed," EPIC said.
Two weeks ago, the commission said it would cease its demands for the data on 150 million registered voters pending the judge's ruling.
We'll keep you posted as this issue progresses. Other lawsuits are also seeking to thwart the commission's data requests.Voice123 is giving back to the voice over community of tomorrow
This Friday at 1pm, Voice123 will be teaching a class centered around educating the voice over community of tomorrow. The class will be given to students in the performing arts department of Wagner College in Staten Island, New York in Spiro Hall, on top of the Grymes Hill campus. It will be taught by alumni member and Voice123 Community Manager, Steven Lowell.
It will be a three-hour long class covering topics from The Voiceover Guide, and also touching on topics related to growing a healthy career in today’s world of voice overs, what to expect in the future, and how to prepare for the long-haul.
This is a very exciting event for everyone involved because it is the first time Voice123 staff will be speaking at a college or university, it certainly will not be the last, and it will be interactive. The idea of giving back and preparing the voice over community of tomorrow was sparked by talks with.EDU professors, who have recommended Voice123 to students, leading to a realization that such education is a necessity for the future of the voice industry. It is important that those who will be auditioning in the next few years, understand what it takes to make it in today’s voice over world; a world that has seen rapid changes in the last decade.
Voice123 is in its tenth year of operation and since then has listened to over 3 million auditions, and processed over 50,000 voice over jobs, while working with a global database of fascinating voice over seekers and voice talent, both established and getting started. It is time to give back…“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth” – Cassius Clay
If you would ever like Voice123 staff to attend your event, please contact us! Maybe we will see you this Friday?Fine, he's back to shaving, for now. But this is his best look.
Yr Wonkette would just like to send our best wishes to Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking member of the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, because now that Jason Chaffetz is planning to take a powder (of porn vitamins!) at the end of June, Oversight will have a new Republican chairman to constantly oppose, since the job of the Oversight committee is to treat its Democratic members as a mere oversight. And also to investigate stuff, like how previous chair Darrell Issa investigated Benghazi and Obamacare and the IRS without finding any wrongdoing even without any input from the Dems. Following in the footsteps of such illustrious wastes of time and investigative money as Issa and Chaffetz is Trey Gowdy, who was chosen yesterday by the GOP Steering Committee. Gowdy is made of the same toxic goo as Chaffetz and Issa, with whom he shares many interchangeable internal components.
Gowdy said the usual stuff about being honored to be chosen and looking forward to working along with other members of the committee to do investigative stuff, just as soon as anything worthy of being investigated comes along, |
for other folks is more than compensated for by the joy of recognizing great design when I see it—and the pleasure of striving to emulate that greatness, no matter how badly I fail every time.A man was arrested in Paris on Friday suspected of slitting the throats of his father and brother at the entrance to a building in the capital's trendy 11th district, police sources told AFP.
The sources, who asked not to be named because they were not authorised to speak publicly, said the reason for the attack was being investigated.
The two men died at the scene despite efforts by paramedics to save them.
After interrogation, the attacker was taken to a secure psychiatric ward on Friday afternoon, according to reports.
"I came down and saw one body in the hall and another in the courtyard. There was blood everywhere," one resident told Le Parisien newspaper.
Pompiers et policiers sont déployés rue de Montreuil où un homme est suspecté d'avoir tué deux personnes. pic.twitter.com/c2cQ9g7Tbd — Romain Baheux (@RBaheux) March 17, 2017
Some witnesses said the suspect made remarks "linked to radical Islam" but the police urged caution, saying the killer's motives were unknown.
Newspaper Le Figaro cited a police source who said the knifeman shouted "Allahu Akbar" ('God is greatest', in Arabic).
The attacked happened outside a building on Rue de Montreuil in the east of the French capital near Place de la Nation (see map below).
A resident of the high-rise building in the city's 11th district said he heard a man "crying for help" at around 11am.
"I looked out the window and saw a man lying on the ground. There was a lot of blood.
"There was another man standing beside him, dressed in a white djellaba (loose-fitting tunic worn by some Muslims). He fell to his knees and prayed until the police came to take him away," 21-year-old Thomas told AFP.
Another resident, 64-year-old Francois Petitjean, described a harrowing scene.
"When I arrived in the hall of the building I saw a body lying in a pool of blood, in front of the postboxes. It was carnage. I went out and then saw another person covered in blood," he said, expressing shock.
Police had sealed off a section of the street around the building. No further details on the suspect or the victims were immediately available.
Specialist police SWAT teams were sent to the incident and a large cordon was set up around the scene of the crime. As a result traffic was disrupted in the neighbourhood.
Images and videos posted from the scene showed the area was calm while many residents told Le Parisien newspaper they had not seen or heard anything.The Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) has announced a 10-year strategy to increase the number of planned births nationwide and improve the overall quality of births.
The strategy, called "The 2nd National Reproductive Health Development Policy and Strategy on the Promotion of Quality Birth and Growth," was discussed by director-general of the ministry's Department of Health, Wachira Pengjuntr, at a conference on Wednesday.
According to the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board, Thailand is facing a decline in total fertility rates. In 2015, a Thai woman had only 1.62 children on average, with the number expected to fall to 1.36 by 2035. Some 50 years ago, a woman had six children on average.
This decline could be credited to the increased roles that women play in society, said Wassana Im-Em, Assistant Representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Thailand. "Women are now able to make more choices in terms of education and employment," she said. "As such, they will be able to choose for themselves whether they are ready to conceive."
The MOPH's strategy is in its early stages. Another issue that it aims to address is improving the quality of births, says Thongchai Lertwilairatanapong, the department's deputy director-general. "A number of Thai children are born underweight, and some are born anaemic as a result of their mothers' poor health condition," he said. Slow development in children can be tackled by better nutrition and play in the early stages of life.
Figures from the Department of Provincial Administration say that the number of births in the country have fallen from 809,807 in 2005 to 736,352 in 2015. The mortality rate, however, is close to the birth rate, standing at four to five hundred thousand per year, says Dr Wachira. He encouraged women who are ready for pregnancy to have a baby.ALAMEDA, Calif. -- A league source and multiple Raiders players indicated on Friday that Kyle Boller is likely to start at quarterback for Oakland against the visiting Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, although no final decision has been made.
There was heavy speculation throughout the week that veteran Carson Palmer, who was acquired in a trade from the Cincinnati Bengals on Tuesday, would start just five days after joining the team. Boller's familiarity with the offense and his teammates, however, seems to have prevailed for a 4-2 team hoping to keep pace with the AFC West-leading San Diego Chargers.
Coach Hue Jackson said Friday he had already decided on a starter and the team knew his decision. But Jackson isn't making that information public, and said he could even use multiple quarterbacks. It remains unclear whether Palmer would play at some point in the game even if he doesn't start.
"Whatever decision I make somebody is going to go in there and play well," Jackson said. "They've done a great job in practice, but obviously somebody's got to trot out there first and that's what we'll do when that time comes."
Said wideout Jacoby Ford: "We've got to get him into rhythm just to get him going, get him in the flow of the game -- that helps us, too. The running game, we've got to get that going, go out there and block on the edge. That's something we've been doing extremely well in our receiver room. We've got to do whatever we can to get Kyle into rhythm, and then we'll be in good shape."
Other than Boller and Palmer, rookie Terrelle Pryor is the other healthy quarterback on the roster. Jason Campbell, who sustained a broken collarbone that spurred the trade for Palmer, is likely to be out for the remainder of the regular season.
Listen to the 2011 NFL season LIVE -- hear all the action online in premium sound quality with NFL Audio Pass. Listen to the 2011 NFL season LIVE -- hear all the action online in premium sound quality with NFL Audio Pass. Sign up now!
Palmer, who ran additional wind sprints after practice, made a brief stop in the locker room.
"I'm getting as prepared as I can, and I'm excited by the opportunity to run on the field -- let alone have a chance to play," he said.
The problematic hamstring of kicker Sebastian Janikowski also led the team to work out three kickers Friday, reported NFL Network insider Jason La Canfora. Janikowski did not practice Friday and was listed as questionable. According to a team official, one of the kickers could still be signed before the game.
Follow Steve Wyche on Twitter @wyche89. The Associated Press contributed to this reportOn August 27-28 the symposium “The Emerging Science of Gastrophysics” was held at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in Copenhagen. The symposium poster said “interdisciplinary”, and with presentations by scientists in fields ranging from physics and chemistry to neuroscience and psychology I think it lived up to its name. In this post I share with you what I found interesting and useful from my own, subjective perspective. I must admit that I didn’t understand everything presented. Perhaps this is even a general challenge for the whole field. It illustrates how difficult it is to do science that is simple enough for chefs to understand yet scientific enough for scientists. César Vega and Ruben Mercadé-Prieto’s study on egg yolks is perhaps one of the best examples of a paper that manages to balance the two. A couple of the presentations were very successful at this, and I think that if we continue to meet at similar symposiums we will see many more papers that manage to catch the attention of chefs and scientists at the same time.
Throughout the symposium several speakers made statements (or jokes) about the name “gastrophysics”, and in his opening remark Jens Risbo suggested it should be a “science for the benefit of the chefs and good food”. Félix Goñi argued that gastrophysics should “improve the cooking of normal people”, rather than that of the top chefs. Peter Barham suggested that gastrophysics is to gastronomy what astrophysics is to astronomy. In the light of the Rutherford quote: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting” it’s clear that even popular food science is physics. Anyhow, I don’t quite see how gastrophysics differs from “molecular gastronomy”, but it’s an interesting topic nonetheless!
Jens Risbo went on to share results from Louise Mørch Mortensen’s studies on the sensory effects of time (3-12 h) and temperature (56-60 °C) in sous-vide cooking of beef.[1] The descriptors used could be divided into two main groups. One group (which included juiciness) varied proportionally with both time and temperature. The other group (including tenderness) showed an increase with temperature but decrease with time (or the opposite: decrease with temperature and increase with time). A key result is that it is not possible to simultaneously optimize sous vide conditions for juiciness and tenderness.
A recent paper on the sensory effects of time and temperature on sous vide cooked beef show that conditions cannot be optimized for maximum juiciness and tenderness at the same time.
The study on meat sous vide was financed within the grant “Molecular Gastronomy–The Scientific Study of Deliciousness and Its Physical and Chemical Basis” which also financed Pia Snitkjí¦r’s study on meat stocks. The seminar on molecular gastronomy held last year in Copenhagen marked the end of the project. Jens Risbo said the project had been great fun with lots of attention and scientific results. There was however perhaps a lack of “great answers” to “great problems” and also a lack of information at a molecular level. As it turns out, molecular gastronomy is actually rarely molecular.
In his presentation Thomas Vilgis described how sugars can affect the mouth feel of agarose gels (the predominant component of agar). Interestingly this effect is removed by the addition of xanthan.[2] There is a “fight for water” so to say between xanthan and sugar. The resulting agar gels are thus softer/less elastic. Agar/xanthan concentrations studied were in the range 0.25% agar/0.75% xanthan to 0.75% agar/0.25% xanthan. There were also rather technical presentations on hydrocolloids given by Erik van der Linden and Peter Shurtenberger, but I wasn’t able to extract any immediate practical applications in the kitchen from their results.
Dana Small shared fascinating insights into how flavor works in the brain and started by explaining super-additive responses. With tastes and smells the sum can be more than the parts. For example, being exposed to sweet and vanilla at the same time induces a signal in the brain which is greater than the sum of signals from sweet and vanilla when tasted/smelled separately. The reason for this is that the neurons are located side by side, and as it turns out a smell sensation can actually induce a taste sensation. In a further study Small showed that our brain takes calories into account when judging flavor: increased blood glucose levels gave a higher flavor response in the brain!
It seems to be a general saying that children may need to taste food 10 times before they like it. What was new (for me anyway) was that this has been studied scientifically. Per Møller shared results from a recent paper where 2-3 year old children were repeatedly given an artichoke purée (a food totally unknown to them). It turned out that even after only 5 exposures the children’s intake of purée increased. However, the study also showed that 30-40% of children were resistant to this strategy. [3]
Møller also touched upon the question on how one food with a predominant basic taste can induce a desire for a different basic taste, and presented an overview (see picture below) of how sweet/fat, sour, salty and bitter foods influence your further cravings. The red diagonal testifies to the importance of variation. I was surprised there were not more “green” combinations, but I note with interest that a change from bitter to sweet and vice versa are desired transitions. This reminds me of the surprising yet very successful pairing of India Pale Ale (which is quite bitter) with a sweet, vanilla flavored crí¨me brí»lée!
From Per Møller’s presentation: You don’t want more of the same. Eating something bitter makes you desire something sweet (and vice versa).
Given the recent attention flavor pairing has received I was really looking forward to Sebastian Ahnert’s presentation on flavor networks. Treating foods and the flavor compounds they contain as a bipartite network allowed Ahnert to study the resulting connections with the toolbox available for complex network research. The somewhat surprising findings reported earlier this year was that western cuisine tends to favor dishes in which ingredients share compounds whereas asian cuisine tends to use ingredients not sharing compounds. [4] The greatest weakness of the published results in my opinion lies in the fact that Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients was used as a source for the volatiles.[5] Secondly I believe that only counting the number of overlapping volatiles (a type 2b flavor pairing according to my previously published classification) is of limited interest. Despite these critical remarks I really like the data mining approach of Ahnert, and during his presentation he discussed several strategies to improve the data. By using 1) concentrations of compounds from the VCF database, 2) odor/flavor threshold values compiled by Leo van Gemert and 3) odor/flavor descriptions from Fenaroli’s to analyze flavor pairings suggested by chefs in The Flavor Bible, Ahnert found that the ingredient pairs in The Flavor Bible share more compounds than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, if the analysis is limited only to compounds that have odours or flavors of food (based on the descriptions in Fenaroli’s) the result is even more significant. This lead Ahnert to formulate a modified hypothesis: “Two foods taste good together if they share dominant* chemical flavor compounds with food aromas” (* in terms of concentration).
The backbone of the flavor network, taken from Ahnert’s paper “Flavor network and the principles of food pairing” published in 2011 in Scientific reports (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike 3.0).
Peter Barham took a popular science approach and started by arguing that since the kitchen is a laboratory, cooking may be looked upon as an experimental science. And as a consequence the a scientific approach with taking notes (I agree), evaluating the outcome and presenting the results followed by further experiments should result in a steady improvement.
He went on explaining a practical joke he has served to a total of 18 Michelin star chefs, an “organic raspberry sorbet”. The catch lies in organic which in this case means “hand crafted by an organic chemist” – every single ingredient in the sorbet is synthetic. A yes – I think all the top chefs liked the sorbet.
Physics is about precise measurements and precise control of variables, and both are also quite useful in the kitchen. An obvious example is sous vide. Barham showed a picture of lamb cooked at 56.6, 57.0, 57.5 and 58.0 °C (for? hours) and the color was actually remarkably different between the meat slabs. According to Barham the same applied to the texture and flavor as well. He preferred his lamb cooked at 57.5 °C and lean beef at 53.5 °C (and since his wife has different preferences he has 2 water baths to solve that).
Last year, at the molecular gastronomy seminar in Copenhagen, Barham demonstrated how microwaves penetrate a potato (besides trying to set an ice cold world record) and how the transition from crystalline starch to a melted starch (at 60 °C) absorbing water yields a visible ring (which can be measured and used in a science project). Texture matters a lot for potatoes, and Barham described how large temperature gradients (i.e. cooking at high heat, for instance in a pressure cooker) allow the outer granules to swell up early, resulting in larger stresses which causes the potato to fracture and become “fluffy”. This is good and desirable for roast potatoes and chips as it gives a large surface are from which water can evaporate, allowing the starch to turn glassy. For boiled and mashed potatoes long cooking times at low temperatures would be preferred, resulting in a uniform texture.
I knew that ice cream made with liquid nitrogen tastes really nice because 1) it is made with “real” ingredients such as cream and eggs, 2) the evaporating nitrogen helps aerate the ice cream and 3) because the fast freezing gives small crystals. The size of crystals is important because our tongue is really sensitive and anything with particles larger than 100 µm (microns) will taste gritty! The best way to make an ice cream smoother is to make the crystals smaller. But how small are these crystals? Barham explained the difficulties in measuring the size of ice cream crystals (and I will not go into details about this) and presented the results which were – to say the least – very surprising. The crystal size varies as follows with the different preparation methods: liquid nitrogen < paco jet < professional ice cream makers < domestic ice cream makers. If the numbers mean anything to you, check out the slide shown below. It turns out that ice cream made with liquid nitrogen has crystals small than 1 µm! This could possibly be regarded as “glassy” water and paves the way for “new physics” in the kitchen. Who would have thought that 🙂
Peter Barham found that the crystal size of ice cream varies greatly with the method of preparation. Crystal size increases as follows: liquid nitrogen < Paco jet < professional machine < domestic machine. The big surprise: ice cream made with liquid nitrogen has crystals small than 1 µm!
With the advent of domestic sous vide and renewed interest in pressure cookers Barham sees there is a need to educate people about the dos and don’ts. And fears that it is only a question of time before some one will die, having eaten food cooked for too long at a too low temperature.
In line with the five aspect meal model developed at Grythyttan Michael Bom Frøst stated that “a meal is a context” and there is an interaction between the product (i.e. the food being served), the person and the whole restaurant setting. In order to study this interaction more deeply three restaurant experiments were done. The first experiment showed that the verbal presentation of a dish influenced how consumers scored the descriptors “liking”, “surprise” and “challenging”.[6] Dishes presented with so-called “process information” (i.e. how the dish was prepared, temperature, time etc.) were generally more liked. Interestingly the presentation had the greatest effect on the least liked dishes. So the next time your waiter goes on and on about what you are eating you should maybe take it as sign of warning 😉 Complexity and appreciation was the topic of two further studies. I covered these last year, so no more details here. Frøst ended his presentation with a popularized version of his results, presented as a recipe for the best meal experience.
Michael Bom Frøst’s recipe for the best meal experience.
The chefs Lars Williams (previously Nordic Food Lab, now at noma) and Daniel Felder (Momofuku) made a brave appearance in an otherwise very technical and scientific setting. They shared their enthusiasm and experience from working with fermented foods, in particular Japanese fermented foods made with the fungi Aspergillus oryzae, perhaps better known to foodies as koji. The fungi produces starch degrading enzymes and grows rapidly on grains such as barley (more on that in an upcoming post about the visit to Nordic Food Lab). Once the fungi has grown (and multiplied) on barley it can be used to inoculate soy beans to make miso (see slide below). With this as a starting point Williams and Felder explored the use of koji to ferment other foods such as yellow peas and pistachios (resulting in peaso and piso respectively). They also described the use of koji to ferment fish (to make katsuobushi) or pork (to make butabushi). Williams also briefly touched upon his work with acetic acid (i.e. vinegar) and lactic acid (i.e. kimchi) fermentations. Coming to a conclusion the chefs stated that their goal is to create a new “culinary identity” by using fermentation as a “living tool”. All their experiments are guided by taste. And did I mention that there were tasting samples for everyone in the audience? Thumbs up for that!
Lars Williams and Daniel Felder’s “Japanese fermented foods for dummies”
Amy Rowat studies the physical and molecular origins of cell texture, and happily applies her know-how to food whenever possible. At UCLA she is responsible for a Science & Food course (with guest lecturers and a blog) – a west coast pendant to Harvard’s science and cooking course. The main idea behind these courses is to make the material so inviting and delicious that the students wanted to learn the underlying science. In her presentation at the seminar she promoted food as an excellent medium to communicate science, giving several examples for DIY experiments. With a cheap scale her class studied how mushrooms lose mass in salt water by osmosis. By analyzing the initial slope of the mass vs. time curve the flux of water molecules could be estimated. And given that the surface area of the mushroom as well as the salt concentration of the water and the mushroom were known it was possible to calculated the diffusion coefficient of water using Fick’s law! Rowat also let the Science & Food course students explore the pressure infusion technique invented by Dave Arnold in greater detail. One surprising finding was that a slow pressure release increased the extraction efficiency! Quite amusingly, Rowat explained that this extraction technique actually works so well that they now use it in the lab to isolate plant cell nuclei from Arabidopsis. That is one rare example of how a kitchen technique is taken back into the lab!
The symposium also included the best conference lunch I have ever had as well as a visit to the Nordic Food Lab who was so kind to prepare this lunch. I will cover both in a future post. In my presentation at the symposium I talked about mineral water and went on to discuss the effects of water hardness on onion texture. There will be a separate blog post about that as well.
[1] Mortensen, L. M.; Frøst, M. B.; Skibsted, L. H.; Risbo, J. “Effect of Time and Temperature on Sensory Properties in Low-Temperature Long-Time Sous-Vide Cooking of Beef” J. Cul. Sci. Technol. 2012, 10, 75-90. DOI: 10.1080/15428052.2012.651024.
[2] Maurer, S.; Junghans, A.; Vilgis, T. A. ” Impact of xanthan gum, sucrose and fructose on the viscoelastic properties of agarose hydrogels” Food Hydrocolloids 2012, 29, 298-307. DOI: 10.1016/j.foodhyd.2012.03.002.
[3] Hausner, H.; Olsen, A.; Møller, P. “Mere exposure and flavour–flavour learning increase 2–3 year-old children’s acceptance of a novel vegetable” Appetite 2012, 58, 1152-1159. DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2012.03.009.
[4] Ahn, Y.-Y.; Ahnert, S. E.; Bagrow, J. P.; Barabási, A.-L. “Flavor network and the principles of food pairing” Scientific reports 2011, 1, 196. DOI: 10.1038/srep00196.
[5] With parsley as an example I used data from a paper on key odorants for parsley leaves and compared these with the volatiles mentioned in Fenaroli’s handbook. It turned out that a number of the volatiles Fenaroli’s links to parsley have low or no impact on the flavor of parsley, and vice versa, a number of the high-impact flavor compounds in parsley are not mentioned by Fenaroli’s at all.
[6] Mielby, L. H.; Frøst, M. B. “Expectations and surprise in a molecular gastronomic meal” Food Quality and Preference 2010, 213. DOI: 10.1016/j.foodqual.2009.09.005.
Filed under: eventsToday I finally managed to compile and run a Firefox version, which was patched to work on Wayland natively. To achieve this, I used the forked and enhanced Firefox version of the Red Hat developer Martin Stransky.
For all those who are unaware of the Wayland project, it’s an succesor to the very old, but still common X display server for Linux operating systems. Compared to X, Wayland is a lot smaller in its code base, written from scratch, far more secure and build up on the newest 3D graphic driver stack. Unfortunately not all big Linux applications support it yet. The work on Wayland compatibility for Firefox was already requested some years ago and it was not moving forward very fast. Fortunately, some days ago it looks like the first patches have been merged into master.
Firefox running natively on Wayland using ArchLinux x64
So again, I gave it a try and this time my buildscript, which I submitted to the AUR compiled fine and I also was able to run Firefox without using xwayland :) So here are the few steps to get it working (in this case I’m using pacaur as an AUR helper script):
pacaur -S firefox-wayland-git GDK_BACKEND=wayland firefox
As expected it is not stable nor usable yet but at least it is a proof that the Firefox developers getting closer to solving this issue and are still working on it!
Even easier: Test it with precompiled and sanboxed Flatpak-Repo
Further, I was testing out Flatpak, a project of the Gnome Foundation, which is a kind of cross-Linux package manager for precompiled packages and also provides a very useful sandboxing approach.
So why not build a Firefox Flatpak with Wayland patches so it is even easier for others to try out on all the operating systems without having to always recompile it (which would take many hours and consume a lot of memory …). First I forked a custom Firefox Flatpak repository on Github from the user kinvolk (thanks!) and customized it to compile Martin Stranskys repository with Wayland patches. I had to be sure that the systems Wayland socket is accessible inside the sandbox, which was already the case.
Well, and that’s how you can test the Flatpak (assumed you have a Flatpak client already installed):
flatpak --user remote-add --no-gpg-verify firefox-wayland-git https://onny.project-insanity.org/files/firefox-wayland-git/repo flatpak --user install firefox-wayland-git org.mozilla.firefox flatpak --env GDK_BACKEND=wayland run org.mozilla.firefox
That’s it, Firefox should start on your Wayland desktop! Please note that this might run even slower here, especially because it was build in debug mode.
Update 01.2018: This article was featured on the popular US open source news site Phoronix in February 2017.The emergence of MCR-1 heralds the breach of the last group of antibiotics, polymyxins, by plasmid-mediated resistance. Although currently confined to China, MCR-1 is likely to emulate other global resistance mechanisms such as NDM-1. Our findings emphasise the urgent need for coordinated global action in the fight against pan-drug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria.
Polymyxin resistance was shown to be singularly due to the plasmid-mediated mcr-1 gene. The plasmid carrying mcr-1 was mobilised to an E coli recipient at a frequency of 10 −1 to 10 −3 cells per recipient cell by conjugation, and maintained in K pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In an in-vivo model, production of MCR-1 negated the efficacy of colistin. MCR-1 is a member of the phosphoethanolamine transferase enzyme family, with expression in E coli resulting in the addition of phosphoethanolamine to lipid A. We observed mcr-1 carriage in E coli isolates collected from 78 (15%) of 523 samples of raw meat and 166 (21%) of 804 animals during 2011–14, and 16 (1%) of 1322 samples from inpatients with infection.
The mcr-1 gene in E coli strain SHP45 was identified by whole plasmid sequencing and subcloning. MCR-1 mechanistic studies were done with sequence comparisons, homology modelling, and electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry. The prevalence of mcr-1 was investigated in E coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae strains collected from five provinces between April, 2011, and November, 2014. The ability of MCR-1 to confer polymyxin resistance in vivo was examined in a murine thigh model.
Until now, polymyxin resistance has involved chromosomal mutations but has never been reported via horizontal gene transfer. During a routine surveillance project on antimicrobial resistance in commensal Escherichia coli from food animals in China, a major increase of colistin resistance was observed. When an E coli strain, SHP45, possessing colistin resistance that could be transferred to another strain, was isolated from a pig, we conducted further analysis of possible plasmid-mediated polymyxin resistance. Herein, we report the emergence of the first plasmid-mediated polymyxin resistance mechanism, MCR-1, in Enterobacteriaceae.
We report the first case of a plasmid-mediated colistin resistance mechanism, designated MCR-1. We describe its putative structure, mechanism of action, and its emergence in Enterobacteriaceae from animal and human isolates, and provide evidence for the spread of mcr-1 from the veterinary sector to human beings.
The emergence of mcr-1 heralds the breach of the last group of antibiotics, polymyxins, by plasmid-mediated resistance. Although currently confined to China, mcr-1 is likely to spread further. Further surveillance and molecular epidemiological studies on the distribution and dissemination of mcr-1 are urgently required, along with the re-evaluation of the use of polymyxins in animals. Our findings highlight the urgent need for coordinated global action in the fight against extensively-resistant and pan-resistant Gram-negative bacteria.
This study reports data for the following: the first report of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance (designated mcr-1), the proportion of mcr-1-positive samples in animals and human beings, rapid dissemination of mcr-1 between Gram-negative strains, in-vivo colistin resistance mediated by mcr-1, MCR-1 modification of lipid A and mediating colistin resistance, structural modelling on MCR-1, and sequencing of a mcr-1-positive plasmid.
We monitored the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance of Escherichia coli from food animals annually and found an increase of colistin resistance in recent years. From the published literature, we know that no plasmid-mediated colistin resistance mechanism has been reported.
On Aug 15, 2015, we searched PubMed with the terms “E coli and colistin resistance”, “Klebsiella pneumoniae and colistin resistance”, “Klebsiella and colistin resistance”, “China and colistin”, and “plasmid mediated colistin resistance” for reports published between Jan 1, 2000, and Aug 15, 2015, with no language restrictions. Our search identified no results of relevance to this study. We also searched with the terms “E coli and colistin resistance” and “Klebsiella and colistin resistance” and found no reports of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance, novel mechanisms of colistin resistance, and in-vivo resistance.
Colistin belongs to the family of polymyxins, cationic polypeptides, with broad-spectrum activity against Gram-negative bacteria, including most species of the family Enterobacteriaceae. The two polymyxins currently in clinical use are polymyxin B and polymyxin E (colistin), which differ only by one aminoacid from each other and have comparable biological activity. The mechanism of resistance to polymyxins is modification of lipid A, resulting in reduction of polymyxin affinity. Until now, all reported polymyxin resistance mechanisms are chromosomally mediated, and involve modulation of two component regulatory systems (eg, pmrAB, phoPQ, and its negative regulator mgrB in the case of K pneumoniae) leading to modification of lipid A with moieties such as phosphoethanolamine or 4-amino-4-arabinose, or in rare instances total loss of the lipopolysaccharide.Thus far, the polymyxins remain one of the last classes of antibiotics in which resistance is not known to spread from cell to cell (ie, plasmid mediated).
What do we know about resistance to colistin in Enterobacteriaceae in avian and pig production in Europe?.
Antimicrobial resistance is now recognised as one of the most serious global threats to human health in the 21st century. There is now evidence of political traction, with endorsements of statements by the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describing a global crisis and an impending catastrophe of a return to the pre-antibiotic era.These serious concerns have been catalysed by the rapid increase in carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae expressing enzymes such as KPC-2 (Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase-2) and NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase-1).For serious infections caused by carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae, the treatment options are restricted and invariably rely on tigecycline and colistin—either singularly or in combination with other antibiotics.Thus the global increase in carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae has resulted in increased use of colistin with the inevitable risk of emerging resistance.This delicate balance between clinical necessity and prevention of resistance is further compromised by agricultural use of human antibiotics, where some countries have actively used colistin in animal production.
The funder had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. The corresponding author had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
These studies were done in BALB/c mice and colistin dosing delivered in a similar manner as previously described. Experimental details are fully described in the appendix (p 3)
A homology model of the complete MCR-1 protein was constructed with the i-Tasser server appendix p 5 ).The presence of transmembrane regions was investigated with transmembrane predictions and transmembrane helices Markov model.
Lipid A was isolated from the E coli transformants by the modified Bligh-Dyer method as previously described.Extracted lipid A was dissolved in chloroform/methanol (4:1) and subjected to electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (MALDI SYNAPT Q- TOF MS, Water Corp, Milford, MA, USA) in the negative ion mode. Data acquisition and analysis were done with MassLynx V4.1 software (Water Corp, Milford, MA, USA).
Plasmid pHNSHP45 was extracted from the E coli transconjugant with the Qiagen Midi kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany) and sequenced (Mi Seq, Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA), producing 400-bp paired-end reads (Majorbio Company, Shanghai, China). A draft assembly of the plasmid was made with GS De Novo Assembler (Brandford, CT, USA), which produced a single contig. Gene prediction and annotation were done with Glimmer 3.02 and BLAST. IncI2 plasmid pHN1122-1(GenBank accession number JN797501) was used as the reference plasmid for annotation. To confirm the role of the putative polymyxin resistance gene, a roughly 2000-bp DNA fragment, including the putative polymyxin resistance gene, designated mcr-1, and its flanking sequence were ligated into a cloning vector pUC18 yielding pUC18-mcr-1. pUC18-mcr-1 was then used to transform E coli W3110 by electroporation.
The transfer frequency of polymyxin resistance was investigated by conjugation experiments with streptomycin-resistant E coli C600 as the recipient strain. Transconjugants were selected on MacConkey agar plates supplemented with colistin (2 mg/L) and streptomycin (2000 mg/L). Transfer frequencies were calculated as the number of transconjugants obtained per recipient. The polymyxin resistance plasmid, designated pHNSHP45, was extracted from the transconjugant and used to transform polymyxin-susceptible strains from different species—namely, E coli E11 (ST131), K pneumoniae MPC11, K pneumoniae 1202 (ST11), and P aeruginosa FE26 by electroporation and selection with 2 mg/L of colistin. E coli 363R (wild-type, mcr-1 positive) was cured to an mcr-1-negative genotype (363S) by passing in subminimum inhibitory concentrations of novobicin and screened for the presence of mcr-1 as previously described.Plasmid stability was assessed in daily serial passages of culture without antibiotic and the culture daily analysed for colistin resistance and confirmed by presence of mcr-1 with DNA probing. Plasmid |
and flings you out onto the dance floor."[28] Network 40 wrote: "Like Mellow Man Ace, the rap melts slowly and is as much a mood piece as it is a cruising tune. A motocross champion from Dallas via Miami, the 22-year-old Ice says it's time to chill out."[29] Following the song's success, California rapper Mario "Chocolate" Johnson, an associate of record producer Suge Knight, claimed that he had helped in writing the song, and had not received credit or royalties.[30] Knight and two bodyguards arrived at The Palm in West Hollywood, where Van Winkle was eating. After shoving Van Winkle's bodyguards aside, Knight and his own bodyguards sat down in front of Van Winkle, staring at him before finally asking "How you doin'?"[30] Similar incidents were repeated on several occasions before Knight showed up at Van Winkle's suite on the fifteenth floor of the Bel Age Hotel, accompanied by Johnson and a member of the Los Angeles Raiders.[30] According to Van Winkle, Knight took him out on the balcony by himself, and implied that he would throw Van Winkle off unless he signed the rights to the song over to Knight.[31]
Legacy Edit
Track listings Edit
1990 release Edit 7" single "Ice Ice Baby" (radio mix) – 4:29 "Ice Ice Baby" (radio mix edit) – 3:49 12" maxi – U.S. "Ice Ice Baby" (radio mix) – 4:28 "Ice Ice Baby" (Miami drop mix) – 4:59 "Play That Funky Music" (radio mix) – 4:39 "Play That Funky Music" (instrumental mix) – 4:36 "Play That Funky Music" (a cappella mix) – 4:32 12" maxi / CD maxi – U.S. "Ice Ice Baby" (radio mix) – 4:28 "Ice Ice Baby" (Miami drop mix) – 4:59 "Ice Ice Baby" (Miami drop instrumental) – 4:59 "Ice Ice Baby" (a cappella mix) – 3:46 "Play That Funky Music" (radio mix) – 4:39 "Play That Funky Music" (instrumental mix) – 4:36 "Play That Funky Music" (a cappella mix) – 4:32 CD maxi – Europe "Ice Ice Baby" (radio edit) – 3:46 "Ice Ice Baby" (Miami drop mix) – 5:00 "Play That Funky Music" (radio mix) – 4:41 12" maxi – Europe "Ice Ice Baby" (club mix) – 5:02 "Ice Ice Baby" (radio mix) – 4:30 "Ice Ice Baby" (radio mix edit) – 3:49 12" maxi – UK "Ice Ice Baby" (Miami drop mix) – 4:58 "Ice Ice Baby" (instrumental mix) – 4:59 "It's a Party" – 4:39 "Ice Ice Baby" (radio mix) – 4:28 Cassette "Ice Ice Baby" (radio edit) – 3:46 "It's a Party" – 4:39 "Ice Ice Baby" (radio edit) – 3:46 "It's a Party" – 4:39 German CD Maxi "Ice Ice Baby" (Miami Drop Mix) "Ice Ice Baby" (Acapella Mix) "Ice Ice Baby" (Miami Drop Mix Instrumental) "Play That Funky Music" (Acapella Mix) 2001 remixes Edit 12" maxi "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (Gigi D'Agostino remix) – 7:17 "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (Funky 9ers club dub) – 4:53 "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (House of Wax club-mix) – 6:06 "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (Debart Style re-e-mix) – 6:42 CD maxi "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (House of Wax radio-mix) – 3:36 "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (Gigi D'Agostino remix-edit) – 3:45 "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (Silverwater & Shaw remix) – 3:42 "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (Prepay remix) – 3:54 "Ice Ice Baby 2001" (Steve Baltes remix) – 3:53 "Everytime (album version) (feat. 4BY4) – 3:58 2008 remixes Edit 12" maxi "Ice Ice Baby 2008" (Mondo Electro remix) "Ice Ice Baby 2008" (7th Heaven House remix) "Ice Ice Baby 2008" (Rico NL Jumpstyle remix) "Ice Ice Baby 2008" (Mendezz and Andrew remix)
Charts and sales EditHow is YOUR club spending the £200,000 it's been given by the Premier League to improve away fans' experiences?
The Premier League has given the 20 top flight clubs £200,000 each to spend on subsidising costs for away fans and Sportsmail has investigated to see what they're doing with this money.
A 10 per cent decline in away attendances over the past five season prompted the Premier League to introduce this Away Fans Fund.
Will it get you travelling to more games? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
Arsenal: Fans will receive a £2.50 discount on every remaining away Premier League match ticket. The club will also provide away supporters with a £10 refreshments voucher at an away fixture this Christmas and invest in the away end at the Emirates.
Aston Villa: Offering travelling supporters free coach travel for ten games this season, starting with their match against Hull City on October 5.
Cardiff City: Will subsidise 30 coaches for Norwich City away so fans only have to pay £5. The club are also looking into other deals. Fans travelling to Cardiff should also check out the club's Away Fan Guide.
Loving it: Cardiff fans go wild after their team struck against Fulham at Craven Cottage
Chelsea: Subsidised travel for at least 10 away games this season including long trips to Everton, Manchester United, Newcastle United and Sunderland.
Crystal Palace and Swansea City do a reciprocal deal which means 'any adult ticket can be purchased at half-price with every full-price junior ticket'. The Jacks also promise to provide a free hot meal for every travelling fan at Southampton on October 6.
Everton: Yet to be announced.
Fulham: Provide four free coaches at every Premier League away game. The club will also hand out free away tickets to junior season ticket holders and members.
Hull City: Offer free travel to away games and have nearly 30 coaches going to Everton on Saturday 19th October. The club will also offer free travel to Spurs (league and cup), Southampton, Arsenal, and Swansea City, all before Christmas. The club are looking at further offers in 2014.
On the road: Hull fans will welcome free travel... but we're not sure if this dog is allowed on the coach
Liverpool: Reducing away ticket prices by £2-£4, dependent on the opposition. The decision was taken after consultation with the club’s Supporters' Committee.
Manchester City: Manuel Pellegrini’s staff and first-team squad have chipped in to the offer. Half-price tickets will be on offer to season-ticket holders at selected away games. Games will be chosen if a considerable travelling distance is involved or it falls in a series of games taking place during a short period of time.
Work is underway at the Etihad to improve the experience for visiting supporters. Club captain Vincent Kompany said: 'I hope this initiative proves how much we value our incredible support on the road'.
Manchester United: Consulted the Fans’ Forum and knocked £4 off the price of every away ticket bought by a United fan, starting with the Fulham game on November 2.
Newcastle United: Funding disabled away fan travel for the remainder of this season but other plans are still to be confirmed.
Norwich City: Offering 'double discount' for trips to both Manchester clubs. The club also laid on 25 free coaches for the trip to Hull City and have offered half price tickets for Stoke City away.
Southampton: Yet to be announced.
Leaving town: Norwich fans were offered half-price tickets for Stoke City away
Stoke City: Offering free coach travel to away fans for all Premier League fixtures. This has already resulted in the Potters taking a club record number of fans to Anfield for a Premier League fixture.
Sunderland: Subsidising away tickets at certain fixtures by £10 and improving the concourse, signage and bar areas for travelling fans. The Black Cats will also produce 40,000 guidebooks for visiting fans with things to see and do while in the area.
Swansea: see Crystal Palace
Tottenham Hotspur: Offering subsidised travel to all 14 top-flight games outside of the London area. They'll also assist official regional clubs travel arrangements and refurbish areas used to accommodate visiting fans at the Lane.
West Bromwich Albion: The club will provide free coach travel for 2,000 West Brom fans at a yet-to-be-confirmed fixture. Discounted ticket offers for selected games will also be made available to away fans visiting the Hawthorns. Away fans will also benefit from the reduced food and drink prices in the concourses at the Hawthorns.The Pentagon has been the biggest loser by far. Sequestration gets real for workers
Sequestration went from wait-and-see to here-it-is Tuesday when the number of furloughed federal workers hit an eye-popping 820,000.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told 680,000 civilian workers they’d have to stay home 11 days without pay. About 140,000 workers from other government agencies have already been given furlough notices.
Story Continued Below
The number is expected to grow as more department heads make their own tough decisions on how to swallow their share of $85 billion in across-the-board budget cuts.
( PHOTOS: How sequestration could affect you)
“We don’t have a choice,” Hagel said during a town hall meeting with defense employees in Alexandria, Va. “We did everything we could not to get to this day, this way. But that’s it. That’s where we are.”
The cuts are another challenge for the White House that’s had to shift to defense this week on scandals ranging from Benghazi talking points to the IRS and Justice Department.
While multiple agency officials told POLITICO they’ve had the freedom to make their own decisions on what gets cut, a senior aide in one Cabinet department said there’s still a “no surprises rule” when it comes to the White House’s communications policy on the sequester.
( PHOTOS: What’s in Obama’s 2014 budget)
“They’re not trying to micromanage those plans,” said the Obama Cabinet official. “They just want to know what the impact is going to be so they’re not surprised.”
What’s clear so far is that sequestration isn’t being handled the same at each agency, several of which got more money in March, thanks to Congress. The air traffic controllers and meat inspectors also got special deals that allowed them to avoid furloughs.
The Pentagon is by far the biggest loser, though Hagel was able to downgrade the forced furloughs from his original prediction of 22 days. Several other agencies with workforces too big to make their cuts any other way also have gone ahead with orders requiring employees to take unpaid leave.
At the EPA, most of the agency’s 17,700 employees started their furloughs in April. About 90,000 employees at the IRS and about 8,500 at Housing and Urban Development will take their first furlough day on May 24. Both departments will be closed that day, giving employees a four-day weekend for Memorial Day.
The Interior Department’s furloughs include about 8,500 employees at the U.S. Geological Survey, 4,100 at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and an additional 760 with the U.S. Park Police. The Labor Department has given notice to about 4,400 of its employees, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ordered days off for 2,200 people. The Energy Department has laid off 200 contractors and furloughed 2,500 more at the Hanford nuclear waste cleanup site in Washington state.
Obama’s White House isn’t immune either, with furlough notices going out to about 480 aides working in the Office of Management and Budget, plus more from the West Wing and other parts of the Executive Office of the President.
CORRECTION: Corrected by: Bridget Mulcahy @ 05/15/2013 03:16 PM CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated which employees would be furloughed. NOAA has proposed four furlough days for about 12,000 employees. There will be no furloughs for 32,000 people who work at the CommerceResearchers in the Electro-Optics Center (EOC) Materials Division at Penn State have produced 100mm diameter graphene wafers, a key milestone in the development of graphene for next generation high frequency electronic devices. Graphene is a 2-dimensional layer of tightly bound carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal arrays. Sheets of graphene are the building blocks of graphite. Due to its phenomenal electronic properties, graphene has been considered as a leading material for next generation electronic devices in the multibillion dollar semiconductor industry.
Using a process called silicon sublimation, EOC researchers David Snyder and Randy Cavalero thermally processed silicon carbide wafers in a physical vapor transport furnace until the silicon migrated away from the surface, leaving behind a layer of carbon that formed into a one- to two-atom-thick film of graphene on the wafer surface. Achieving 100mm graphene wafers has put the Penn State EOC in a leading position for the synthesis of ultra-large graphene and graphene-based devices.
With the support of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, EOC researchers are initially focusing on graphene materials to improve the transistor performance in various radio frequency (RF) applications. According to EOC materials scientist Joshua Robinson, Penn State is developing graphene device processing to enhance graphene transistor performance and has fabricated RF field effect transistors on 100mm graphene wafers.
Another goal of the Penn State researchers is to improve the electron mobility of the Si-sublimated wafers to nearer the theoretical limit, approximately 100 times faster than silicon. That will require improvements in the material quality and device design, says Robinson, but there is significant room for improvements in growth and processing, he believes.
In addition to silicon sublimation, EOC researchers Joshua Robinson, Mark Fanton, Brian Weiland, Kathleen Trumbull, and Michael LaBella are developing the synthesis and device fabrication of graphene on silicon using a non-sublimation route as a means to achieve wafer diameters exceeding 200mm, a necessity for integrating graphene into the existing semiconductor industry. Graphene has the potential to enable terahertz computing at processor speeds 100 to 1000 times faster than silicon.
First discovered in 2004, graphene is now being studied worldwide for electronics, displays, solar cells, sensors, and hydrogen storage. With its remarkable physical, chemical, and structural properties, graphene promises to become a key material for 21st century technology.Houston
1. Houston Rockets (Record: 9-1; last week’s rank: 3): The Rockets get a slight nod for the top spot over Memphis because they are actually undefeated when Dwight Howard plays.
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Memphis
2. Memphis Grizzlies (Record: 9-1; last week’s rank: 2): The Grizzlies host the Rockets on Monday in a big early-season showdown.
Golden State
3. Golden State Warriors (Record: 8-2; last week’s rank: 1): After having assist-to-turnover woes, Stephen Curry has averaged 24.5 points, 12 assists and two turnovers the past two games.
Toronto
4. Toronto Raptors (Record: 8-2; last week’s rank: 4): Is Toronto becoming a hoops town? While the Maple Leafs were losing 6-2 at Buffalo, Canadian fans there chanted, “Let's go Raptors!”
Washington
5. Washington Wizards (Record: 7-2; last week’s rank: 8): Wizards guard Bradley Beal is slated to practice Monday, six weeks after fracturing his left wrist. A return vs. the Cavs on Friday?
Chicago
6. Chicago Bulls (Record: 7-3; last week’s rank: 6): Lost in all the Derrick Rose drama is an All-Star-caliber start from newcomer Pau Gasol, who is averaging 18 points and 10.6 rebounds.
Portland
7. Portland Trail Blazers (Record: 7-3; last week’s rank: 12): Portland expects power forward LaMarcus Aldridge (upper respiratory illness) to face the Pelicans’ Anthony Davis on Monday.
Dallas
8. Dallas Mavericks (Record: 7-3; last week’s rank: 13): First-year Mavericks forward Chandler Parsons, who has been critical of the Rockets, returns to Houston on Saturday to face the Rockets for the first time.
Sacramento
9. Sacramento Kings (Record: 6-4; last week’s rank: 14): Rudy Gay was more interested in re-signing now than at the end of last season. Winning, money and love by the Kings helped.
San Antonio
Story continues
10. San Antonio Spurs (Record: 5-4; last week’s rank: 9): The reigning champions face LeBron James Wednesday in Cleveland for the first time since the NBA Finals.
Los Angeles
11. Los Angeles Clippers (Record: 5-3; last week’s rank: 5) DeAndre Jordan has averaged 15.5 rebounds and six blocks the past two games and leads the NBA in rebounding.
Cleveland
12. Cleveland Cavaliers (Record: 5-3; last week’s rank: 10): The rivalry between the Wizards and Cavaliers, who have talked trash about backcourts recently, could regain steam Friday.
New Orleans
13. New Orleans Pelicans (Record: 5-3; last week’s rank: 16) New Orleans is two games over.500 for the first time since the franchise started 2-0 in 2011-12.
Miami
14. Miami Heat (Record: 5-5; last week’s rank: 7): Forward Chris Bosh missed 15 of 17 shots against the Bucks on Sunday and has missed 37 of 49 in his past three contests.
Phoenix
15. Phoenix Suns (Record: 5-5; last week’s rank: 15): Phoenix is in the early stages of a six-game, 10-day road trip – its longest of the season – that covers nearly 7,000 miles.
Atlanta
16. Atlanta Hawks (Record: 5-4; last week’s rank: 20): Guard John Jenkins scored 12 points in a loss to the Cavs on Saturday in his first game since having back surgery in February.
Brooklyn
17. Brooklyn Nets (Record: 4-5; last week’s rank: 11): New coach Lionel Hollins is preaching to his players that the key to winning is team play and not worrying about personal statistics.
Milwaukee
18. Milwaukee Bucks (Record: 5-5; last week’s rank: 19): The Bucks earned their fifth win of the season at Miami on Sunday. They needed 26 games to get to five victories last season.
Utah
19. Utah Jazz (Record: 4-7; last week’s rank: 17): Sunday marked the 10-year anniversary of Utah retiring the No. 12 jersey of John Stockton, the NBA’s all-time assists leader.
Charlotte
20. Charlotte Hornets (Record: 4-6; last week’s rank: 21): Noah Vonleh, the ninth pick in this year’s draft, was scoreless Saturday in nearly six minutes in his NBA debut at Golden State.
Oklahoma City
21. Oklahoma City Thunder (Record: 3-8; last week’s rank: 22): Reigning NBA MVP Kevin Durant shot jumpers before the Rockets game Sunday, one month after breaking his right foot.
Indiana
22. Indiana Pacers (Record: 4-7; last week’s rank: 29): So who is the injury-ravaged Pacers’ leading scorer? Forward Chris Copeland, averaging a career-high 14.2 points per game.
Orlando
23. Orlando Magic (Record: 4-7; last week’s rank: 26): Rookie forward Aaron Gordon, who fractured his left foot, is expected to see a foot specialist in Charlotte, N.C., this week for a full examination.
Detroit
24. Detroit Pistons (Record: 3-7; last week’s rank: 24): First-year coach Stan Van Gundy, who coached the Magic from 2007-12, faces his old team Monday.
Boston
25. Boston Celtics (Record: 3-5; last week’s rank: 18): Kelly Olynyk is currently first among all second-year NBA players in points per game at 14.4 and third in rebounding at 6.5.
New York
26. New York Knicks (Record: 3-8; last week’s rank: 25): The Knicks went two weeks without a win before snapping their seven-game losing streak Sunday against the Nuggets.
Denver
27. Denver Nuggets (Record: 2-7; last week’s rank: 28): One of ex-Nuggets coach George Karl’s old assistants said Karl still wants to coach and is paying close attention to Denver’s struggles.
Minnesota
28. Minnesota Timberwolves (Record: 2-7; last week’s rank: 23): The Timberwolves’ company line regarding Kevin Garnett saying he wants to buy the team: It is not for sale.
Los Angeles
29. Los Angeles Lakers (Record: 1-9; last week’s rank: 27): Klay Thompson would’ve entered the draft a year earlier if the Lakers had agreed to take him in the first round, a source said. The Lakers declined.
Philadelphia
30. Philadelphia 76ers (Record: 0-9; last week’s rank: 30): So when will these hapless Sixers get their first win? Forget about San Antonio on Monday, but rebuilding Boston is next up on Wednesday.
More NBA coverage from Yahoo Sports:Liberal leadership candidate Justin Trudeau is making stops in Red Deer and Calgary on Sunday as part his Alberta campaign tour, where he's had a tough time winning over potential supporters.
Some Albertans at earlier stops in the Edmonton area said the 41-year-old has definite star power, but questioned whether he has enough political substance.
Trudeau said this tour of the west is about trying to change that perception, whether he has a good reception or not.
"This country is not about picking and choosing the areas that you think you might be popular in. It's about connecting and building a broad sense of where this country needs to go," he said.
On Saturday night, the Montreal member of Parliament stopped in Edmonton, after visiting Bonnyville and Vegreville, where he met with resistance.
In the heart of Vegreville's conservative country, the owner of a train station restaurant said she was surprised when Trudeau's team called and asked to make a campaign stop in her venue.
But Ellen Dunn accepted the request, if only to challenge the would-be leader to answer her tough questions on supporting small business.
"I'm a one man show — I need to know what he can do for a one man show," Dunn said.
A tough sell
As he spoke to the Vegreville audience, Trudeau tried to energize the crowd and get them excited about the future of the country.
"Maybe there is something big happening in politics again, maybe there's room for each of us to get involved," he said.
But he didn't win over everyone. Some said he looked too young to lead. Some said he's all about style — and even discussed his hair, just as the The Toronto Star did in an article earlier this week.
Justin Trudeau talks to voters in a train station restaurant in Vegreville, Alta. Saturday. (CBC)
Despite the continuing attention on his appearance, Trudeau told CBC News he's choosing to focus on the issues.
"I continue to be bemused by the fact that people try to write about things that are going to sell newspapers. The work I'm doing is connecting with people on the ground, on substance."
But many, including Dunn, were disappointed they didn't hear more specifics from the candidate.
"I'm not sure I heard substance as far as individual items," Dunn said.
Ron Williams, the local Liberal candidate in the last federal election, was also on-hand at the Vegreville stop, where he dispatched some advice for Trudeau.
"Don't equivocate. State where you stand on the issues and why that is your belief," Williams said.
Alberta comment lingers
Trudeau's western tour is also about trying to counter bad feelings that might be lingering after comments he made about Alberta in 2010 recently came to light.
In a 2010 interview in French, Trudeau told the Télé-Québec program Les Francs-tireurs (The Straight Shooters): "Canada isn't doing well right now because it's Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn't work."
Trudeau later apologized, and explained that the comments were directed at the government of Stephen Harper, and not Albertans in general.
The federal Liberal party will announce its new leader April 14.Business
Abercrombie & Fitch to Close Flagship Store in Hong Kong
Another US clothing brand will be closing its store in Hong Kong due to the dwindling retail sales and the decreasing number of shoppers from mainland China. Casual wear fashion chain Abercrombie & Fitch announced this week that it will close its only flagship store in Central early next year.
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Abercrombie & Fitch's four-storey, 25,600 square feet boutique on Pedder St at the city's Central business district opened in 2011. Its monthly rent at the bustling area amounts to HK$7 million per month. The store's lease is valid until 2019, but the company will be pulling out early and expects the store's closure to be completed before next year's Q2 ends.
The company will be paying a lease termination charge of HK$124 million during the fourth quarter.
"These actions are part of the company's ongoing strategic review and are expected to drive economic benefit overtime," the company said in a statement. Abercrombie & Fitch will also close its flagship store in Seoul, South Korea, in January next year.
To offset and possibly drive more sales, the fashion company plans to open five stores in mainland China by January 2017.
Hong Kong has experienced a boom in retail growth in the past decade as one of Asia's premier shopping destination. However, recent numbers show that it is slowly losing its glamor as a shopping hub mainly because of the slowing Chinese economy as Hong Kong's shoppers mostly come from mainland tourists.
Luxury fashion brand Coach already closed its four-storey boutique in Central last year, while Forever 21 announced that it will follow suit, closing its store in Causeway Bay in late 2017.
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©2019 Chinatopix All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permissionThe Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl Semifinal games are still weeks away, but ticket prices are already announced for students of each respective school...
The Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl Semifinal games are still weeks away, but ticket prices are already announced for students of each respective school should their team make it to the College Football Playoff Championship – and they’re not cheap.
A website called collegefootballplayoff.com is selling ticket reservations, or what they call CFP RSVPs, that “guarantees you the right to purchase a ticket to the game at face value if your team qualifies”. The prices for RSVPs are not the price for your ticket, will not be applied towards to the price of your ticket, and will not be refunded should your team lose in the semifinals on New Year’s Day. RSVP prices are as follows, and range by seat location:
Alabama Crimson Tide: $569.79 – $3,510.00
Clemson Tigers: $760.50 – $3,510.00
Oklahoma Sooners: $359.19 – $3,510.00
Georgia Bulldogs: $947.70 – $6,435.00
The ticket price on top of that would be $475 for upper level and $575 for lower level. The site states that:
“Multiple options are available for the same Tier (Upper or Lower level). Regardless of the prices, all “Upper Level” and all “Lower Level” are each for the same class of seating within the Tier.
Customers who have already purchased an RSVP are allowed to relist the RSVP for sale at any price of their choosing. For any tier, i.e., “Lower Level”, all RSVP’s for a given team and game are the same.
When inventory at the current default prices runs out, the only way to purchase an RSVP will be to purchase those higher priced listings.”
The site is run by SIDEARM Sports, a college athletics website provider whose only client of the four is Alabama, but it links to all the verified social media pages of the CFP and is the first result on Google for College Football Playoff Championship tickets. Still, Ticketmaster says it is the only official provider of CFP tickets. No face value tickets exist on Ticketmaster; verified resale tickets start at $1,650.
It seems you’ll be paying an arm and a leg no matter where you get your tickets. The excessive price, and especially the fact that you could be out hundreds or thousands of dollars if your team doesn’t make it, will likely out-price a good many fans from the game.
The College Football Playoff Championship takes place on January 8 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
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commentsKATSU's ICARUS ONE in action. Photo by Nicksees
Last month, the notorious graffiti artist KATSU caught a tag that had, until then, been pretty much unimaginable. Using a modified drone equipped with a spray can, he painted a series of gestural red lines on one of the largest and most prominent billboards in New York City. Right across the face of Kendall Jenner, no less. The video of the stunt, which was the first recorded instance of public drone graffiti, got over a million hits within a week.
The stunt demonstrated that the graffiti drone, which KATSU unveiled in an interview last year, not only works, but is rather effective. Some, like the UK's Telegraph, went as far as to declare that a new era of vandalism was upon us.
And now, at icarusone.com, you can find everything you need to build your own graffiti drone, which KATSU has christened as ICARUS ONE. All it takes is a spray can, some tape, an arduino, some zip ties, and a tomato cage, and, of course, the drone itself, which costs around $500. The ICARUS will, in theory, allow graffiti writers to make spraywork that's larger and more far-reaching than anything that could be achieved with any other tool currently available on the market.
Judging by the instructions on the website, building your own ICARUS, which KATSU developed with the help of the artist Becky Stern, is not a walk in the park. But it isn't rocket science either. It does take some soldering, and one of the components, the mechanism that pushes the nozzle on the spray can, needs to be 3D-printed. You'll also need to know your way around an arduino. Those who consider soldering more difficult than dangling one-handed from a bridge can order a pre-made ICARUS directly from the source, though these orders will be reviewed on a "case-by-case basis."
KATSU assured me that the payoff of all that soldering and tinkering is significant. "The scale one can draw with ICARUS is frightening," he told me over email. "Imagine scrawling your name or a doodle 100 feet by 100 feet. Imagine sitting on a rooftop at night while your drone tags the building across the street. You could paint a rooftop on one busy street corner then fly over and paint one across the avenue."
It seems the artist's plan is simple: empower artists, wreak havoc.
KATSU's ICARUS ONE flying by Google HQ in New York City. Gif by Nick Puskas
He said he intends to build a fleet of ICARI to distribute among his troublemaking associates in order to seed an online community of graffiti-drone users. If there is enough demand, he told me, he will consider mass production. The design is completely open source, and people who make their own ICARUS are encouraged to expand, modify, and improve on the technology.
From icarusone.com
"Writers will able to deploy ICARUS in hostile environments and remove themselves from harm's way. Painting bridges, overpasses, entire building faces, trains, trucks, and police cars," he explained. (He declined to say whether he had made any new outings with the graffiti drone since the Jenner tag). I asked him to name a place that he could tag with the graffiti drone that would have been impossible to reach by the traditional methods.
"Statue of Liberty's face," he replied.
Want to see how KATSU does it? Here's his exclusive demo for Motherboard:
"I predict a lot of intense mischief, and a lot of puzzled property owners," the prolific NYC-based tagger Seka replied when I asked his opinion of KATSU's project. Seka said that, although he is not sure he would build his own ICARUS, he definitely wants to experiment with one. He speculated that the challenge of building an ICARUS might dissuade a large portion of vandals. "Maybe if graff drones were available at Home Depot, and one could rack them, then people would probably be all about them. "
But even if it were available to be stolen from your nearest hardware store, not everybody in the community is excited to get their hands on the new technology. Some consider it unnecessary.
'Imagine sitting on a rooftop at night while your drone tags the building across the street,' said KATSU. 'You could paint a rooftop on one busy street corner then fly over and paint one across the avenue.'
"Graffiti writers have been hitting the top of buildings for years, and they need no drones," explained the founder of the graffiti blog bombingscience.com, who would only identify himself as "Fred." "Maybe the drone thing will be exciting for a couple of nerdy graffiti writers. But 99 percent of them will still hit the rooftops by all means necessary."
Others see it as antithetical to the spirit of the art form. For many, the physical challenge and peril of graffiti and vandalism is what it's all about, and the graffiti drone eliminates that element of the experience.
KATSU's ICARUS ONE flying in the New York City subway. Gif by Nick Puskas
"At the end of the day, writers around the world will still be climbing and risking their lives for those highest spots," a representative from the blog Graffuturism, who refused to even give his or her first name, wrote in an email.
"I don't dislike the drone idea," explained Seka, "I just don't predict it having the same energetic punch and passion as a raw street tag."
"It's like the US bombing the Middle East," wrote the Graffuturism rep. "You are out of the line of fire."
But graffiti is also about putting as much paint on walls as possible in the shortest period of time. As a tool for what Brett Webb, who founded the formative graffiti site artcrimes.com, described to me via email as "pure vandalism," it's hard to deny the potential of the graffiti drone. To be sure, it replaces adrenaline and physical strength with cold, hard code, but the idea is to paint walls illegally on a larger scale than ever before.
KATSU tag on Kendall Jenner Calvin Klein advertisement in New York City. Photo by the author
In this respect, the graffiti drone appears to take after the drones that are transforming war, oil and gas, moviemaking, and online shopping, among a host of other industries. Just as KATSU hopes that ICARUS will enable artists and troublemakers to reach walls and bridges more quickly, efficiently, and safely than humans, Amazon and Google are investing considerable time and effort on a drone-delivery system that they hope will get you your iPad case, or whatever, faster than any man with a van. "I think drones will have a place in every facet of our lives," KATSU told me.
On Munchies: Only Drones and Dogs Can Save Our Avocados Now
Of course, just as with Amazon's delivery drones—which Audi compared in an advertisement to Hitchcock's The Birds—some portion of the hype surrounding the graffiti drone is based on the unsettling prospect of aerial robotics doing our bidding, rather than the reality, which is somewhat more pedestrian. Drones aren't harbingers of the singularity, they aren't all armed with missiles, and they don't always function as seamlessly as we'd like to believe (or worry).
Indeed, to some, like Webb, the ICARUS appears to have a ways to go before artists and vandals will be able to exercise the same control over their paint as they can when they use their hands. "What I've seen, has been extremely crude as far as quality," he wrote, and the drone "looks pretty tough to operate."
"The ICARUS ONE works quite well but takes mastering," KATSU conceded. "You will need much patience to learn to pilot with paint."
But this model, KATSU hastened to add, is only the Wright Flyer. In October, he and fellow FAT Lab member Maddy Verner plan to release ICARUS TWO, which uses computer vision to autonomously draw designs as one makes them in real time on an iPad. KATSU suggested that someday a departed graffiti writer could leave behind an ICARUS TWO to catch his or her tags in perpetuity, as long as someone charges its batteries.
ICARUS TWO. Photo by Nicksees
Brett Webb described the graffiti drone as another step forward in the continuing automation of vandalism, a process that he says is long-standing and ongoing, and includes fellow graffiti artists Cost and Revs's innovations with the copy machine and the printed sticker |
so intelligent, and so relaxed, as Lagerfeld. He didn’t appear to be very ambitious, he just loved to work (Karl got up before five o’clock every morning), to draw, to read books, and have a good time.” Lagerfeld quoted his mother when Spelman probed him on his future; “remember, it always becomes better than you think.” Doesn’t it just?
“Mode und Wohnen (Fashion and Living) started in Hamburg, 1979, lasting until 1984,” Regina tells me. “I knew Karl Lagerfeld personally, I’d met him earlier in Paris, when he worked for Chloé. When I asked him for a story on the new look for his Monaco apartment he agreed right away.” Embedded, as always, firmly in the cultural zeitgeist, Lagerfeld had embraced Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis movement — the tongue-in-cheek riot of colour, disjointed lines and feral ideology of the early 1980s that has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Along with friend Andrée Putman, Karl had assembled an elaborate collection of key pieces and prototypes from the Milan-based postmodernist design group — and Spelman would document this salient collection.
“My husband Jacques Schumacher, his assistant (Uwe Düttmann — now a renowned photographer in his own right) and myself stayed for three days in Monte Carlo. Karl invited us to great restaurants, paying for everything as he knew that the magazine had very little money” Spelman continues. “We also met his boyfriend Jacques de Bascher in Monte Carlo, who looked fabulous in his stylish foreign legion outfit with a beret. In the apartment we saw a exquisite drawing of Jacques done by David Hockney.” [Cont.]
Related Story: New York gallery Friedman Benda presents an essential collection from the early career of Ettore Sottsass…
Sharing wall space with Hockney were nudes by friend Helmut Newton, Lagerfeld a prolific collector of art — equally as prolific at getting rid: “I had Warhols and Basquiats and I gave them away because I thought they would not last” he recently confessed to The New York Times. It’s probably this ability to quickly detach that has enabled his long run at the top of his game … homes and their interiors have been as easily discarded: apartments, an 18th-century chateau, Biarritz villa, Art Deco, Rococo — Lagerfeld’s accommodation has chopped and changed as frequently as his seasonal collections.
—
Photographs last forever, and Jacques Schumacher was kind enough to open up his archives to We Heart — affording us an unrivalled insight into a moment in time, a moment of fashion and design history
—
And so, Memphis in Monaco wouldn’t last forever. “He told us that he generally liked new things, such as Memphis, but at the same time also thought about selling them a few years later.” Which he did. Sotheby’s held an auction of Lagerfeld’s Memphis collection in 1991. But photographs last forever, and Jacques Schumacher was kind enough to open up his archives to We Heart — affording us an unrivalled insight into a moment in time, a moment of fashion and design history. The German’s pre-white hair; that ghetto blaster; a very uncomfortable looking bed; a bloody boxing ring, this is compelling viewing.
“The Memphis style is very amusing, I think we need more humour and lightness in our lives … especially today”, Regina ruminates on the movement’s enduring legacy, as she recalls quoting architect Emilio Ambasz in the 1983 story: “they have the amiable quality of pets” he declares of the Memphis pieces. “One can embrace them, play with them, cover them up at night to sleep. They are easy to have. You only need to wipe them with a damp cloth and they look fresh and lively again.”
What an image, Karl Lagerfeld giving his sideboard a wipe down before putting it to bed for the night.Help Desk Analyst
Biotronic NeuroNetwork - Ann Arbor, MI
This job posting is no longer available on Indeed.
Biotronic is one of the oldest, largest, and most respected providers of neurophysiological intraoperative monitoring services in the country. We work with more than 400 hospitals and over 850 physicians throughout the United States, and have over 175 neural monitoring technologists located around the country.
We are currently seeking help desk analysts in our Ann Arbor, MI Headquarters.
Duties:
Help Desk
Provides basic help desk support for problems and service requests related to hardware, software and network connectivity.
Facilitates closure to problem ticket / service requests while meeting or exceeding defined service level expectations.
Conducts timely 1st level problem determination for incidents and accurately documenting the issues using the appropriate tools.
Records problem symptoms and status information in a timely/accurate fashion using the appropriate tools in order to communicate with and properly utilize 2nd and 3rd level support resources.
Coordinate the resolution of problems and issues with hospitals and internal staff
System Administration
Provide support for staff laptops including installation, and maintenance; maintaining inventory records; and managing warranty repair process.
Research and evaluate the usefulness of new hardware and software products.
Assist with planning and execution of upgrades and software implementations
Work with 2nd and 3rd level administrators to gain experience with products like Active Directory, VMWare ESXi, Microsoft System Center Suite, Exchange and many other enterprise products.
Qualifications:
High school diploma or general education degree (GED).
A+ certification preferred.
Technical aptitude with strong PC literacy skills required; including proficiency with Windows Operating System and Microsoft Office and basic knowledge of LAN/WAN environments.
Experience with using diagnostic tools for troubleshooting hardware/software related problems
Must be independent, self-motivated individual capable of managing multiple complex tasks and quickly adapt to changing priorities.
Attention to detail with excellent follow-up and follow through skills.
Must be able to provide clear, concise, information through written and verbal communications.
Benefits: Biotronic provides competitive compensation and benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and life insurances, vacation, holiday, personal time, paid travel, and a 401k match.
We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.Bind It allows you to save online articles and stories forever then read them when you want. Never lose an important article or story again because the web page disappeared or went behind a paywall. Best of all it works right from within Safari and saves your article in iBooks.
Bind It takes a webpage and binds it into an electronic book for iBooks. It scans the webpage to find the important information and discards the junk ads. Read later without distraction.
Save up articles that you don’t have time to read at the moment. Catch up on them when you are bored. Perfect for long waits at the doctors office.
Because Bind It combines the text and pictures of an article into a book you keep, it is available on your iOS device even when you don’t have an internet connection. You can save up articles for a plane ride or any time you know you won’t have an internet connection.Sea Cucumber Facts and Information
Introduction to Sea Cucumber
The Sea Cucumber is a type of marine life form. They are a type of echinoderm so they have an endoskeleton. They also have various forms of connective tissues that comprise them. There are many species found and experts believed that they may not have even identified all of them yet. More than 1,250 species have been classified so far.
Sea Cucumber Description
They have skin that is leathery and a very long body. They seem to be jelly like and are often confused with slugs. The wall of their bodies is formed by collagen. This allows them to make their body loose or tight. Then they can easily get in and out of small crevices. This can help them to escape predators too.
Phylum Echinodermata Subphylum Echinozoa Class Holothuroidea
They range in size from 4 to 12 inches long. There are a few species though that can be just over 3 feet long. They don’t have a brain but instead a very detailed and complex nervous system. They don’t have any sensory organs so what they take part in is all based on programming and instinct. They do have a mouth but it is hard to see. They tend to be laying on their side in the water so that is why those elements are harder to identify.
Sea Cucumber Distribution
They are found on the bottom of the floors of seas around the world. They live in very large numbers and are believed to make up the biggest overall population of biomass. Both Alaska and China have very large numbers of the Sea Cucumber living in their waters. In the past couple of decades they have substantially increased in numbers in the water around California.
Sea Cucumber Behavior
While the Sea Cucumber can’t vocalize it uses other means of being able to communicate with others. They are able to send signals that involve hormones through the water. They can liquefy the body when they need to in order to get away from predators. Some of the species are able to emit a stick substance too that the predator will get tangled up in.
Sometimes they will allow part of their body to be pulled off in order to escape danger. Then the Sea Cucumber will lie low for a few weeks in order to give that part of the body time to regenerate. This is a process that can continue during the span of their life in order for them to be able to survive. Missing body parts for any living creature could hinder their ability to thrive.
Sea Cucumber Feeding
This living creature is a scavenger and it will take any food sources that it can find. They tend to consume a variety of debris that is found at the very bottom of the ocean floor. Some species also consume anglerfish. Decaying matter and plankton though make up the majority of the diet for the Sea Cucumber.
They leave their tentacles open and this allows them to capture food through them. They can also be found sifting through the sediment at the bottom of the ocean to be able to find any food there.
Sea Cucumber Reproduction
Mature Sea Cucumber females will deposit eggs as they move around in the water. Males will be attracted to them through the hormone scents and deposit sperm on those eggs. The eggs can be very vulnerable to predators so only a fraction of them will be able to emerge.
They are larvae for several months before the body parts of the Sea Cucumber start to emerge. The temperatures of the water will affect that time frame. Typically the warmer the water is the faster they will develop through those stages. The average lifespan in the wild is from 5 to 10 years.
Sea Cucumber Related ArticlesFollowing in the footsteps of Comcast’s “Watchable” and Verizon’s new go90 service, Cox Communications is preparing to branch out with a video streaming service that is targeted to millennial audiences, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The MSO official told the paper that Flare MeTV, expected to launch later this year first as an app for the iPad, will initially be offered in the U.S. without ads, though it could eventually support advertising or subscription-based models later. The coming app’s “Flipboard-like” UI will also allow users to search across different services, including HBO, Showtime and Hulu, the pub said.
A Cox official confirmed those details, noting that more information will be announced closer to the launch later this year.
Update:According to a Web site that previews Flare MeTV that went live on Friday (November 6), users will have the ability to personalize their viewing with daily updated playlists, and select specific topics for their individual feeds, including politics, entertainment, business, technology, science and health. The site also enables consumers to register for Flare MeTV’s beta. Cox has also created a Twitter handle for it (@flaremetv) and set up a Facebook page for Flare MeTV.
By comparison, Watchable and go90 are both starting under the free, ad-supported model with sanctioned content partners, though subscription-based options will be available via go90 following its recent content and marketing deal with the NBA.
Flare MeTV is just one of a recent string of OTT services from Cox that carry the Flare label.
Among them, Cox recently launched FlareKids, an ad-free, family-friendly OTT streaming app for the iPad featuring content from networks such as PBS Kids, Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. Cox has also introduced flarePlay, an OTT subscription gaming service. Cox also markets myflare, a personal media management service that lets customers store digital pictures, video, music and documents in the cloud
Coxshut down its short-lived flareWatch IPTV trial in 2013.In this guide I want to introduce you to an extremely powerful machine learning technique known as the Support Vector Machine (SVM). It is one of the best "out of the box" supervised classification techniques. As such, it is an important tool for both the quantitative trading researcher and data scientist.
I feel it is important for a quant researcher or data scientist to be comfortable with both the theoretical aspects and practical usage of the techniques in their toolkit. Hence this article will form the first part in a series of articles that discuss support vector machines. This article specifically will cover the theory of maximal margin classifiers, support vector classifiers and support vector machines. Subsequent articles will make use of the Python scikit-learn library to demonstrate some examples of the aforementioned theoretical techniques on actual data.
Motivation for Support Vector Machines
The problem to be solved in this article is one of supervised binary classification. That is, we wish to categorise new unseen objects into two separate groups based on their properties and a set of known examples, which are already categorised. A good example of such a system is classifying a set of new documents into positive or negative sentiment groups, based on other documents which have already been classified as positive or negative. Similarly, we could classify new emails into spam or non-spam, based on a large corpus of documents that have already been marked as spam or non-spam by humans. SVMs are highly applicable to such situations.
A Support Vector Machine models the situation by creating a feature space, which is a finite-dimensional vector space, each dimension of which represents a "feature" of a particular object. In the context of spam or document classification, each "feature" is the prevalence or importance of a particular word.
The goal of the SVM is to train a model that assigns new unseen objects into a particular category. It achieves this by creating a linear partition of the feature space into two categories. Based on the features in the new unseen objects (e.g. documents/emails), it places an object "above" or "below" the separation plane, leading to a categorisation (e.g. spam or non-spam). This makes it an example of a non-probabilistic linear classifier. It is non-probabilistic, because the features in the new objects fully determine its location in feature space and there is no stochastic element involved.
However, much of the benefit of SVMs comes from the fact that they are not restricted to being linear classifiers. Utilising a technique known as the kernel trick they can become much more flexible by introducing various types of non-linear decision boundaries.
Formally, in mathematical language, SVMs construct linear separating hyperplanes in high-dimensional vector spaces. Data points are viewed as $(\vec{x}, y)$ tuples, $\vec{x} = (x_1, \ldots, x_p)$ where the $x_j$ are the feature values and $y$ is the classification (usually given as $+1$ or $-1$). Optimal classification occurs when such hyperplanes provide maximal distance to the nearest training data points. Intuitively, this makes sense, as if the points are well separated, the classification between two groups is much clearer.
However, if in a feature space some of the sets are not linearly separable (i.e. they overlap!), then it is necessary to perform a mapping of the original feature space to a higher-dimensional space, in which the separation between the groups is clear, or at least clearer. However, this has the consequence of making the separation boundary in the original space potentially non-linear.
In this article we will proceed by considering the advantages and disadvantages of SVMs as a classification technique, then defining the concept of an optimal linear separating hyperplane, which motivates a simple type of linear classifier known as a maximal margin classifier (MMC). We will then show that maximal margin classifiers are not often applicable to many "real world" situations and as such need modification, in the form of a support vector classifier (SVC). We will then relax the restriction of linearity and consider non-linear classifiers, namely support vector machines, which use kernel functions to improve computational efficiency.
Advantages and Disadvantages of SVMs
As a classification technique, the SVM has many advantages, many of which are due to its computational efficiency on large datasets. The Scikit-Learn team have summarised the main advantages and disadvantages here but I have repeated and elaborated on them for completeness:
Advantages
High-Dimensionality - The SVM is an effective tool in high-dimensional spaces, which is particularly applicable to document classification and sentiment analysis where the dimensionality can be extremely large ($\geq 10^6$).
- The SVM is an effective tool in high-dimensional spaces, which is particularly applicable to document classification and sentiment analysis where the dimensionality can be extremely large ($\geq 10^6$). Memory Efficiency - Since only a subset of the training points are used in the actual decision process of assigning new members, only these points need to be stored in memory (and calculated upon) when making decisions.
- Since only a subset of the training points are used in the actual decision process of assigning new members, only these points need to be stored in memory (and calculated upon) when making decisions. Versatility - Class separation is often highly non-linear. The ability to apply new kernels allows substantial flexibility for the decision boundaries, leading to greater classification performance.
Disadvantages
$p > n$ - In situations where the number of features for each object ($p$) exceeds the number of training data samples ($n$), SVMs can perform poorly. This can be seen intuitively, as if the high-dimensional feature space is much larger than the samples, then there are less effective support vectors on which to support the optimal linear hyperplanes, leading to poorer classification performance as new unseen samples are added.
- In situations where the number of features for each object ($p$) exceeds the number of training data samples ($n$), SVMs can perform poorly. This can be seen intuitively, as if the high-dimensional feature space is much larger than the samples, then there are less effective support vectors on which to support the optimal linear hyperplanes, leading to poorer classification performance as new unseen samples are added. Non-Probabilistic - Since the classifier works by placing objects above and below a classifying hyperplane, there is no direct probabilistic interpretation for group membership. However, one potential metric to determine "effectiveness" of the classification is how far from the decision boundary the new point is.
Now that we've outlined the advantages and disadvantages, we're going to discuss the geometric objects and mathematical entities that will ultimately allow us to define the SVMs and how they work.
There are some fantastic references (both links and textbooks) that derive much of the mathematical detail of how SVMs work. In the following derivation I didn't want to "reinvent the wheel" too much, especially with regards notation and pedagogy, so I've formulated the following treatment based on the references provided at the end of the article, making strong use of James et al (2013), Hastie et al (2009) and the Wikibooks article on SVMs. I have made changes to the notation where appropriate and have adjusted the narrative to suit individuals interested in quantitative finance.
Linear Separating Hyperplanes
The linear separating hyperplane is the key geometric entity that is at the heart of the SVM. Informally, if we have a high-dimensional feature space, then the linear hyperplane is an object one dimension lower than this space that divides the feature space into two regions.
This linear separating plane need not pass through the origin of our feature space, i.e. it does not need to include the zero vector as an entity within the plane. Such hyperplanes are known as affine.
If we consider a real-valued $p$-dimensional feature space, known mathematically as $\mathbb{R}^p$, then our linear separating hyperplane is an affine $p-1$ dimensional space embedded within it.
For the case of $p=2$ this hyperplane is simply a one-dimensional straight line, which lives in the larger two-dimensional plane, whereas for $p=3$ the hyerplane is a two-dimensional plane that lives in the larger three-dimensional feature space (see Fig 1 and Fig 2):
Figs 1 and 2: One- and two-dimensional hyperplanes
If we consider an element of our $p$-dimensional feature space, i.e. $\vec{x}=(x_1,...,x_p) \in \mathbb{R}^p$, then we can mathematically define an affine hyperplane by the following equation:
\begin{eqnarray} b_0 + b_1 x_1 +... + b_p x_p = 0 \end{eqnarray}
$b_0
eq 0$ gives us an affine plane (i.e. it does not pass through the origin). We can use a more succinct notation for this equation by introducing the summation sign:
\begin{eqnarray} b_0 + \sum^{p}_{j=1} b_j x_j = 0 \end{eqnarray}
Notice however that this is nothing more than a multi-dimensional dot product (or, more generally, an inner product), and as such can be written even more succinctly as:
\begin{eqnarray} \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x} + b_0 = 0 \end{eqnarray}
If an element $\vec{x} \in \mathbb{R}^p$ satisfies this relation then it lives on the $p-1$-dimensional hyperplane. This hyperplane splits the $p$-dimensional feature space into two classification regions (see Fig 3):
Fig 3: Separation of $p$-dimensional space by a hyperplane
Elements $\vec{x}$ above the plane satisfy:
\begin{eqnarray} \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x} + b_0 > 0 \end{eqnarray}
While those below it satisfy:
\begin{eqnarray} \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x} + b_0 < 0 \end{eqnarray}
The key point here is that it is possible for us to determine which side of the plane any element $\vec{x}$ will fall on by calculating the sign of the expression $\vec{b} \cdot \vec{x} + b_0$. This concept will form the basis of a supervised classification technique.
Classification
Continuing with our example of email spam filtering, we can think of our classification problem (say) as being provided with a thousand emails ($n=1000$), each of which is marked spam ($+1$) or non-spam ($-1$). In addition, each email has an associated set of keywords (i.e. separating the words on spacing) that provide features. Hence if we take the set of all possible keywords from all of the emails (and remove duplicates), we will be left with $p$ keywords in total.
If we translate this into a mathematical problem, the standard setup for a supervised classification procedure is to consider a set of $n$ training observations, $\vec{x}_i$, each of which is a $p$-dimensional vector of features. Each training observation has an associated class label, $y_i \in \{ -1,1 \}$. Hence we can think of $n$ pairs of training observations $(\vec{x}_i, y_i)$ representing the features and class labels (keyword lists and spam/non-spam). In addition to the training observations we can provide test observations, $\vec{x}^{*} = (x^{*}_1,..., x^{*}_p)$ that are later used to test the performance of the classifiers. In our spam example, these test observations would be new emails that have not yet been seen.
Our goal is to develop a classifier based on provided training observations that will correctly classify subsequent test observations using only their feature values. This translates into being able to classify an email as spam or non-spam solely based on the keywords contained within it.
We will initially suppose that it is possible, via a means yet to be determined, to construct a hyperplane that separates training data perfectly according to their class labels (see Figs 4 and 5). This would mean cleanly separating spam emails from non-spam emails solely by using specific keywords. The following diagram is only showing $p=2$, while for keyword lists we may have $p>10^6$. Hence Figs 4 and 5 are only representative of the problem.
Fig 4: Multiple separating hyperplanes; Fig 5: Perfect separation of class data
This translates into a mathematical separating property of:
\begin{eqnarray} \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x}_i + b_0 > 0,\enspace\text{if}\enspace y_i = 1 \end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray} \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x}_i + b_0 < 0,\enspace\text{if}\enspace y_i = -1 \end{eqnarray}
This basically states that if each training observation is above or below the separating hyperplane, according to the geometric equation which defines the plane, then its associated class label will be $+1$ or $-1$. Thus we have developed a simple classification process. We assign a test observation to a class depending upon which side of the hyperplane it is located on.
This can be formalised by considering the following function $f(\vec{x})$, with a test observation $\vec{x}^{*}=(x^{*}_1,...,x^{*}_p)$:
\begin{eqnarray} f(\vec{x}^{*}) = \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x}^{*} + b_0 \end{eqnarray}
If $f(\vec{x}^{*}) > 0$ then $y^{*} = +1$, whereas if $f(\vec{x}^{*}) < 0$ then $y^{*} = -1$.
However, this tells us nothing about how we go about finding the $b_j$ components of $\vec{b}$, as well as $b_0$, which are crucial in helping us determine the equation of the hyperplane separating the two regions. The next section discusses an approach for carrying this out, as well as introducing the concept of the maximal margin hyperplane and a classifier built on it, known as the maximal margin classifier.
Deriving the Classifier
At this stage it is worth pointing out that separating hyperplanes are not unique, since it is possible to slightly translate or rotate such a plane without touching any training observations (see Fig 4).
So, not only do we need to know how to construct such a plane, but we also need to determine the most optimal. This motivates the concept of the maximal margin hyperplane (MMH), which is the separating hyperplane that is farthest from any training observations, and is thus "optimal".
How do we find the maximal margin hyperplane? Firstly, we compute the perpendicular distance from each training observation $\vec{x}_i$ for a given separating hyperplane. The smallest perpendicular distance to a training observation from the hyperplane is known as the margin. The MMH is the separating hyperplane where the margin is the largest. This guarantees that it is the farthest minimum distance to a training observation.
The classification procedure is then just simply a case of determining which side a test observation falls on. This can be carried out using the above formula for $f(\vec{x}^{*})$. Such a classifier is known as a maximimal margin classifier (MMC). Note however that finding the particular values that lead to the MMH is purely based on the training observations. That is, we still need to be aware of how the MMC performs on the test observations. We are implicitly making the assumption that a large margin in the training observations will provide a large margin on the test observations, but this may not be the case.
As always, we must be careful to avoid overfitting when the number of feature dimensions is large (e.g. in Natural Language Processing applications such as email spam classification). Overfitting here means that the MMH is a very good fit for the training data but can perform quite poorly when exposed to testing data. I discuss this issue in depth in the article on the bias-variance trade-off.
To reiterate, our goal now becomes finding an algorithm that can produce the $b_j$ values, which will fix the geometry of the hyperplane and hence allow determination of $f(\vec{x}^{*})$ for any test observation.
If we consider Fig 6, we can see that the MMH is the mid-line of the widest "block" that we can insert between the two classes such that they are perfectly separated.
Fig 6: Maximal margin hyperplane with support vectors (A, B and C)
One of the key features of the MMC (and subsequently SVC and SVM) is that the location of the MMH only depends on the support vectors, which are the training observations that lie directly on the margin (but not hyperplane) boundary (see points A, B and C in Fig 6). This means that the location of the MMH is NOT dependent upon any other training observations.
Thus it can be immediately seen that a potential drawback of the MMC is that its MMH (and thus its classification performance) can be extremely sensitive to the support vector locations. However, it is also partially this feature that makes the SVM an attractive computational tool, as we only need to store the support vectors in memory once it has been "trained" (i.e. the $b_j$ values are fixed).
Constructing the Maximal Margin Classifier
I feel it is instructive to fully outline the optimisation problem that needs to be solved in order to create the MMH (and thus the MMC itself). While I will outline the constraints of the optimisation problem, the algorithmic solution to this problem is beyond the scope of the article. Thankfully these optimisation routines are implemented in scikit-learn (actually, via the LIBSVM library). If you wish to read more about the solution to these algorithmic problems, take a look at Hastie et al (2009) and the Scikit-Learn page on Support Vector Machines.
The procedure for determining a maximal margin hyperplane for a maximal margin classifier is as follows. Given $n$ training observations $\vec{x}_1,..., \vec{x}_n \in \mathbb{R}^p$ and $n$ class labels $y_1,...,y_n \in \{-1,1\}$, the MMH is the solution to the following optimisation procedure:
Maximise $M \in \mathbb{R}$, by varying $b_1,..., b_p$ such that:
\begin{eqnarray} \sum^{p}_{j=1} b^2_j = 1 \end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray} y_i \left( \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x} + b_0 \right) \geq M, \quad \forall i = 1,...,n \end{eqnarray}
Despite the complex looking constraints, they actually state that each observation must be on the correct side of the hyperplane and at least a distance $M$ from it. Since the goal of the procedure is to maximise $M$, this is precisely the condition we need to create the MMC!
Clearly, the case of perfect separability is an ideal one. Most "real world" datasets will not have such perfect separability via a linear hyperplane (see Fig 7). However, if there is no separability then we are unable to construct a MMC by the optimisation procedure above. So, how do we create a form of separating hyperplane?
Fig 7: No possibility of a true separating hyperplane
Essentially we have to relax the requirement that a separating hyperplane will perfectly separate every training observation on the correct side of the line (i.e. guarantee that it is associated with its true class label), using what is called a soft margin. This motivates the concept of a support vector classifier (SVC).
Support Vector Classifiers
As we alluded to above, one of the problems with MMC is that they can be extremely sensitive to the addition of new training observations. Consider Figs 8 and 9. In Fig 8 it can be seen that there exists a MMH perfectly separating the two classes. However, in Fig 9 if we add one point to the $+1$ class we see that the location of the MMH changes substantially. Hence in this situation the MMH has clearly been over-fit:
Figs 8 and 9: Addition of a single point dramatically changes the MMH line
As we mentioned above also, we could consider a classifier based on a separating hyperplane that doesn't perfectly separate the two classes, but does have a greater robustness to the addition of new invididual observations and has a better classification on most of the training observations. This comes at the expense of some misclassification of a few training observations.
This is how a support vector classifier or soft margin classifier works. A SVC allows some observations to be on the incorrect side of the margin (or hyperplane), hence it provides a "soft" separation. The following figures 10 and 11 demonstrate observations being on the wrong side of the margin and the wrong side of the hyperplane respectively:
Figs 10 and 11: Observations on the wrong side of the margin and hyperplane, respectively
As before, an observation is classified depending upon which side of the separating hyperplane it lies on, but some points may be misclassified.
It is instructive to see how the optimisation procedure differs from that described above for the MMC. We need to introduce new parameters, namely $n$ $\epsilon_i$ values (known as the slack values) and a parameter $C$, known as the budget. We wish to maximise $M$, across $b_1,..., b_p,\epsilon_1,..,\epsilon_n$ such that:
\begin{eqnarray} \sum^{p}_{j=1} b^2_j = 1 \end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray} y_i \left( \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x} + b_0 \right) \geq M (1 - \epsilon_i), \quad \forall i = 1,...,n \end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray} \epsilon_i \geq 0, \quad \sum^{n}_{i=1} \epsilon_i \leq C \end{eqnarray}
Where $C$, the budget, is a non-negative "tuning" parameter. $M$ still represents the margin and the slack variables $\epsilon_i$ allow the individual observations to be on the wrong side of the margin or hyperplane.
In essence the $\epsilon_i$ tell us where the $i$th observation is located relative to the margin and hyperplane. For $\epsilon_i=0$ it states that the $x_i$ training observation is on the correct side of the margin. For $\epsilon_i>0$ we have that $x_i$ is on the wrong side of the margin, while for $\epsilon_i>1$ we have that $x_i$ is on the wrong side of the hyperplane.
$C$ collectively controls how much the individual $\epsilon_i$ can be modified to violate the margin. $C=0$ implies that $\epsilon_i=0, \forall i$ and thus no violation of the margin is possible, in which case (for separable classes) we have the MMC situation.
For $C>0$ it means that no more than $C$ observations can violate the hyperplane. As $C$ increases the margin will widen. See Fig 12 and 13 for two differing values of $C$:
Figs 12 and 13: Different values of the tuning parameter $C$
How do we choose $C$ in practice? Generally this is done via cross-validation. In essence $C$ is the parameter that governs the bias-variance trade-off for the SVC. A small value of $C$ means a low bias, high variance situation. A large value of $C$ means a high bias, low variance situation.
As before, to classify a new test observation $x^{*}$ we simply calculate the sign of $f(\vec{x}^{*})= \vec{b} \cdot \vec{x}^{*} + b_0$.
This is all well and good for classes that are linearly (or nearly linearly) separated. However, what about separation boundaries that are non-linear? How do we deal with those situations? This is where we can extend the concept of support vector classifiers to support vector machines.
Support Vector Machines
The motivation behind the extension of a SVC is to allow non-linear decision boundaries. This is the domain of the Support Vector Machine (SVM). Consider the following Figs 14 and 15. In such a situation a purely linear SVC will have extremely poor performance, simply because the data has no clear linear separation:
Figs 14 and 15: No clear linear separation between classes and thus poor SVC performance
Hence SVCs can be useless in highly non-linear class boundary problems.
In order to motivate how an SVM works, we can consider a standard "trick" in linear regression, when considering non-linear situations. In particular a set of $p$ features $x_1,..., x_p$ can be transformed, say, into a set of $2p$ features $x_1, x^2_1,..., x_p, x^2_p$. This allows us to apply a linear technique to a set of non-linear features.
While the decision boundary is linear in the new $2p$-dimensional feature space it is non-linear in the original $p$-dimensional space. We end up with a decision boundary given by $q(\vec{x})=0$ where $q$ is a quadratic polynomial function of the original features and hence is a non-linear solution.
This is clearly not restricted to quadratic polynomials. Higher dimensional polynomials, interaction terms and other functional forms, could all be considered. Although the drawback is that it dramatically increases the dimension of the feature space to the point that |
aster chips
The second major breakthrough exciting materials scientists centres on a possible application for graphene.
Its conductive properties are well known and it has long been the vision of chip designers to construct graphene-based processors.
IBM made early inroads in 2010 when it created a basic graphene transistor.
This month, the company announced that it had gone a step further, integrating it into a circuit known as a broadband frequency mixer - an essential component of TVs, mobile phones and radios.
Image caption First-ever integrated circuit with a graphene transistor
"When a radio station broadcasts at a high frequency through space, the wave is then received by your radio, but the high frequency cannot be heard, so it must be converted into a low frequency wave that we can hear," the lead scientist of the project, Dr Phaedon Avouris, told BBC News.
IBM calls its research an important milestone for the future of wireless devices.
Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates the capability of graphene integrated circuits.
Previously, scientists had experienced difficulty preserving the integrity of the material during the silicon etching process. Getting it to work alongside other chip materials had also proved problematic.
"Our work demonstrates that graphene can be used as practical technology, that it's no longer some individual material," said Dr Yu-Ming Lin, one of the scientists on the project.
"This is the first wafer-scale production of graphene-integrated circuit - and we've shown that graphene can be integrated with other elements to form a complete function, which enables higher performance and more complex functionalities in a circuit."
The results appear impressive.
In their paper published in the journal Science, the team explained that the circuit could operate at high frequencies of up to 10GHz (10 billion cycles per second), and at temperatures of up to 127°C.
Big surprise
IBM's work surprised many - even the physicist behind the material's discovery.
"I never suspected we would get there so fast," said Dr Konstantin Novoselov of Manchester University.
One of our projects is exploring the possibility of using graphene as a membrane in the next generation of artificial kidneys Dr Daniil Stolyarov, Graphene Labs
He is the man who, together with a colleague Dr Andre Geim, first produced this highly conductive, extremely strong and transparent material in 2004.
The two scientists, both originally from Russia, managed to extract graphene while experimenting with plain old sticky tape and graphite, commonly used in pencils.
The pair won the prestigious Nobel Prize for their breakthrough.
"This integrated circuit is a logical step forward, and it's somewhere in the middle between the first experiments and real-life applications," said Dr Novoselov.
"But I was surprised to see that someone managed to do it that quickly."
Other applications
Electronics giants as well as small labs have been eyeing graphene's future prospects, hungry for smaller, faster, thermally stable and more powerful electronic components.
Image caption Yu-Ming Lin (l) and Phaedon Avouris (r) are part of the IBM team working with graphene
Korea's Samsung has invested heavily into graphene research, and the Finnish firm Nokia has just announced its plans to team up with partners - among them the two Nobel-prize winners - to explore graphene opportunities.
Besides electronics, graphene could be used in optics and composite material applications.
A number of graphene-based prototypes have already been developed in labs around the world - and it seems that possibilities are almost endless.
It has also proven a hit with biologists - as the most transparent, strongest and most conductive material on Earth, graphene could be an ideal candidate for Transmission Electron Microscopy.
Samsung has promised to release its first mobile phone with a graphene screen in the near future.
Professor Andrea Ferrari of Cambridge University says that besides being totally flexible, a touch screen of a phone or a tablet made of graphene could even give you "sensational" feedback.
Your phone will be able to sense if you're touching it - you won't have to press a button to turn it on or off Prof Andrea Ferrari, Cambridge University
"We went from physical buttons to touch screens, the next step will be integrating some sensing capabilities," says Professor Ferrari.
"Your phone will be able to sense if you're touching it, will sense the environment around - you won't have to press a button to turn it on or off, it will recognise if you're using it or not."
Also, he said, one day we might not need to carry around GPS devices - along with other graphene-based sensors, they could be woven into our clothes.
"Besides GPS, you could have something that will monitor your heart rate for instance - and it'll be integrated into the fabric," explains Professor Ferrari.
And graphene could even help airplanes "communicate" with pilots.
The scientist explained that electrical properties of graphene change depending on the strain it is subjected to - like when there are strong winds, for instance.
So the casing of the plane would be able to sense if it is under great or small stress, and feedback the information directly to the cockpit, without the need for additional sensors."Stand With Us to Fight"
Hundreds protest Enbridge pipeline and oil tankers at Heiltsuk-led rally
by Sandra Cuffe
The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca
Sandra Cuffe Photo: Share Del.icio Heiltsuk Nation elder Edwin Newman addresses rally against oil pipelines and tanker traffic in Vancouver on March 26.
VANCOUVER—Hundreds of people from First Nations, environmental and community organizations, and others from Vancouver and beyond, rallied against Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline and coastal oil supertanker traffic earlier today, filling the Vancouver Art Gallery grounds.
A march led by the Heiltsuk Nation of the Central Coast departed from the Coastal First Nations office at Granville and Hastings Streets and wound its way through the downtown business district to join another group waiting at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The rally marked the 23rd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska, which spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil on March 24, 1989.
"Only seven percent of that oil was cleaned up," said Coastal First Nations Executive Director Art Sterritt of the Exxon Valdez spill. "Our well-being as First Nations is dependent on our lands, on our waters.
Sandra Cuffe Photo: Despite the rain, hundreds rallied against oil pipelines and tankers at the Art Gallery in Vancouver on March 26.
“Our people, the Heiltsuk people, have always had a position: No oil tankers on the coast! That position has never changed,” Heiltsuk elder Edwin Newman said, addressing the rally. “We are pleading with our coastal neighbours to stand with us to fight this issue.”
“When we stand together, we are a powerful people,” added Newman, whose call for unity was echoed by speaker after speaker.
"We are Canada's energy union and we stand with you on this issue," Jim Britton, Western Region Vice President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers' Union (CEP) told the crowd. "We do not support Enbridge. We do not support Northern Gateway...This isn't just about oil. This is about us. This is about our communities."
If built, the proposed 1,200-kilometre Northern Gateway oil pipeline would transport a half-million barrels of tar sands bitumen from Alberta to Kitimat, BC. The proposed twin pipelines' 30-metre-wide right-of-way would cross hundreds of rivers, streams and watersheds along its route through numerous unceded Indigenous territories. The crude oil would then be transported on massive oil tankers through delicate coastal ecosystems and Indigenous territories and finally across the Pacific to Asian markets.
"The world that we have lived in for the past 10,000 years is shifting around us," Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an organization dedicated to building a global movement against climate change, told the rally, situating the coastal struggle against pipelines and tankers within the global climate justice movement. "The planet is starting to become unglued because we are raising the temperature."
"We know, we absolutely know that this fight is going to completely eclipse the [fight for] Clayoquot Sound," Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs said. "We know that this fight is going to intensify."
While the struggle against Northern Gateway has garnered massive support and international attention, it is not the only pipeline project facing opposition in the province. Grassroots Wet'suwet'en community activists have been resisting the proposed Pacific Trails natural gas pipeline that would connect to a new Liquefied Natural Gas port on the Central Coast. The project would traverse the unceded lands of many of the same First Nations opposing the Enbridge project. In its case, however, the elected leadership of several First Nations along the route are supporting the Pacific Trails project.
Another lesser-known pipeline project already runs through the lower mainland. The Kinder Morgan oil pipeline brings tar sands crude across the Rockies along its Trans Mountain pipeline to terminals in both Burnaby and Washington State. Only two months ago there was a spill in Abbotsford, BC, following a major oil spill at the Burnaby terminal site in 2007.
Kinder Morgan is expected to announce its expansion plans for the pipeline, according to Ben West, Healthy Communities Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee. The company is reportedly looking to increase the quantity of crude transported from 300,000 barrels per day to 600,000 or 700,000.
"Kinder Morgan has been trying to do this as quietly as possible," West told the rally. "We have to stand together to say no to all these projects!"
As the rally wound down after two hours in the rain, the loudest expressions of support were heard for 11-year-old Sliammon First Nation singer-songwriter Ta'Kaiya Blaney. She recalled going to the Enbridge office in Vancouver one year ago to express her opinion about the Northern Gateway pipeline.
"I was escorted out and I was told that if I didn't leave I would be charged for trespassing," Blaney recounted to the ralliers, who showed their support with enthusiastic cheers.
Before performing her song "Shallow Waters," Blaney told the hundreds gathered on the Monday afternoon of the message found in the song: "If we do nothing it will all be gone."
Sandra Cuffe is a writer and aspiring janitor currently living in Vancouver.
This article was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op.
Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.caLibertarian icon Ron Paul has accused Donald Trump of betraying his promises to the American electorate by seeking a new conflict with either Iran or North Korea, warning the US president that any such war will put an end to his term.
“President Trump seems to be impatiently racing toward at least one disastrous war. Maybe two. The big question is who will be first? North Korea or Iran?” wrote the 81-year-old former congressman in his weekly column published on the site of his Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
North Korea or Iran…Where Will President Trump Attack First? https://t.co/089oNzpwGLpic.twitter.com/5BjWn8pZUF — Ron Paul (@RonPaul) 31 July 2017
“With continuing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans over the unproven ‘Russiagate’ allegations, it increasingly looks like he will seek relief by starting a ‘nice little war.’ If he does so, however, his presidency will likely be over and he may end up blundering into a much bigger war in the process,” states Paul, who contested the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2012.
The new White House administration has attempted to exert unprecedented pressure on Pyongyang amid a series of missiles test carried out on the orders of Kim Jong-un over the past year.
Read more
Paul believes that Trump is looking to play a proactive role in any standoff with the Kim regime, saying, that displays, such as the recent US B-1 bomber flight over the Korean peninsula, sends “a clear message that he is ready to attack.”
Paul further criticizes the scaling up of US naval forces in the Persian Gulf in recent months, which led to clashes between Iranian and American vessels.
“Imagine if the US Navy had encountered Iranian warships in the Gulf of Mexico firing machine guns at them when they approached the Iranians,” writes Paul, who has consistently advocated a policy of non-interventionism.
He also notes that Iran is complying with the terms of the Obama-era nuclear agreement, apparently to Trump's dismay.
And although Paul did not endorse any of the 2016 candidates, his son Rand Paul, who ran for the nomination, did, with Trump emerging as the most popular major-party politician among libertarian voters, with many of his policies superficially echoing Paul’s own stance.
“Although Trump’s bombastic rhetoric on Iran and North Korea has been pretty consistent, the American people voted Trump because he was seen as the less likely of the two candidates to get the US into a major war,” writes Paul.
“A recent study by Boston University and the University of Minnesota concluded that Trump won the most votes in parts of the country with the highest military casualties… These are the Americans living in the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan that surprised the pundits by voting for Trump over Hillary.”
With the US establishment distracted, Paul advocates for his supporters to “make their voices heard” and drag attention back to the international arena, to stop Trump “blustering us into one or two wars that will make Iraq and Afghanistan look like cakewalks by comparison.”Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption French police were warned that four bombs had been planted
Thousands of Roman Catholic pilgrims were evacuated from the Sanctuary of Lourdes in France after a bomb scare which turned out to be a hoax.
The threat came as 30,000 worshippers gathered for the annual Feast of the Assumption, one of the pilgrimage site's busiest days of the year.
Police gave the all-clear for the site to reopen after a search by bomb disposal teams with sniffer dogs.
More than six million believers visit the Sanctuary each year.
It is famous for what many Roman Catholics believe was a vision of the Virgin Mary by a local girl in 1858.
It houses the shrine or grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes and on 15 August believers celebrate the Virgin Mary's ascent to heaven.
Lourdes pilgrimage site Founded after miller's daughter Bernadette Soubirous reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1858
Original sanctuary was the chapel above the grotto where the visions occurred
Now covers 51 hectares (126 acres) and has 22 places of worship
Has dozens of chaplains and other religious helpers as well as hundreds of permanent and seasonal staff Source: Official Lourdes website
A Church spokesman told French news agency AFP that a telephoned warning had been received by police, announcing that four bombs were going to go off at around 1500 (1300GMT).
He said the evacuation, just before the midday Mass, had taken place calmly.
No explosions were heard at 1500, but bomb disposal teams could still be seen at key buildings and areas.
Police later gave the all-clear and the site reopened.
Cure claims
The Sanctuary is the name given to the central area of the Lourdes pilgrimage site.
The site is home to 22 places of worship, including the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, which marks the spot where pilgrims believe the Virgin Mary appeared.
It was founded after a 14-year-old French girl, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed to have witnessed a series of visions in a cave.
Since then, many people suffering illness or infirmity claim to have been miraculously cured by spring water coming from the Sanctuary.Ernest Gellner was both a philosopher and a social anthropologist. He believed that positivism was the correct philosophy, but the logical positivists had expressed it badly. Rather than being an analysis of how all knowledge is obtained, Gellner thought that positivism should be seen as a quasi-ethical principle of how one ought to obtain knowledge. This position is interesting but a bit hard to grasp. A few quotes may help to explain it. The first is from the essay "Gellner's Positivism" by Ian Jarvie (in The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, eds. John Hall and Ian Jarvie):
As Gellner construes philosophy, it [...] should, among other things, be partly empirical: the facts of the world make a philosophical difference. The overwhelming fact of the modern world makes a decisive philosophical difference. Furthermore, the particular philosophy of the facts so scorned by the Oxford disciples of the later Wittgenstein, namely positivism, seems to Gellner the correct philosophy -- even if it was seldom properly worked out by those who adhered to it (e.g. the logical positivists). This last qualification merely points to the fact that Gellner is a positivist yes, but something of a positivist sui generis because modern positivisms are 'trite and scholastic'. (p. 524)
Gellner elaborates his position on the theory of knowledge in his book Legitimation of Belief, in the essay "Positivism against Hegelianism" (in his book Relativism and the Social Sciences; Gellner memorably concludes this essay by saying: "the positivists are right. For Hegelian reasons." p. 67) and in an article entitled "An ethic of cognition" (in his book Spectacles and Predicaments). In "An ethic of cognition" Gellner writes:
The key idea in empiricism is the sovereignty of experience, and above all the exclusive and sole sovereignty of experience, in cognitive matters. What seems a trite truism (we learn by experience) becomes an unbelievably daring, radical, destructive, and difficult doctrine if reformulated more strongly so as to say -- we learn in no other way. (p. 169)
In particular, Gellner sees positivism as a method that excludes knowledge obtained through divine revelation, such as from a holy text. As Jarvie notes, "The positivism to which Gellner gives almost unqualified approval is d'Holbach's Le systéme de la nature" (Op. cit., p. 523). D'Holbach's 1770 book is sometimes called the "Bible of atheism" and is a classic Enlightenment account of a materialistic description of the universe. Small wonder that Gellner sometimes called himself an "Enlightenment fundamentalist."
Gellner sees positivism as the denial of the kind of world-views offered by religion, world-views in which the True, the Good and Beautiful converge within a cosmic story that dispels all doubt. These ideological world-views are not exclusively religious -- other all-encompassing belief systems that combine knowledge with morality are also excluded by positivism:
So, the sheer distribution of faith and disbelief itself confirms the truth of faith. Only those devoid of Grace doubt the existence of God; only neurotic resisters doubt the insights of depth psychology; only class enemies fail to see the cogency of scientific historical materialism [...] (p. 166)
Gellner defines positivism, or empiricism, as the rejection of these ideological worlds -- of religion, Marxist historical materialism, and so on:
What is empiricism, in general? The rough but correct definition, i.e., the one which brings out what really matters about the doctrine, is also highly paradoxical. It runs approximately as follows: empiricism is the a priori exclusion of a certain class of possible worlds, namely those worlds which satisfy some very deep general moral yearnings, roughly indicated above. (p. 168)
As Jarvie noted, Gellner believed that empirical facts about the modern world make a difference to epistemology. In particular, the most important fact of this kind is what he called "the Big Divide":
The biggest, most conspicuous single fact about the human world is the Big Divide between what may roughly be called the industrial-scientific societies and the Rest. The former possess, for good or ill, enormous manipulative and predictive powers over nature (though not over social processes), endowing them with the means both of mass destruction and of mass affluence and leisure. The latter miserably scrape a precarious living by agriculture or even cruder methods. Their techniques for either feeding or killing people are slow, inefficient, and labour-intensive. (p. 175)
Thus, positivism should be formulated so that it takes into account the Big Divide:
The importance of original, Comtian positivism was that it combined an articulation of the model with a historico-sociological awareness of the Big Divide. The trite and scholastic nature of many twentieth-century formulations of positivism are a consequence of an interest restricted to the model alone. The empiricist story of how an individual accumulates information about the world, is only useful if treated as an account of how some societies (but some only) have learned to investigate nature, and so as a parable of the Big Divide. (pp. 175f)
Gellner's position is that any attempt to prove the correctness of positivism as a theory of knowledge by means of a purely logical argument is doomed to fail. There is no way to prove, by logical argument alone, to someone who believes in an ideological world-view that he is wrong:
What is important is the fact that we have no logical or independent way of proving that such a 'circular' world, or strictly speaking a world sustained by reasoning which seems circular to an outside and hostile critic (or outside and hence hostile), cannot exist. On the contrary: it could well exist. A world so constructed as to make its most important features manifest to the good, and obscured from the wicked, might well exist. Perhaps, indeed, it does exist: and perhaps this world is just such a world. There is nothing in the very least logically self-contradictory in such a supposition. It cannot be excluded by logic. And it cannot be excluded by fact either, for it is constructed precisely in a way such that all facts can be accommodated. (p. 166)
Positivism should be seen as a quasi-ethical principle about how one ought to think and obtain knowledge, and as a rejection of all-encompassing world-views that combine the True and the Good. One more quote from Ernest Gellner's essay "An ethic of cognition":Details Published on Thursday, 05 January 2012 01:21 Written by Jeff "The Canuck" Pearce
Layne Norton talks the talk and walks the walk. Not only is he a professional bodybuilder in the IFPA and the NGA, but he has a BS in Biochemistry, a PhD in Nutritional Sciences, owns his own training and nutrition business (BioLayne,LLC.) and is a Research and Development Consultant for Scivation. Apparently, this wasn't enough for Layne; he also holds the AAPF National Record for Raw Squat and Deadlift in the 220 pound class. Layne just turned 30 years old and this is just a fraction of what this man has accomplished so far. Layne released his first DVD, entitled Layne Norton Unleashed, in 2008. Unfortunately, around February 2008, he also suffered a pec tear. Layne now has a new DVD coming out covering his recovery and return to the competitive bodybuilding stage. He is a remarkable guy, with a remarkable story.
JEFF: Layne, I really appreciate you taking time to talk to me today. I have prefaced this interview with a brief snapshot of what you have accomplished thus far in your life. You have evolved into a shining example of what can happen when you put your head down and work hard. For those of us that are unfamiliar with you, what got you into the bodybuilding? Specifically, was there one event that set you on this path or did you just come upon bodybuilding?
LAYNE: I got picked on a lot growing up, not just the typical crap that everyone endures. I was low on the social totem pole in middle school and high school and that meant most people 'above' me did their best to make my days at school a living hell, trying to embarrass me, humiliate me, and belittle me. As a result, I had very little self-esteem and self-confidence. I took up weight lifting to try to improve my self-image and also hopefully stop people from picking on me so much. Over the years, I kept lifting because I grew to love the process and less because I was focused on what other people thought of me. Competing was just the next step for me. I have always been the kind of person who wants to push myself as far as I can when I am passionate about something, so competing in bodybuilding for me was inevitable.
JEFF: A lot of guys on the come up have pictures of their bodybuilding role model all over the place, do you have a bodybuilding role model that helped motivate or inspire you?
LAYNE: A few of them. Arnold was definitely one. I still remember reading Arnold's Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding and being in awe of the physiques. When I got into natural bodybuilding, Dave Goodin and Dr. Joe Klemczewski were people I looked up to and was fortunate enough to meet my first year in competitive bodybuilding. They were so supportive and so nice; that really set the tone for me wanting to push forward in competitive natural bodybuilding.
JEFF: On February 28th, 2008 you suffered a pec tear. You suffered, healed up and never stopped working hard through the entire rehab. You document it here: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/layne_norton_comeback_1.htm. Can you describe the first thoughts going through your head when the tear happened? Did you feel like your bodybuilding career had ended or was there never a question in your head that you would be back?
LAYNE: My thoughts were "awww f***ing s***!" I couldn't believe that I tore my pec. I heard the snap when it happened and it was truly sickening. Still, at the time I just figured it would be a setback. It wasn't until the MRI came back and I met with the surgeon that I got really scared. The surgeon told me that the tear was mostly in the muscle belly and that the tear was going to be very hard to repair. He said that there was a good chance a surgery to repair it wouldn't work. That was like a gut punch to me. But I told them that I wanted to proceed anyway because I'd rather try than not. I just remember doing my final workout the day before the surgery and trying to stay positive. I kept telling myself, "It's going to work, IT'S GOING TO WORK." Fortunately, it did.
JEFF: I'm happy to hear that it did! Did you ever come to a point where you thought that you may give up bodybuilding?
LAYNE: No, I figured that if worst came to worst I'd just step onstage with a dent in my pec and deal with it. If anything, it strengthened my resolve. Especially after reading all the comments from idiots online who were celebrating that I tore my pec. That's right, there were threads made by people who were happy that I'd torn my pec and that my bodybuilding career was 'over.' I couldn't wait to prove them wrong and shut their mouths for them.
JEFF: Someone that celebrates another person's suffering should really take a good look at themselves because that is just sickening. Chances are that they can't stand to see someone else succeeding while they stew in their dead end lives. You continued to train legs throughout your ordeal, did you find that that kept you focused on recovery and returning to the stage?
LAYNE: Definitely, my mentality was that my legs were a weak point, so I was going to use this as an opportunity to make improvements and come back even better. 4 days after my surgery I was back in the gym doing single leg extensions. After my surgery I was working out legs 3x/week. I made really good gains during the 10 weeks after my surgery recovering from my surgery by killing my legs 3x/week.
JEFF: What role did your wife and family play in your recovery?
LAYNE: Like anything, I could not have done it without Isabel. She was right alongside me, telling me that it was going to work and that I could do it. There is nothing like that kind of support.
JEFF: You're a lucky man. From all appearances, you were impossibly positive throughout the entire ordeal. What kind of advice can you give to people who have suffered muscle tears and other serious injuries?
LAYNE: First off, don't ignore the injury. As stupid as it sounds, I know so many people who just think it will go away. Get to a specialist and make sure you shop around for a good one in your insurance network. Try to find someone who has experience dealing with athletes. Having a great surgeon made a huge difference in my recovery.
JEFF: I'm happy to see that you made it out of your ordeal a better person than when you went in. What is your stance on performance-enhancing drugs in bodybuilding?
LAYNE: My stance is they are a choice. I don't look down upon anyone who chooses to use them, that is their choice. My choice has been to not use them and hope that people respect that decision. I am always trying to push myself to be the best that I can be. I have chosen to do that in the drug tested organizations, I'm not saying that makes me any better than anyone else, it's just my choice. I think that in bodybuilding there are tested and non-tested organizations so everyone has a choice. I respect everyone's choice so long as they follow the guidelines for their organization. If you cheat by using in a natural show, you truly are a piece of shit because you have the choice to do a non-tested show.
JEFF: I believe most natural guys would agree with you on that topic, I definitely do. How do you deal with people that compare you to enhanced athletes? Does the comparison ever bother you and have you ever considered using?
LAYNE: I think it's pretty foolish. It is two different sports. Trying to say how an untested athlete would do if they were drug free or vice versa is foolish, it's impossible to know.
JEFF: How did turning pro changed your overall mind set? Did something click in your head that told you that things just got serious?
LAYNE: I've always been serious and a hard worker. But when I won my pro card, I realized that I could do every single thing right and still never win another show. That really made me realize how ridiculously hard I had to work if I wanted to have a shot.
JEFF: Has this shift in your bodybuilding mentality manifested itself in your personal life as well? Are you finding yourself increasingly competitive in business and academic pursuits?
LAYNE: I've always been competitive, but mostly with myself. I've always tried to test myself and push myself to be better than I was before. I knew that if I did that, eventually I was going to do well against other people. I think it's too dangerous to get fixated on other people and what they are doing because it can be discouraging or unfocus your energy in the wrong places.
JEFF: If you had to highlight three things that you have learned through your research or the research of others that apply directly to the fundamental aspects of bodybuilding nutrition; briefly, what would they be?
LAYNE: I guess that would be the following:
1) Anyone who says the words 'always', 'never', 'best', 'worst', or any other
superlatives or black and white terms when describing metabolism or physiology most likely has no idea what they are talking about.
2) Most bodybuilders eat way too frequently.
3) Most normal people under consume protein and most bodybuilders over consume protein.
JEFF: How do you change your supplementation protocol during the off season vs. contest prep?
LAYNE: The only thing that changes is that I'll add yohimbine on occasion during prep and also use HMB when dieting. Other than that, it doesn't change.
JEFF: What kind of training split are you using right now?
LAYNE: It changes a lot depending upon what my specific goals are at the time, but I'm always following some form of periodized training. Typically daily undulating periodization training (DUP) or non linear periodization training (NLP). NLP formed the basis of my popular Power Hypertrophy Adaptive Training (PHAT) that a lot of people now follow. I still use that training quite a bit. But I also work in a lot of DUP which incorporates strength, power, and hypertrophy training on the premise that unless you utilize all three (strength, power, hypertrophy) you will never maximize the benefits of any one of the outcomes. So I'll do low rep heavy training on one day like a powerlifter, pure hypertrophy training like a bodybuilder on another day, and I'll also through in speed work at 40-60% of my 1RM for repeated rapid submaximal efforts in order to optimize power output. I'll often incorporate bands and chains. I've also done specialized protocols like Smolov squat cycle and some of the Sheiko programs. At the moment the program split I'm following is:
Day 1: Max effort upper body (low rep, heavy weight)
Day 2: Max effort lower body (low rep, heavy weight)
Day 3: Rest or high intensity cardio
Day 4: Chest and back hypertrophy & speed work
Day 5: Shoulders and arms hypertrophy and speed work
Day 6: Lower body hypertrophy and speed work
Day 7: Rest or high intensity cardio
JEFF: I've seen you use chains in your training before, is there a particular training device/aid, like chains, that you like to use often? Why?
LAYNE: Yeah, I use bands and chains. There is some evidence that they increase power and strength development better than straight weight alone, so I use them to augment my training. Also, it makes my training interesting and more fun.
JEFF: Do you believe in empty stomach cardio?
LAYNE: I do not think it is more beneficial than cardio after eating. A nice review article on fasted cardio appearing in the Strength and Conditioning Journal by Brad Schoenfeld really laid out several reasons why it does not hold up when put up under flame of science for the following reasons:
-Research has shown no difference in total fat loss between subjects doing fasted cardio and those doing cardio after eating.
-Fat burning consists of 1) liberating fatty acids from adipose tissue through lipolysis and then transport of those fatty acids to other tissues like muscle, liver, heart where they are then 2) oxidized for energy. When you eat before cardio you reduce lipolysis but it ends up not making a difference because lipolysis is NOT the rate limiting step of fat loss when it comes to cardio, it is oxidation that is rate limiting so you end up oxidizing the same amount
-You may burn MORE fat over a 24 hour period when you eat before cardio because there is a GREATER thermogenic response to cardio as opposed to eating fasted
-Lemon et al. demonstrated nitrogen losses were DOUBLED when you train fasted. Fantastic for maintaining muscle in a caloric deficit... NOT
-Not eating before cardio will reduce training intensity and means you will burn less calories during cardio because you won't have as much energy.
JEFF: How soon can we expect to be seeing you on stage again?
LAYNE: Well, I probably won't be competing this year as I am focused on several business pursuits and my wife and I plan to start a family soon so that is going to take precedent. I'd say 2013 you can expect to see me back.
JEFF: Now that I am done talking about bodybuilding, sets and reps, I'd like to depart from the typical bodybuilding interview topics. Layne, give us a list of some of your favourite bands/singers?
LAYNE: Definitely. My workout favorites include Disturbed, Chimaira, Pillar, Hatebreed, Rob Zombie, Papa Roach, Shinedown, Sevendust, and Slipknot. I also enjoy some weird stuff like music from some of my favorite video games like the theme music from Mass Effect 2 and Deus Ex. I also like some Hans Zimmer epic movie tracks like 'Mind Heist' from Inception. When I'm just chilling I love listening to bands like Staind and Filter.
JEFF: Chicken, steak or fish. Based on taste alone (no science here), what would you eat if you could only eat one for the rest of your life. It can be prepared anyway you want and it can be any cut. Chicken wings included.
LAYNE: Probably steak.
JEFF: What is your favourite muscle car? Any year, any make.
LAYNE: I'm not really a care guy to be honest. I'm afraid I'm not going to have a cool answer for this one. This is a guy who's cars are a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix and a 2004 Oldsmobile Alero, HAH! But both are paid for and I value having no debt over driving some fancy car. But I guess if I had a bunch of money to drop on a car I'd get a nice Audi or BMW.
JEFF: Favourite movie? Why?
LAYNE: Tough one. I am a huge fan of Jaws because I wanted to be a marine scientist when I was younger. Also, I am a big fan of Jerry McGuire because I thought it was a great movie overall. I also really loved the Bourne Identity movie series. And, of course, the Terminator series, for obvious reasons .
JEFF: Who is your favourite sports figure of all time?
LAYNE: When I was younger, I was a huge Ryne Sandberg fan because I loved the cubs and loved the way he played the game. Now I really enjoy watching Tim Tebow. I just enjoy watching humble people who work really hard and who keep proving people wrong. I guess I can relate since I always had people telling me what I couldn't do when I was growing up and I really wanted to prove those people wrong. I'm sure Tebow feels the same way.
JEFF: I know you are good at everything, but are you good at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 too?
LAYNE: Never played it. I played MW2 and it was ok, but MW3 looked like more of the same. I'm terrible at FPS games online to be honest. My favorite game is the Mass
Effect series, I can't wait for Mass Effect 3. I've beaten ME2 on Insanity level 3 times now. Also, I really liked Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
JEFF: Where can people contact you for contest prep or nutritional/training advice?
LAYNE: Through my website at www.biolayne.com or emailing me [email protected].
JEFF: You have your new DVD coming out, Layne Norton Reloaded. |
let her talk to her son. Her attorney Randolph McLaughlin explained what happened next: “They broke the door down, tasered, beanbagged and shot him eight times. The last bullet went into his head and had stippling around the entry wound, which says that that shot, which probably took his life, was at close range.”
On May 26, Samuel Cruz, like Mohamed Bah, was acting erratically. Elsa called 911. She recounted to me what she told the operator: “There’s something wrong with my husband. He needs help. Can you please send us somebody to help me to assisting him to go to the hospital?” She said, “Your husband is harming anybody?” And I said, “No, ma’am, no. He’s a very nice person. He never harm anybody. Could you please send us somebody, or whatever?” And then, “OK.” The New Rochelle police arrived, dressed, as Elsa recalls, “for war.” They forced their way into the apartment and shot her husband dead.
Both the NYPD, in Bah’s case, and the New Rochelle police, in Cruz’s case, claim that the distressed individual lunged at officers with a knife. As Bah and Cruz’s other attorney, Mayo Bartlett, noted: “The thing that’s striking in these cases is the fact that the police are not called in response to a crime. There’s no rush. There’s no need to take such immediate action.”
This is where “The Memphis Model” comes in. Maj. Sam Cochran is a retired officer with the Memphis, Tenn., police. In 1987, police responded to a man who was harming himself, and threatening others, with a knife. The police killed the man. Community outcry prompted the mayor to call for a solution. They developed the Crisis Intervention Team. Sam Cochran explained to me, “It’s a community program [with] three main partnerships: law enforcement, local mental-health services providers and also advocacy.” CITs put a trained officer or mental-health professional on the scene, to de-escalate a situation. Since its inception in Memphis, it has been adopted in more than 2,500 communities in 40 states, as well as internationally.
The Cruz and Bah families are suing, demanding that the New Rochelle Police Department and the NYPD adopt CIT policies. As attorney Randolph McLaughlin summarized: “The police say the exact same thing in Bah and in Cruz: ‘He came at us with a knife, and we killed him.’ … What was their plan? Did they have a plan when they broke in the door? Why did they break in the door? Why didn’t they slow things down? Why did they aggravate the situation? In fact, the officers in all of these cases have not been trained in crisis intervention. They’ve been trained in the use of force—deadly force. And if that’s all the officer has at his disposal, he will use it.”
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2013 Amy Goodman
See all of Democracy Now!’s reporting on police brutality.news from the topic experiment
In the past couple of weeks I made a couple of extra changes to the topic experiment, 'hg topic --verbose' got a large update and now list various information about the topics, this should help people getting a grasp on the current state of they topic in a single command: Example output > $ hg topic -v > bisect (on branch: default, 11 changesets, 149 behind) > diff.order.issue (on branch: default, 4 changesets, 2 heads, 3 behind) > exception-too-wide (on branch: default, 1 changesets, 2027 behind) > vfs.cleanup (on branch: default, 12 changesets, 3 troubled, 2 heads, 253 behind) > * vfs.ward (on branch: default, 7 changesets, 2 troubled, 2 heads, 189 behind) The most notable change is probably the creation of the 'hg stack' command. The 'hg stack' command display comprehensive information about all changesets in your current topic. Here is some example output (without the Christmas color) > $ hg stack > ### topic: bisect > ### branch: default, 149 behind > t9: may update > t8: move checkstate > t7: checkstate #2 > t6: checkstate #1 > t5: move plain update code around > t4: printresult > t3: extract extendrange > t2: extract reset > t1: use vfs for reset > ^ hgweb: document why we don't allow untrusted settings to control zlib Example output for messy state: > ### topic: vfs.ward (2 heads) > ### branch: default, 189 behind > t7$ reposvfs: add a ward to check if locks are properly... (unstable) > t6@ mq: release lock after transaction in qrefresh (current) > t5: perf: release lock after transaction in perffncachewrite > t3^ repovfs: add a ward to check if locks are properly taken (base) > t4$ ignore bisect (unstable) > t3: repovfs: add a ward to check if locks are properly taken > t2: vfs: add the possibility to have a "ward" to check vfs usage > t1: pull: grab wlock during pull > ^ journal: take wlock for writting the'shared' file On the performance side, timeless introduced some improved regarding caching that should reduce some of the performance impact. There is still low hanging fruit there, but situation is already much better. Sean Farley initiated a flake8 crusade and enforced some more coding style through the code. The topic extension also gained some raw documentation about its various features, its not great but is better than nothing. Feel free to send patch to improve it. reminder, the extension can be found there: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/topic-experiment/ Cheers, -- Pierre-Yves DavidFlint's population falls below 100,000
Architectural structures such as the Flint Vehicle City arches remain from Flint's heyday when the population of the city was nearly 200,000 people even though in 2013 the population dipped below 100,000 for the first time since the 1920's. Flint's population is estimated to be about 99,763 on Wednesday, May 21, 2014 in downtown Flint. Katie McLean | MLive.com
(Katie McLean)
FLINT, MI -- Flint's population has dropped below 100,000 for the first time since the 1920s, according to a new Census estimate issued Thursday, May 22.
The Census Bureau report says Flint's estimated population dropped from 100,412 in 2012 to 99,763 in 2013, continuing a trend of population loss decades in the making.
The city's population peaked at nearly 200,000 as recently as the 1960s, fueled by tens of thousands of General Motors jobs.
Flint City Council President Scott Kincaid said the drop below 100,000 will have a big impact on the Flint community in a negative way.
"Since the last census, it doesn't surprise me that we're under 100,000. I've been kind of looking at the revenue of the city of Flint. When you look at the revenue that kind of reflects that. We're losing population, especially younger people. They can't afford to live in the city with water and sewer rates," Kincaid said. "I think our trend in the city will continue down probably for another four or five years."
With a population of less than 100,000, fewer funds will come into the community through state and federal sources, Kincaid said.
Dollars coming into the city from federal Community Development Block Grants will be less and the city will receive less through state revenue sharing, Kincaid said.
"Our block grant dollars will be treated like other small cities and townships. (Being under 100,000) will substantially reduce our federal funding," he said.
And it makes sense that the dropping population affects the state of the city, Kincaid said. Flint, which used to be at 180,000 residents, now has about 80,000 fewer people. But the streets, houses and infrastructures are still there for 180,000, Kincaid said.
"It will just have a negative impact as far as revenue for the city of Flint. I don't see an uptick for the next four or five years," Kincaid said.
Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, who has said the fall below 100,000 was expected, said Thursday that the 100,000 population benchmark doesn't reflect a community's worth.
"The quality of life in any community is not determined by its population size," Walling said. "You can see that all across Michigan.
"It's going to take a couple additional years of planning and development to stabilize Flint's population."
City officials have acknowledged that Flint's population is likely to continue to decline further before stabilizing by 2020.
A new master plan is based on the assumption that the city's population will be 76,000 to 150,000 in the long term, and Chief Planner Megan Hunter has projected the loss of 20,000 people from 2010 to 2020.
According to Kevin Doyle, an economic analyst at the bureau of labor market information and strategic initiatives, Flint still is the seventh-largest city in the state.
Flint's 0.6 percent population decrease falls in the middle when it came to population change across the state. The largest increase in the state was Grand Haven, which grew 2.5 percent, while Detroit was the city with the biggest loss, at 1.4 percent.
"The change wasn't relatively large when you are looking at the cities in the state as a whole," said Doyle.
Last year, a report from Genesee County planners estimated Flint's population will continue to sink for the foreseeable future, dropping to a projected 67,133 by 2040.
Mundy Township is expected to grow at the highest rate of any community in the county -- 30.8 percent by 2040, followed by the village of Goodrich -- up 28.8 percent, and Fenton Township -- up 22.3 percent.
Staff writers David Harris and Sarah Schuch contributed to this report.A helipad in Ireland
Helipad area scheme
A helipad is a landing area or platform for helicopters and powered lift aircraft.
While helicopters and powered lift aircraft are able to operate on a variety of relatively flat surfaces, a fabricated helipad provides a clearly marked hard surface away from obstacles where such aircraft can land safely.
Larger helipads, intended for use by helicopters and other vertical take-off and landing aircraft, may be called vertiports. An example is Vertiport Chicago,[1] which opened in 2015.[2]
Usage [ edit ]
There is a helipad in the back of this U.S. Navy Strategic Sealift Ship
Helipads may be located at a heliport or airport where fuel, air traffic control and service facilities for aircraft are available.
Most helipads are located remote from populated areas due to sounds, winds, space and cost constraints, however, some skyscrapers maintain a helipad on their roofs in order to accommodate air taxi services. Some basic helipads are built on highrise buildings for evacuation in case of a major fire outbreak. Major police departments may use a dedicated helipad at heliports as a base for police helicopters.
Large ships and oil platforms usually have a helipad on board for emergency use. In such a case, the term "helideck" or "helodeck" has been widely used in the meaning of a helipad on board.
Helipads are common features at hospitals where they serve to facilitate medical evacuation or air ambulance transfers of patients to trauma centers or to accept patients from remote areas without local hospitals or facilities capable of providing the level of emergency medicine required. In urban environments, these heliports are typically located on the roof of the hospital.
Rooftop helipads sometimes display a large two-digit number, representing the weight limit (in thousands of pounds) of the pad. In addition, a second number may be present, representing the maximum rotor diameter in feet.[3]
Location identifiers are often, but not always, issued for helipads. They may be issued by the appropriate aviation authority. Authorized agencies include the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States, Transport Canada in Canada, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the International Air Transport Association. Some helipads may have location identifiers from multiple sources, and these identifiers may be of different format and name.
Construction [ edit ]
Helipads are usually constructed out of concrete and are marked with a circle and/or a letter "H", so as to be visible from the air. However, they are not always constructed out of concrete; sometimes wildfire fighters will construct a temporary helipad out of timbers to receive supplies in remote areas. Rig mats may be used to build helipads. Landing pads may also be constructed in extreme conditions such as on ice.
The world's highest helipad,[4] built by India, is located on the Siachen Glacier at a height of 21,000 feet (6400 m) above sea level.[5]
The world's largest heliport is in Morgan City, Louisiana, and has a total of 46 helipads, used mostly to support offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Portable helipads [ edit ]
A portable helipad is a helipad structure with a rugged frame that can be used to land helicopters in any areas with slopes of up to 30 degrees, such as hillsides, riverbeds and boggy areas. Portable helipads can be transported by helicopter or powered-lift to place them where a VTOL needs to land, as long as there are no insurmountable obstructions nearby.
Portable Helipad At Bhopal M.P. India
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]At the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit today, the majority of the keynote was aimed squarely at how a new product segment of ‘Always Connected PCs’ with all-day battery life will bridge the gap between the utility of a smartphone and the productivity of a PC. The critical take home message from Qualcomm, and the partners that showed devices at the event, was that by using a smartphone chip on a smaller PCB and an integrated modem, laptop designs could be stuffed with a battery and as long as it has the right OS and software combination, it will offer a better user experience than what is available currently. Qualcomm has extensively worked with Microsoft on creating a version of Windows 10 that works on their Snapdragon 835 SoCs, and is now ready to declare deployment.
Joining Qualcomm on the stage for the announcement were the key partners (from left to right):
Jerry Shen, ASUS CEO: Announcing the ASUS NovaGo
Kevin Lensing, CVP and GM of Client at AMD: Announcing Ryzen Mobile partnership
Cristiano Amon, EVP Qualcomm Technologies
Terry Myerson, EVP of Microsoft Windows and Devices: Announcing Windows 10 on ARM
Gunther Ottendorfer, COO of Sprint: Reinforcing Connectivity Partnership
Kevin Front, VP and GP of Consumer Systems HP: Announcing HP Envy x2
Cristiano Amon, executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies and president of QCT, was joined on stage by senior executives from Microsoft, Asus, Sprint, HP and AMD announcing the new class of Always Connected PC, at Qualcomm’s second annual Technology Summit Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017 in Maui, HI. Photo Source: Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
Now creating a new product category that is successful is difficult. How many attempts at a tablet were there before the market warmed to them, for example. Or consider how many smart watches have come and gone since the inception. As bright as all the semblance of new technology is, the major incumbent in the notebook PC space also had something today.
Intel Responds
In a nutshell, Intel’s response was:
[Intel] has been powering always-connected PCs since their inception. Today, there are more than 30 business- and consumer-oriented Intel-based always-connected PCs available, offering the leading performance, a variety of connectivity options and price points, long battery life and thin and light form factor design.
The response is basically a ‘we’ve had always-connected PCs for years’. This is true: while normally focused on the business use case, laptops with LTE connectivity do exist from most of the major OEMs. This usually comes in the form of an add-in card and a business contract situation, although I personally have owned a number of laptops that do offer SIM card slots for this sort of functionality.
Intel is citing designs such as the HP ProBook 400 Series, Samsung’s Galaxy Book 12, the Lenovo ThinkPad L470, the Lenovo Miix 520, the Google Pixelbook, and the Mi Notebook Air, with more designs coming in 2018. Intel is also citing that it has modems in future devices capable of Gigabit LTE as well, along with its investments into 5G. Intel also cites that it has full compatibility with Windows and 64-bit software.
From Lenovo's Miix 520 website
So is what Qualcomm is doing new? Will it succeed? Truth be told, they are reinvigorating interest in this type of device, regardless of if it has already been around, and pushing it for other use cases. Intel has often pushed its devices for new use cases over the years, but this time it is a new silicon manufacturer playing the game in a slightly different way. The devices that come out, be it with a Qualcomm SoC or an Intel CPU with extra modem, are both going to have positives and drawbacks – Qualcomm is touting all-day battery life and instant screen-on without sleeping, while Intel goes for performance and compatibility.
Shots fired? The annual CES event in Las Vegas is happening in early January. I expect Qualcomm, Intel, and all the OEMs to be screaming about ‘Always Connected PCs’. It’s a fun time to be a consumer.
Related ReadingThank you for reading PlugInSites. I have enjoyed sharing my experiences, charging station news and insights into some of the more interesting places to charge an electric car around the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. I hope you have a happy holiday season and best wishes for the new year.
Please enjoy this 1912 advertisement that was published in the American Journal of Surgery.
An Electric for her very own – what more enjoyable surprise could your wife receive on Christmas morning? Every woman longs to own an Electric. Every woman knows the comfort, convenience and heightened social prestige it gives. Why not make this year the happiest Christmas?
Your wife would love to drive about in her own Electric – quiet, fashionable, simple and safe. She can pay her social calls; do her shopping; attend the theatre and receptions. You will enjoy the luxury and convenience of it, too, in paying your professional calls.
And Christmas is the season of seasons for an Electric. The cold, biting winds and snow flurries make you feel all the cosier within an Electric. There is such exhilarating pleasure in gliding noiselessly down the boulevard, through the park, threading in and out of congested traffic – quickly, easily, without bother or effort.
Driving an Electric is simplicity itself – no trouble whatever. Any woman – even a child – can operate an Electric efficiently. The first cost of an Electric is decidedly moderate when you consider its lasting, satisfactory service. Maintenance expense and cost of power is far lower than that for other types of cars.
Before you buy any car – consider the Electric.
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Like this: Like Loading...According to a Written Answer by the Home Office Minister Admiral Lord West of Spithead, the controversial "If you suspect it, report " terrorism propaganda campaign, involving posters and some local newspaper and local radio advertising, launched in March 2009, has cost at least £1.7 million, and the "anti-terrorist hotline" costs about £120,000 a year to run.
Spy Blog: Metropolitan Police terrorism fear Propaganda Poster lies about bombs, reconnaissance and CCTV cameras - updated 25th March 2009
This campaign includes this false and misleading poster, which claims a non existent link between public CCTV and protection against terrorist bombs: "A bomb won't go off here because weeks before a shopper reported someone studying the CCTV cameras"
In answer to a Question by Baroness Neville-Jones (Shadow Security Minister, Home Affairs; Conservative):
9 July 2009 : Column WA176 Lord West of Spithead (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Security and Counter-terrorism), Home Office; Labour) The confidential anti-terrorist hotline is administered by the Metropolitan Police Service. The hotline receives, on average, 243 calls per month. In March 2009, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) launched a national media campaign to raise counterterrorism awareness. The anti-terrorist hotline received more than 1,800 calls in March 2009 and more than 1,100 in April 2009. The anti-terrorist hotline is a 24-hour facility for members of the public to volunteer information to specially-trained police officers, in confidence, regarding any activity which they suspect to be terrorism-related. The police service considers the anti-terrorist hotline to be a valuable means for the public to volunteer information in confidence. It is assessed that more than 80 per cent of calls received by the hotline contain information relevant to terrorist activity. It is estimated that the anti-terrorist hotline costs approximately £120,000 to run each year. [...]
Incredibly, this Written Answer about the "Anti-Terrorism Hotline", does not bother to mention the actual telephone number! i.e. 0800 789 321
"on average, 243 calls per month" equates to about 2900 calls a year or about £40 per call.
The "more than 1,800 calls in March 2009 and more than 1,100 in April 2009" following the ACPO poster, local press and local radio advertising campaign, has, presumably, now tailed off to below the "on average, 243 calls per month" figure, which must include the effect of the advertising campaign stimulated peaks.
If you bother to hunt around on the Metropolitan Police Service website, there is a "If you suspect it, report it" web page which gives further details about the "Anti-Terrorist Hotline", but none of the Climate of Fear propaganda posters or adverts bother to give details of how to find this web page.
This creepy and disproportionate web page tries to throw suspicion of involvement in terrorism on anyone who uses a "Van, Passport, Mobile Phone, Camera, Chemicals, Masks and Goggles, Credit Card, Computer, Suitcase or Padlock" i.e. the vast majority of millions of innocent people!
There is now, after many years without one, a confidential online form, which does make use of the standard SSL / TLS session strong encryption, built in to your web browser software to protect the confidentiality of your e-commerce credit card etc.online transactions.
N.B. Reminder to the MPS: your Digital Certificate expires later this month on the 24th July 2009, do remember to get a new one ordered and installed before then.
However, "text messages from mobiles are not accepted", which is an utterly stupid policy. What are they worried about? SMS text messages are no more difficult to trace than mobile phone calls.
There is also no no Web Form or Mobile Phone Multi Media Message Service facility for uploading digital images or video clips taken by members of the public on their digital cameras or mobile phone cameras of "suspicious" people, locations or objects.
It is inconceivable that in the aftermath of the next major terrorist attack in the UK, there will not be an appeal to the public to send in such digital images and video clips of "anything suspicious".
Why waste crucial time in the minutes and hours immediately after such an attack, by hurriedly setting up an untested web upload form or an SMS / MMS capable mobile phone number, and then trying to publicise it.?
This facility should already be in place, after having been properly specified and stress tested to cope with the huge surge in demand which will follow a major incident.
Adding such a secure web form and SMS/ MMS digital image / video clip upload facility would cost only a few hundred pounds, and even allowing for several thousand pounds for extra secure, resilient infrastructure, testing and training, this will still only cost a fraction of the the £1.7 million pounds wasted on the counter productive, insulting and widely ridiculed advertising campaign.
See BoingBoing: Remixes of the paranoid London police "anti-terror"/suspect your neighbours posters.Xbox Music, or just Music as it is called, has received a new update in the Windows Phone Store. This is the third update the app has rolled out after the developer preview release of Windows Phone 8.1. Furthermore, Microsoft has also given a glimpse of the features that it will be rolling out in future updates.
In the recent updates, we have got the Cortana integration with playlists, audio scrubbing, better sync across local, cloud content, and more. Bumping up the version number to 2.5.3929.0, the following are the new additions to the app:
Change tracks by swiping album art on the Now Playing screen.
The interface has gone through some positional changes. The position and layout changes make more room for content.
As always, there are bug fixes.
You ask, we (try to) deliver! New Music for WP8.1 now includes swipe (up/down) for next/prev track. Not the same… but good substitute! — joebelfiore (@joebelfiore) May 24, 2014
That’s not a lot of changes – we know. Microsoft has also announced the improvements that we can expect in future updates:
Continued focus on stability and performance improvements.
Initial sync of local and cloud content happens in the background.
Support for more than 100 songs in the Now Playing queue.
Faster loading of longer lists.
Transparent Tile support.
Live Tile support.
Kid’s Corner support.
General UX improvements.
Snag the updated version of the app from the download link below. And let us know how you like it.
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Further reading: MusicChicago Uber Rider Says Driver Received Oral Sex During Ride In Viral Facebook Video
By Rachel Cromidas in News on Jul 25, 2017 5:47PM
A man who took an Uber ride in Chicago earlier this month says his driver received oral sex during his ride from a woman who was sitting in the front seat. The man, a Boston resident who was visiting Chicago, complained to Uber and later shared a video of the ride on Facebook that has since gone viral.
The passenger, Aner Manuel, told Esquire magazine that he had caught the ride on July 17 around 2:43 a.m. after an evening out in Wrigleyville. He was confused when he saw that there was a woman sitting in the front seat of the Uber (he had not called a shared Uber Pool-type ride) but that he got in the car anyway. That's when things got weirder: the woman in the front seat seemed to be "clearly on drugs," and Manuel began recording what was happening on his cell phone as the driver and his companion began kissing. Then, as the Facebook video shows, the woman appears to begin performing oral sex on the driver as he continues to drive the car. That's when Manuel asked the driver to pull over and let him out, about eight minutes into the ride.
Uber representatives reportedly offered Manuel a $10 ride credit and said they would investigate what happened. Chicagoist has reached out to both Manuel and Uber, and will update the post if we hear back. An Uber rep told Esquire and Chicagoist that the driver's access to the app has been removed, and "the behavior of this former driver is appalling and is not tolerated on the Uber app."
"As soon as this situation was reported to us, we immediately removed this driver's access."
Manuel described the drive as "the most dangerous and inappropriate Uber ride ever" in his Facebook post complaining to Uber's page.
As I approached my uber, I noticed there was a passenger in the front seat. I double checked to make sure I didn't select UberPool, and then approached the car. I assumed it may have been a family member of some sort. As we pulled off the female in the front (who was clearly on drugs) attempted to open the door and could not even sit straight as the vehicle was in motion. She then began to grope him and grab him. They began to kiss and she began loosening his belt. As we got further and further from my pickup location I had no idea where I was, so I had to stay in the car. She then proceeded to perform oral sex. This was my last straw. I asked the driver to drop me off. Since I've contacted uber and they refunded me for trip and gave me a "$10 credit". They've seen this video and are still "investigating". They have been extremely bad at answering any messages I've sent, and I demand something gets done. This is not okay!Fish & Fisheries
The Study: Reddy, S.M.W., A. Wentz, O. Aburto-Oropeza, M. Maxey, S. Nagavarapu, and H.M. Leslie. 2013. Evidence of market-driven size-selective fishing and the mediating effects of biological and institutional factors. Ecological Applications 23:726–741.
The Question: Market demand is generally viewed as a negative for the environment — what the consumer wants, the consumer gets, regardless of the impact on natural resources. Just look at how any number of resources have diminished over decades of increasing demand, whether renewable (forests, fish) or non-renewable (oil, minerals).
But can market demand — with a little help from local fishing practices or regulation — give people what they want and have natural resources actually get healthier in the process? That was what researchers found in La Paz, Mexico, where consumer demand for plate-sized Pacific red snapper is transforming a fishery.
Study Nuts and Bolts: In La Paz, increased tourism and local incomes has created a high demand for plate-sized, or medium, fish at restaurants, which has driven the market price for those fish up as much as 13% higher than for other sized fish (see chart below).
The researchers hypothesized that this increased demand for plate-sized fish could actually improve both fish stocks and fishermen’s incomes by shifting fishing pressure away from small and large fish. Small fish are needed to grow up and reproduce, while large fish produce a disproportionate number of offspring for their size. Medium-sized fish may be just right for fishing. To test this, they used daily records of catch from fishermen and information about market prices and then estimated the impact of four different harvest scenarios on both fish stocks and revenues.
What They Found: Market prices did shift fishing pressure to different sizes of fish: The researchers found a 6% increase in the supply of medium, or plate-sized, fish in the fishery and a 4% decrease in numbers of large fish. This market-driven harvest increased fishermen’s revenues by 14%, but decreased total fish biomass by -3% — making it unsustainable in the long term. Even though fewer medium-sized fish were being harvested, it was not enough to benefit the fish population.
However, by investigating another modeling scenario, the researchers found that encouraging a 5% increase in fishing for plate-sized fish over natural market demand, while proportionally decreasing the amount of small and large fish that could be caught, would result in an increase in fish biomass by 28% and fishermen’s revenues by 22%. Some fishing cooperatives in the area already encourage this sort of selectivity and government regulations could also be used to complement these efforts. The researchers recommend piloting this approach in the La Paz Pacific red snapper fishery.
What Does It All Mean? Catch of red snapper in La Paz has increased 100-fold since the 1950s, and plate-sized red snapper is the preferred fish at restaurants and hotels in La Paz’s tourist zone. A sustainable approach to fishing is needed to prevent fishery collapse as has happened in other areas, such as New England cod fisheries.
The novel approach developed by the researchers — integrating natural market forces with institutional regulations — could result in a sustainably managed red snapper fishery in La Paz, and be a model for other fisheries or resource areas.
“Most studies of how market forces impact the environment focus on reducing consumption — it’s rarely been shown that economic growth can be positive for both nature and people,” explains lead author Sheila Walsh Reddy, a sustainability economist with The Nature Conservancy. “This study shows that natural market demand can be a force for good, if necessary institutional conditions are present.”
Opinions expressed on Cool Green Science and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy.A southern Illinois man awakened to find a spider in his bed, and in a panic, ran through a glass door outside his home, police told FoxNews.com.
The man's identity was not released, but the 20-year-old was apparently sleeping in the buff when he spotted the spider Tuesday morning in his bed, Mike Judge, the police chief, said. He apparently ran through a glass storm door during his escape, cutting his arms, legs and a finger. He was treated at a hospital.
Authorities fielded numerous reports of a bloody streaker and later found the man back at his home, where he'd donned some shorts.
It isn't clear what kind of spider he encountered.
The sheriff doesn't suspect drugs or alcohol were involved.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Now that I have customised my emacs extensively, the default configuration is quite uncomfortable for me to use. I have a file called my-defaults.el which is the bare minimum I need to make using emacs a pleasant experience. If I have to sit down at your emacs session, I will probably need to cut and paste these into a temp buffer and call M-x eval-region.
I’ve mentioned some of these modifications before.
I always always use ido and uniquify. Ido makes it so nice for finding files and switching buffers, I now find the default behaviour surprising and sometimes even catch myself waiting for the options to appear.
( require'ido ) ( require'uniquify )
flex-matching is a given of course, and I don’t like being prompted unnecessarily for new buffers – I’m always creating them.
(ido-mode t) (setq ido-enable-flex-matching t) (setq ido-create-new-buffer 'always)
The way emacs deals with identically named files by default is poor, but it is great that it is so easy to fix.
(setq uniquify-buffer-name-style'reverse) (setq uniquify-separator "|" ) (setq uniquify-after-kill-buffer-p t) (setq uniquify-ignore-buffers-re "^\\*" )
Since emacs23, fonts now look great. This is from my windows config. Other folks have written about beautifying emacs for other OSes. I summarised those posts here.
(set-default-font "-outline-Consolas-normal-r-normal-normal-14-97-96-96-c-*-iso8859-1" )
It should be obvious what most of these do. The most important ones are setting yes-or-no-p to accept y or n rather than forcing me to type yes<RETURN> and removing the toolbar. Actually no, scratch that, these are all important. (Emacs23 has some of these set by default).
(global-font-lock-mode 1) (setq inhibit-splash-screen t) (setq font-lock-maximum-decoration 3) (setq use-file-dialog nil) (setq use-dialog-box nil) (fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p) (tool-bar-mode -1) (show-paren-mode 1) (transient-mark-mode t) (setq case-fold-search t) (blink-cursor-mode 0)
It took me ages to figure out how to prevent emacs converting a bunch of spaces into tabs. And of course, the scrollbar should always be on the right.
(custom-set-variables '(scroll-bar-mode 'right) '(indent-tabs-mode nil))
Where am I?
(line-number-mode 1) (column-number-mode 1)
Keep emacs backup files in one place. This is from my windows config again.
(push '( ".". "c:/home/jared/.emacs-backups" ) backup-directory-alist)
And make it so that when I copy a region, that gets sent to the OS clipboard.
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t) (setq interprogram-paste-function 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value)Today I have a fun collection from another new to me brand, Lone Star Lacquer. The Cozy Collection is made up of five polishes inspired by everything that keeps you cozy during the winter time. If you all could talk to my co-workers they'd tell you that I'm the coziest person at work. I'm not kidding, that is a direct quote. I've usually got my space heater running and a pashmina tucked around my legs, but in my defense my office is FREEZING!
Up first is Lone Star Lacquer Crackling Fire, a brick red filled with itty bitty sparkles that catch the light. I used three coats for this swatch and the polish applied easily.
*press samples
Lone Star Lacquer
Next up isThis neutral toned pink is filled with subtle holo flashes. It applied easily in three coats.is one of my favorites from this collection.is a light brown that flashes gold in certain lighting. I used two coats for this swatch.Next is, a pale frosty pink. This polish is also very sheer so I needed four coats for full coverage.Finally we haveNow I don't like coffee in it's normal form, but I'll make an exception for polish. ;-)is a deep brown with shimmer and subtle holographic glitters. I used two coats for this swatch and had no application issues.There you have it. Do you have a favorite or two? Mine are Crackling Fire and Cup 'O Joe.Enjoy & until next time, Amy LeeAUBURN HILLS -- Want to criticize Andre Drummond? That's fine with Detroit Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy. So is questioning whether Drummond is worth $120 million or whether being
Friday over Washington is acceptable. Taking it farther is where Van Gundy draws the line. Drummond is well-liked by his teammates, and vice versa, and any attempt to extrapolate the 22-year-old |
that allows us to talk most effectively and logically about the nature of things. But mathematics differs from other languages like English or Spanish. Indeed, it possesses a built-in logic, and is thus more akin to a computer language. When we write a grammatically correct English sentence like “All dogs have four legs and my table has four legs, so my table is a dog,” there is no guarantee the sentence will be logically correct or correspond with events in the world. Conversely, the grammatical incorrectness of a phrase like “to boldly go where no man have gone before” does not render its realization impossible. One can break a rule of English grammar without falling into meaninglessness, but break a rule of mathematics and disaster ensues. If one false mathematical statement is allowed, it can be used to prove the validity of any mathematical statement. When Bertrand Russell once made this claim during a lecture, he was challenged by a skeptical heckler to prove that the questioner was the pope if twice 2 were 5. Russell at once replied: “If twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5; subtract 3, then 1 equals 2. But you and the pope are 2; therefore, you and the pope are 1!”
So mathematics is a language with a built-in logic. But what is so striking about this language is that it seems to describe how the world works—not just sometimes, not just approximately, but invariably and with unfailing accuracy. All the fundamental sciences—physics, chemistry, and astronomy—are mathematical sciences. No phenomenon has ever been discovered in these subjects for which a mathematical description is not only possible but also beautifully appropriate. Yet one could still fail to be impressed. After the fact, perhaps, we can force any hand into some glove, and maybe we have chosen to pick the mathematical glove because it is the only one available. It is striking, however, that physicists so often find that some esoteric mathematical structure, invented by mathematicians in the dim and distant past only for the sake of its elegance and curiosity value, is precisely what is required to make sense of new observations of the world. In fact, confidence in mathematics has grown to such an extent that one now expects (and finds) interesting mathematical structures to be deployed in nature. Scientists look no further when they have found a mathematical explanation.
There are many striking examples of the unexpected and curious effectiveness of mathematics. In 1914, when Einstein was struggling to formulate a new description of gravity to supersede that of Newton, he wished to endow the universe with curved space and time, and to codify the laws of nature in a manner that would apply for any observers no matter what their state of motion. His old student friend, the mathematician Marcel Grossman, introduced him to a little-known branch of nineteenth-century mathematics, called tensor calculus, that was tailor-made for his purposes. Upon adopting this mathematical language, how Einstein would describe laws of nature became clear and (if one is that clever) obvious.
In modern times, particle physicists have discovered that symmetry dictates the way elementary particles behave. Particular collections of related particles can behave in any way they choose so long as a particular abstract pattern is preserved. The laws of nature are superficially the catalog of habitual things that occur in the world while yet preserving these patterns. With every such catalog of changes one can always find an unchanging pattern, though the pattern is often subtle and rather abstract.
In the last century, mathematicians set about investigating all the possible patterns that one could invent. These patterns are the subject matter of a branch of mathematics called group theory. The catalog of mathematical patterns that the early group theorists established has become the guiding force in the study of elementary particles. So successful were these simple patterns in describing the way the forces and particles of nature behave that physicists have taken to exploring all the possible patterns to discover those that give the most interesting insight into the origin of the universe. In this way the expectation that elegant mathematical ideas will be found in nature allows detailed predictions to be made about the behavior of elementary particles. Experiments with particle accelerators enable these aesthetic fancies to be tested against the facts.
The search for the “theory of everything” has sought the most elegant and all-encompassing pattern into which all the other patterns can be successfully fitted. The theory of superstrings (in which the most basic element of nature is not “point-like” but line-like”) has become a focal point of interest in such a search and has also created a new phenomenon. Physicists have encountered concepts that require the invention of new mathematical structures and ideas. For the first time, off-the-shelf mathematics is not enough to unravel all the patterns.
Elsewhere, the development of fractal geometry has given insight into the patterns within a whole spectrum of natural phenomena—from the clustering of galaxies to the structure of snowflakes. Many superficially chaotic situations possess a deep, underlying mathematical order. Again, fractals were once no more than an obscure branch of mathematics investigated for its own sake.
Scientists seem to believe so deeply in the mathematical structure of nature that it is an unquestioned article of faith that mathematics is both necessary and sufficient to describe everything from the inner space of elementary particles to the outer space of stars and galaxies—even the universe itself. What are we to make of the ubiquity of mathematics in the constitution of the universe? Is it evidence of a deep logic within the universe? If so, where does that logic come from? Is it just a creation of our own minds, or is God a mathematician?
Why does reality follow a mathematical lead? The answers to such puzzling questions depend crucially upon what we think mathematics actually is. There are four clear options—formalism, inventionism, realism, and constructivism.
FORMALISM
At the beginning of this century, mathematicians faced several bewildering problems. Logical paradoxes like that of the barber (“A barber shaves only those individuals who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?”) or the problem with sets of sets (“Consider the collection of all collections: Is it a member of itself?”) seemed to undermine the entire mathematical edifice. Who knows where the next paradox might surface? In the face of such difficulties David Hubert, the foremost mathematician of the day, proposed that we cease worrying about the meaning of mathematics altogether. Instead, he offered, define mathematics to be no more and no less than the tapestry of formulas that can be created from any set of initial axioms by manipulating the symbols involved according to specified rules. This procedure, it was believed, could not create paradoxes. The vast embroidery of interwoven logical connections that results from the manipulation of all the possible starting axioms according to all the possible noncontradictory rules fixes, according to Hilbert, what mathematics “is.”
Clearly, for Hilbert and his disciples the miraculous applicability of mathematics to nature is something about which they neither care nor seek to explain. Mathematics, for them, does not have any meaning. The axioms and rules for the manipulation of symbols are not connected with observed reality in any necessary way. Formulas exist on pieces of paper, but mathematical entities have no other claim to existence. The formalist would no more offer an explanation for the mathematical character of physics than would he seek to explain why physical phenomena do not obey the rules of poker or blackjack.
Hubert thought that this strategy would create a body of logically valid reasoning and result, free of all possible paradoxes, which would be defined to be mathematics. Given any mathematical statement, it would be possible in principle to determine whether it was a true or false conclusion from any particular set of starting assumptions by working through the logical network of connections. Hilbert and his disciples set to work, confident that they could encompass all truth within this straitjacket.
Unfortunately, and totally unexpectedly, the enterprise collapsed overnight. In 1931, Kurt Gödel, an unknown young mathematician at the University of Vienna, showed that Hilbert’s goal was unattainable. Whatever set of consistent axioms one chooses, whatever set of consistent rules one adopts for manipulating the mathematical symbols involved, there must always exist some statement, even though framed in the language of those symbols, whose truth or falsity cannot be decided using those axioms and rules. Mathematical truth is something larger than axioms and rules. Try solving the problem by adding a new rule or a new axiom and one merely creates new undecidable statements. Checkmate. Hilbert’s program cannot work. If you want to understand mathematics fully you have to go outside of mathematics. Incidentally, if a “religion” is a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel has taught us that not only is mathematics a religion, but it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one!
INVENTIONISM
Inventionism is the belief that mathematics is simply what mathematicians do. We invent mathematics: We do not discover it. Mathematical entities like sets or triangles would not exist if there were no mathematicians. The inventionist is not very impressed by the effectiveness of describing the world by mathematics. The reason we find mathematics so useful is perhaps merely an indication of how little is known of the physical world. It is only the properties well-suited to mathematical description that we have been able to uncover. So, although we “see” the universe to be mathematical, this does not mean that it really is mathematical any more than the sky is pink because it looks that way when we wear rose-colored spectacles.
If, however, mathematics were entirely a human invention and used by scientists simply because it is useful and available, then one might expect significant cultural differences within the subject. But whereas there are discernible styles in the presentation of mathematics and in the type of mathematics investigated in different cultures, this diversity is just a veneer. The independent discovery of the same mathematical theorems by different mathematicians from totally different economic, cultural, and political backgrounds at different times throughout history argues against such a simple view. Moreover, the phenomenon of the independent, multiple “invention” of the same mathematical truth sets mathematics apart from music or the arts. Pythagoras’ theorem was discovered many times by different thinkers. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony could be independently recreated. This contrast argues that the foundation of mathematics lies outside of the human mind and is not totally fashioned by our human way of thinking.
Kant’s categories of thought need not place a significant barrier between our understanding of the world and the bedrock of reality. For our minds and their categories of thinking are the products of the evolutionary process. Like our other bodily features, they are the products of a natural selection process in which reality (not perceived reality) dictates what survives. Accordingly, our eyes have evolved as effective light detectors in tune with the real properties of light. Our eyes carry information about the real nature of light, our ears carry information about the reality of sound. Likewise, our minds should be clear recorders of those aspects of reality that are crucial for the evolution of sentience. If our mental categories were distorting reality, we would not have survived. Certain basic mathematical notions like symmetry, geometry, and counting could thus have emerged as innate concepts preexisting in the human mind.
However, even if we believe this argument, we still have to consider those esoteric areas of science and mathematics that could have played no role in our evolution. Moreover, mathematics uses all manner of concepts that we do not directly experience in reality - irrational numbers, points, or spaces with more than three dimensions. Nevertheless, although we may have invented some mathematics for our own special purposes, the idea that we have invented it all—so that it does seem to describe observed reality—seems farfetched because we can so often use this same mathematics to predict the existence of new and unsuspected physical phenomena.
REALISM
The most straightforward view of mathematics is to maintain that the world is mathematical in some deep sense. Mathematical concepts exist, and they are discovered by mathematicians, not invented. Mathematics exists whether or not there are mathematicians. It is a universal language that could be used to communicate with alien beings who have developed independently from ourselves. For the realist, the number seven exists as an immaterial idea that we see realized in specific cases, like seven dwarfs, seven brides, or seven brothers. It is sometimes called mathematical Platonism, because it assumes that there exists some other world of perfect mathematical forms that are the blueprints from which our particular experience is derived. Realism of this sort seems tantamount to the view that God is a mathematician. And indeed, if the entire material universe is described by mathematics (as modern cosmology leads us to expect), then there must exist some immaterial logic that transcends and permeates the material universe.
Realism regards the surprising effectiveness of mathematics in describing nature as crucial evidence that supports a realist approach. Most scientists and mathematicians carry out their work as if realism were true, even though they might be loath to defend it too strongly outside the workplace. But realism of this sort has a most extraordinary consequence. One might imagine writing a computer program to simulate some complex physical process, like the formation of a solar system or the division of a cell. In principle, a program complicated enough to simulate the whole universe and all the processes that go on in it could exist. Within such a program, the formation of galaxies and stars would be simulated together with the biological evolution of animals and human beings.
If the simulation were perfect, then the simulated people would have simulated thoughts and make simulated observations about other things and people in the program. They would regard all these things to be as real as real could be. They could not tell from “inside” the computer program that they were on the inside. Being part of the software, they could not tell what sort of hardware they were being run on (or even if there existed any hardware). Similarly, we cannot tell whether or not we are part of some Superbeing’s computer simulation.
We might wonder if it is possible, in fact, to write a computer program to simulate everything that happens in nature. This question leads us to consider the last of our options regarding the interpretation of mathematics.
CONSTRUCTIVISM
The last of our “isms” was another response to the uncertainty about logical paradoxes that spawned formalism in the early years of this century. The constructivists’ starting point, according to Leopold Kronecker, one of its creators, is the assertion that “God made the integers; all else is the work of man. What he meant was that we should accept only the simplest possible mathematical notions as a starting point, and we should derive everything else from these intuitively obvious notions. By this conservative stance the constructivists hoped to avoid encountering or manipulating concepts—like “infinity”—about which we could have no concrete experience and which have counterintuitive properties (infinity minus infinity equals infinity, for instance). Mathematics consists, then, of the collection of statements that can be constructed in a finite number of deductive steps, taking whole numbers as the starting point. On this view, the “meaning” of a mathematical formula is simply the finite chain of computations that have been used to reach it.
This view may sound harmless enough, but it has dire consequences. It creates a new category for mathematical statements, which can now be true, false, or undecided. A statement whose truth cannot be decided in a finite number of constructive steps is given this last limbo status. The most important consequence of this policy is that a statement is no longer either true or false. This is reminiscent of Scottish courts of law, where a verdict of guilty, not guilty, or not proven may be returned (the latter permits a retrial of the defendant on the same charge), whereas English or American courts require a verdict of either guilty or not guilty.
Traditionally mathematicians have developed many ways of proving formulas to be true, methods that do not correspond to a finite number of constructive steps. One famous method beloved of the ancient Greeks is called reductio ad absurdum. If we want to show something to be false, we assume it to be true and from that assumption deduce something contradictory (like 2 equals 1). From this contradiction we conclude that our original statement could not have been true. This argument is based on the presumption that a statement that is not true is false, an invalid strategy, according to the constructivists’ rules.
Furthermore, constructivism outlaws the whole body of mathematical theorems that prove that something exists but which do not construct an example of that something. This philosophy would have interesting consequences if adopted in physics because many important physical theories, like Einstein’s general relativity or Niels Bohr’s quantum mechanics, make important use of nonconstructive reasoning in deducing properties of the universe. To most mathematicians, a constructivist approach seems rather depressing—tantamount to fighting with one arm tied behind your back.
Now what has constructivism to say about the mathematical character of nature? We can see that constructivism latches on to what remained of Hilbert’s formalistic program following Gödel’s devastating discovery. There must always be some statements whose truth can neither be proved nor disproved, but what about all those statements whose truth can be determined by any of the traditional methods of mathematics? How many of them could the constructivists prove? Can we build, at least in principle, a computer that reads input, displays the current state of the machine, and possesses a processor for determining a new state from its present one, and then use it to decide whether a given statement is true or false after a finite time? Is there a specification for a machine that can decide for us whether all the decidable statements of mathematics are either true or false? Contrary to the expectations of many mathematicians, the answer was no. Alan Turing at Cambridge, and Emil Post and Alonzo Church at Princeton, showed that there are statements whose truth would require an infinite time to decide. These statements are, in effect, infinitely deeper than the logic of step-by-step computation. The idealized computer we have described is called a Turing machine; it is the essence of every computer. No real computer possesses greater problem-solving ability.
The mathematical operations that a Turing machine cannot perform in finite time are called non- computable functions. They could have interesting consequences. If, for example, the action of the human mind involves noncomputable operations, then the quest for artificial intelligence cannot succeed in producing computer hardware able to mimic the complexity of human consciousness.
If we return to the puzzle of the applicability of mathematics to nature, we can cast the question into an interesting statement about computability. If an operation is computable, this means we can fabricate a device from matter whose behavior mimics that operation. Typical devices might be swinging pendulums or electrical impulses. Conversely, physical devices like these can be well described by computable mathematical operations. The fact that is well described by mathematics is equivalent to fact that the simplest mathematical operations—like addition and multiplication—and other, more complicated operations used so effectively in science are computable functions. If they were not, then they could not be equivalent to any natural process, and we would not be terribly impressed by the usefulness of mathematics.
It is fascinating to ask whether the laws of nature contain noncomputable elements. Already, the quest to find a quantum theory of the whole universe has created this possibility. If natural laws do contain noncomputable elements, then their consequences cannot be discovered by any systematic calculation that merely applies the same principles over and over again; each step requires that qualitatively different and novel principles be used. Whereas some sequences are simple in the sense that a brief formula can be given to generate the sequence, others are so complex that no abbreviation of the sequence can contain enough information to generate it. We might expect the universe to be such an entity: one ultimately irreducible to any abbreviated formula and defined most simply by nothing less than its own unfolding sequence of events.
The universe may or may not be intrinsically mathematical. If it is not, then we are extremely fortunate in that mathematical language works in areas it was never designed to cover. If the universe is mathematical in some deep sense, then the undecidabilities demonstrated by Gödel and Turing are part of the fabric of the universe rather than merely products of our minds. They show that even a mathematical universe is more than axioms, more than computation, more than logic—and more than mathematicians can know.
John D. Barrow is Reader in astronomy at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. His current book is The World within the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Related: A McKinney boy and his family confront a paralyzing illness
In July, the Texas Department of State Health Services issued a warning to health providers after seven incidents were reported by the end of June.
There have been a total of 11 confirmed and two suspected cases of AFM in Texas to date, and five have been in Collin, Dallas, Denton and Tarrant counties, according to DSHS. The first case was reported in March, followed by two in May, four in June, three in July and one in August.
"Any time we see illnesses without an apparent explanation, it is concerning and we want to figure out what's going on," Chris Van Deusen, press officer for DSHS said on Friday. At this point, however, the agency has not seen evidence pointing to a pattern or common cause in Texas, he said.
Infection with AFM leads to the sudden onset of limb weakness and loss of muscle tone and reflexes. Other symptoms include drooping eyelids, facial weakness and slurred speech. Despite testing, health officials do not know what’s causing the uptick.Franklin County commissioners agreed this week to settle with four more former jail inmates who were shocked with Tasers.
Franklin County commissioners agreed this week to settle with four more former jail inmates who were shocked with Tasers. All four were plaintiffs in a federal class-action lawsuit that accuses deputies of using excessive force.
The four settlements total $61,500 and are on top of another four that commissioners agreed to settle in the past year, for a grand total of $126,500. The county admits no wrongdoing in each settlement, and Prosecutor Ron O�Brien said the payouts are more �cost-effective� than a trial.
O�Brien said there likely will be one more lawsuit to settle before the case is resolved.
The Ohio Legal Rights Service, a state agency that claimed deputies were violating the constitutional rights of prisoners, filed the suit in 2010. Attorneys for Legal Rights said they reviewed hundreds of jail records, including videotapes of prisoners being forcibly stripped in front of deputies of the opposite sex and shocked with Tasers.
The U.S. Department of Justice later joined the lawsuit on behalf of the prisoners.
The county settled the lawsuit in February 2011 � pending damages � and the sheriff�s office agreed to a policy that deputies would use Tasers only if someone is resisting �by use of physical force,� displays �active aggression� or poses a threat to deputies or others in the jail.
Sheriff Zach Scott, who was not sheriff when the lawsuit was filed, referred all questions to O�B rien�s office.
The four settlements approved on Tuesday stem from the following incidents:
� Dawn Powell was stunned twice in two days in May 2011 for not responding to deputies� orders.
Powell was booked on charges of petty theft, obstructing official business and resisting arrest after she refused to pay for a meal she ate at the Eastland Buffet.
After she did not respond to orders while inside her cell, Lt. Ed Schillig shocked her with his Taser, according to court records.
The next day, doctors determined Powell was �psychotic� and �believes she is Jesus� and ordered her admitted to Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare psychiatric hospital.
Later that day, court records say, Sgt. Matthew Stice �Tased Ms. Powell immediately� inside her cell after she did not respond to orders.
Powell�s attorneys said she never resisted or became aggressive.
An internal investigation determined that both Stice and Schillig�s use of force was justified, but the county agreed yesterday to pay Powell $20,000.
� Frankie Mosley was stunned with a Taser for refusing to leave an interview room and squirming while in custody. Mosley was arrested in September 2009 on multiple felony charges and in April 2010 was being interview by a doctor for a court-ordered evaluation.
Mosley became agitated and refused to leave the interview room. Five deputies came in and subdued Mosley, with two deputies placing their knees in his back to keep him on the ground.
Mosley then uttered �I hate y�all, man� while squirming and trying to roll over.
That�s when Sgt. Andrew Eing fired his Taser.
Eing then pressed his Taser to Mosley�s back two more times while trying to get Mosley to his feet.
A sheriff�s internal investigation found Eing�s use of force was justified. The county agreed to pay Mosley $4,000.
� Nicole Bradley was stunned four times in March 2009 after she was booked into jail on a misdemeanor charge of driving while under suspension.
Videotape shows deputies shoving Bradley face-first against a wall, causing Bradley to cry out in pain, according to court records. At that moment, Deputy Laura Martin stunned Bradley in the back.
Once on the ground, Bradley can be heard saying �What did I do?� as Martin stuns her again.
Martin then fired her Taser when Bradley raised her head off the ground while four deputies were trying to get her undressed. Martin then stunned Bradley again while she was crying and naked.
The sheriff�s office determined Martin�s use of force was justified. The county agreed yesterday to pay Bradley $20,000.
� Dawn Fiore-Bruno had a known history of mental illness when she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in December 2009.
Fiore-Bruno was talking loudly and cursing but did not resist when deputies booked her into jail. Once inside a holding cell, deputies placed Fiore-Bruno face down on the floor and began stripping her naked.
As deputies rolled a topless Fiore-Bruno onto her back to remove her pants and underwear, she tried to roll back onto her stomach. That�s when Deputy Steven Dean stunned her.
A sheriff�s investigation determined Dean�s use of force was justified. The county agreed to pay $17,500 to settle the case.
lsullivan@dispatch.com
@DispatchSullyLasers with a wavelength of two microns could move the boundaries of surgery and molecule detection. Researchers at EPFL have managed to generate such lasers using a simple and inexpensive method
In recent years, two-micron lasers (0.002 millimetre) have been of growing interest among researchers. In the areas of surgery and molecule detection, for example, they offer significant advantages compared to traditional, shorter-wavelength lasers. However, two-micron lasers are still in their infancy and not yet as mature as their telecom counterparts (1.55-micron). Moreover sources currently used in labs are typically bulky and expensive. Optical fibre-based 2 micron lasers are an elegant solution to these issues. This is where researchers at Photonics Systems Laboratory (PHOSL) come in.
In an article published in Light: Science & Applications, the team of Camille Brès at EPFL described a way to design these lasers at a lower cost, by changing the way optical fibres are connected to each other. Thanks to the new configuration, they were able not only to produce very good 2 micron lasers, but also to do without an expensive and complex component that is normally required.
Bloodless surgery and long-range molecule détection
Two-micron spectral domain has potential applications in medicine, environmental sciences and industry. At these wavelengths, the laser light is easily absorbed by water molecules, which are the main constituents of human tissue. In the realm of high precision surgery, they can be used to target water molecules during an operation and make incisions in very small areas of tissue without penetrating deeply. What is more, the energy from the laser causes the blood to coagulate on the wound, which prevents bleeding.
Two-micron lasers are also very useful for detecting key meteorological data over long distances through the air. Not to mention that they are highly effective in the processing of various industrial materials.
Replacing a cop with a detour
To create a 2 micron fibre-laser, light is usually injected into an optical-fibre ring containing a gain region which amplifies 2 micron light. The light circulates in the ring, passing through the gain region many times thus gaining more and more power, until becoming a laser. For optimal operation, these systems include a costly component called isolator, which forces the light to circulate in a single direction.
At PHOSL, researchers built a thulium-doped fibre laser that works without an isolator. Their idea was to connect the fibres differently, to steer light instead of stopping it. "We plug a kind of deviation that redirects the light heading in the wrong direction, putting it back on track", said Camille Brès. This means no more need for the isolator, whose job is to stop light moving in the wrong direction, sort of like a traffic cop. "We replaced the traffic cop with a detour," said Svyatoslav Kharitonov, the article's lead author.
Higher quality laser
The new system not only proved to be less expensive than more traditional ones, it also showed it could generate a higher quality laser light. The explanation is as follows: the laser output gets purified because light interacts with itself in a very special way, thanks to the amplifying fibre's composition and dimensions, and the high power circulating in this atypical laser architecture. "While the association of amplifying fibres and high power usually weakens traditional lasers performance, it actually improves the quality of this laser, thanks to our specific architecture", said Svyatoslav Kharitonov.
###
Publication: Light: Science & Applications, Isolator-free unidirectional thulium doped fibre laserCardfight!!Vanguard
World Championship
Weiss Schwarz
World Championship
Future Card Buddyfight
World Championship
World Grand Prix 2016 (Tournaments for Japanese Edition Games) Click here for the information and schedule for overseas regional qualifiers.
The information stated in this page, including dates, locations, tournament formats and regulations does not apply to WGP2016 unless otherwise stated.
Please print and fill in the above deck registration forms for Bushiroad Championship 2016. Kindly print and fill out both pages.
You may also use these forms for other events.
Regarding BWC2016 Singapore Qualifier Dear Players, First and foremost, Bushiroad SEA would like to thank all our players for your fervent support at the Bushiroad World Championship (BWC) 2016, Singapore Qualifier. Bushiroad SEA would also like to take this opportunity to apologize for causing distress among many players due to the mismanagement of the event. Specifically, there are two points that we wish to address. Firstly, it has been brought to our attention that there was discomfort caused by our Bushiroad staff due to the improper tone used when speaking to players. This is unacceptable behavior, and appropriate action has been taken regarding this matter.
To prevent such incidents from happening again, we will work to better educate our staff in communicating with our players as well as the general public. Secondly, we understand that there were complications in tournament registration that arose due to a requirement put in place that necessitates the submission of players’ deck lists during this process. While this has been common practice overseas for most major tournament circuits, this is the first time that this has been enforced in Singapore. We seek all players’ understanding on this matter, as we would like to foster a fairer and more enjoyable tournament environment for all players as well as to standardize all registration protocol across the globe.
As such, we seek the cooperation of all our players in preparing your deck lists beforehand for any major Bushiroad tournaments in the future. We would like to assure our players that we are constantly working to improve our management process in order to enhance your overall tournament and event experience. If you wish to submit any feedback for us to improve, please direct your emails to sg_support@bushiroad.com. We look forward to your participation in future Bushiroad’s tournaments and events. Bushiroad South East Asia Pte Ltd
Bushiroad World Championship
Luck & Logic Side Event
The Bushiroad World Championship is back! Participate in the Regional Qualifiers to test your skills and make new friends! Top players of each Regional Qualifier will be invited to the respective Continental Championships, and the winners will advance to compete in the World Finals thereafter!
This year we will also be incorporating Bushiroad’s latest trading card game Luck & Logic into the tournament line up as side events! Stay tuned to our official websites and Facebook pages for the latest news and updates!
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Kindly note that not all events will be available for each location.
Attractive Participation Prizes!
Cardfight!! Vanguard
World Championship
PR/0163EN Soniccgal
BWC2016 Exclusive
Cardfight!! Vanguard Deck Case Weiss Schwarz
World Championship
SAO/SE26-PE02 PR Summer Festival, Asuna
BWC2016 Exclusive
Weiss Schwarz Deck Case Future Card Buddyfight
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PR/0166EN Bal Dragon,
“Change! Impact Monster!”
BWC2016 Exclusive
Future Card Buddyfight Deck Case
Simply by participating in Regional Qualifier tournaments, each player may receive 1 piece of Hot-Stamped World Championship Promotional Card and 1 Exclusive Deck Case from the game played!
We have also prepared more prizes lined up! Stay tuned to this page and our official channels for the reveals!
The quantities of promotional cards and deck cases allocated to each location are limited. While stocks last.
Winners’ Prizes
Players who advance to Top 8 in BWC2016 Regional Qualifier tournaments receive a “Top 8 Pin” of the game he/she plays.
Finalists’ Prize
Finalists who achieve Top 4 in Bushiroad World Championship 2016 Regional Qualifier tournaments receive certificates of their respective positions and the game played. Sponsorship for accommodation and travels will be provided for top players. Number of invitations and sponsorships given to winners will differ depending on the tournaments and locations. For more details, please refer to the Invitation and Sponsorship section.
Continental Championship Commemorative Cards
Each player competing in the BWC2016 Continental Championships will be awarded a special commemorative card of the game they are playing! These precious cards are hot-stamped “BWC2016 Continental”, mark of your outstanding performance in the circuit!
Cards from left to right: BWC2016/VG01EN Chrono Dran G | SI/WPR-E002 PR Cheering Shiyoko | BWC2016/BF01EN Jackknife, “EXAM STYLE”
Regional Qualifier Locations
We are pleased to announce the 25 Regional Qualifier locations for this year’s World Championship!
Top players from each Regional Qualifiers will advance to the Continental Championships in their respective regions, and the winners will advance to compete in the World Finals thereafter!
Regional Qualifiers
Some information of the European Grand Prix (EGP) and World Grand Prix (WGP) 2016 are included as well. Please be noted that they are different events from Bushiroad World Championship, even though some EGP or WGP tournaments are held at the same venue and/or on the same dates as Bushiroad World Championship. Please kindly refer to their official pages for more information.
Information is subject to change.
North America / Latin America
Europe
United Kingdom Telford Strategy GameCon at Telford International Centre St Quentin’s Gate, Telford, Shropshire, TE3 4JH Registration: 9:00am
Start: 10:00am Registration: 9:00am
Start: 10:00am Registration: 9:00am
Start: 10:00am Side Events Start: 1:00pm Players of World Championship tournaments may enter Strategy GameCon for free. France Paris EPITA 14 – 16 Rue Voltaire 94270 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Side Events Registration: 2:00pm Italy Rome Angeli e Draghi Via Luigi Vanvitelli, 5, 00153 Roma Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Only English edition cards may be used for the main tournament. Side Events Please check the side event start time with the local organizer. Belgium Brussels Outpost Brussels Rue de la Tribune 8, 1000 Bruxelles Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Side Events Please check the side event start time with the local organizer. Greece Athens Kaissa Café Leof. Mesogeion 12, Athina Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Side Events Please check the side event start time with the local organizer. Germany Cologne Foyer Im MediaPark 6 KOMED Im MediaPark 7, 50670 Köln Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Registration: 10:00am
Start: 11:00am Side Events Please check the side event start time with the local organizer.
Asia-Oceania
Australia Melbourne Madman Anime Festival at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre 1 Convention Centre Pl, South Wharf VIC 3006 Registration: 9:00 – 9:45am
Start: 10:00am Registration: 12:00 – 12:30pm
Start: 12:30pm Registration: 9:00 – 9:45am
Start: 10:00am Side Events Please check the side event start time with the local organizer. New Zealand Auckland Hobby Master (Takapuna Store) Shop 5, 529 Lake Road Registration: 11:00 – 11:45am
Start: 12:00am Registration: 11:00 – 11:45am
Start: 12:00am Indonesia Jakarta Pluit Village Mall Jl. Pluit Indah Raya, Penjaringan, Kota Jkt Utara, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta 1445. Registration: 9:00 – 10:00am
Start: 10:30am Registration: 9:00 – 10 |
timetable.
The canal earned a record $5.455 billion in revenue last year — its most lucrative since inauguration in 1869 — compared to $5.105 billion the previous year, the authority said.
Mameesh said the toll structure was unchanged as an incentive for ships at a time when lower oil prices could make the alternate, fuel-intense route around Africa attractive.
"The fuel price has dropped all over the world. Raising the transit toll would make it easier for ships to travel around the Cape of Good Hope," he told reporters in the canal city of Ismailia.
The only change for 2015 would be for shippers of liquefied natural gas, who will see a toll discount they had cut to 25 percent from 35 percent, he said.
The canal is one of the world's busiest water corridors and the strategic link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. It employs some 25,000 Egyptians.
The government has said the new canal section will shorten the waiting period from 11 to three hours, allowing two-way traffic of almost 100 ships at a time.
Mameesh said that workers had accomplished 86 percent of the new canal's dry digging and 21 percent of its dredging. Some 35 kilometers (22 miles) had been dug so far and 10 kilometers (six miles) dredged, he said, adding that the cost of the project stood at 8.2 billion.Seven USA Today affiliated Facebook pages lost an average of more than half of their Facebook followers after the social media company dismantled a network of fake accounts. The newspaper denied involvement with this fake account operation and claims to have notified Facebook of the inauthentic likes.
Facebook announced Friday that large publishers should expect to lose no more than three percent of their followers after a purging of fake accounts.
USA Today’s main page lost nearly six million followers, dropping 38 percent, as of Sunday afternoon. USA Today’s “cruise log” page dropped 77 percent since the announcement, and USA Today’s opinion page lost 73 percent of its followers. Other USA Today affiliated pages — sports, life, college and travel — all lost more than 40 percent of their likes.
News outlets such as Vox, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Hill all experienced a loss of less than one percent of their followers, as of Sunday afternoon.
Stephanie Tackach, a USA Today spokeswoman, told The Daily Caller, “Not only did no one knowingly use these fake accounts to grow or stimulate traffic, but as I mention we were the ones who noticed the suspicious activity and flagged it to our partners at Facebook.”
Tackach did not respond to an inquiry about when USA Today notified Facebook. The outlet’s former head of social media content and strategy, Jamie Mottram, bragged in January that the newspaper was the “fastest-growing FB page in news.” Fake page likes can boost content’s popularity on search engines and the Facebook timeline.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment about when USA Today let them know about the fake followers.
Leading up to Facebook’s announcement Friday, USA Today had experienced massive growth while other outlets were struggling on the social media site.
USA Today’s Exceptional Facebook Growth Over The Last 6 Months
Updated to reflect that Jamie Mottram is no longer with USA Today.ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
Lorries, cars and taxis are set to be banned from one of London’s most notorious junctions during the day.
The City of London Corporation today confirmed that it planned to press ahead with an 18-month trial of a 7am to 7pm ban at Bank from April in an attempt to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
The move follows the death in June last year of Oxford and Cambridge graduate Ying Tao, 26, who was hit by a turning HGV as she cycled to work.
A total of 34 cyclists and 31 pedestrians were injured in the 7am-7pm period between 2011 and last year and City experts predict the move could cut casualties by 50 to 60 per cent.
The Corporation proposed the ban a year ago and has been consulting Transport for London and taxi drivers.
The proposal, to be decided by the policy and resources committee on December 15, includes £130 fines for drivers who break the ban.
A City Corporation spokesman said a decision about whether to make the ban permanent would be made within 12 to 18 months of the launch of the temporary scheme.Egypt launches air strikes against Islamic State targets in Libya in wake of latest beheading video
Updated
Egyptian jets have bombed Islamic State (IS) targets in Libya, a day after the group there released a video showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians.
It was the first time Egypt announced military action against Islamist targets in its western neighbour, having previously denied it targeted militants there.
Egypt said the dawn strike hit militant camps, training sites and weapons storage areas in neighbouring Libya, where civil conflict has plunged the country into near anarchy and created havens for armed factions.
While Cairo is believed to have provided clandestine support to a Libyan general fighting a rogue government in Tripoli, the mass killings pushed president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi into open action, expanding his battle against Islamist militancy.
"Your armed forces on Monday carried out focused air strikes in Libya against Daesh camps, places of gathering and training, and weapons depots," the military said in a statement, using the Arabic word for IS.
Libya's air force said it also participated in Monday's attack.
"There are casualties among individuals, ammunition and the (Islamic State) communication centres," Libyan air force commander Saqer al-Joroushi told Egyptian state television, adding that between 40 to 50 militants were killed.
It was not possible to confirm those numbers.
Witnesses told news agency AFP there were at least seven air strikes in Derna in the east, a hotbed of militancy since Libyan dictator Moamar Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011. It was not immediately clear whether other areas were also hit.
State television showed footage of Egyptian fighter jets it said were taking off to conduct the strikes.
"Avenging Egyptian blood and retaliating against criminals and killers is a duty we must carry out," the military said.
The air strikes came hours after Mr Sisi threatened a "suitable response" to the killings of the Copts, who had travelled to Libya seeking work.
Mr Sisi, a former army chief, faced a chorus of demands to retaliate after the beheadings.
Pope Francis voices his sadness
The 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians were marched to a beach, forced to kneel and then beheaded on video, which was broadcast via a website that supports IS.
It makes no difference whether they be Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants. They are Christians! The martyrs belong to all Christians. Pope Francis
Before the killings, one of the militants stood with a knife in his hand and said: "Safety for you crusaders is something you can only wish for."
Afterwards, he says: "And we will conquer Rome, by the will of Allah."
Pope Francis departed from the script of an address to members of the Church of Scotland to express his deep sadness over the IS killings.
"Their only words were 'Jesus, help me!' They were killed simply for the fact that they were Christians," he said in his native Spanish, departing from the Italian he uses at most formal events.
The leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, who has said it is "lawful" to stop an unjust aggressor, also said the "martyrs belong to all Christians".
"The blood of our Christian brothers and sisters is a testimony which cries out to be heard," he said.
"It makes no difference whether they be Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants. They are Christians!"
Christians make up about a tenth of a predominantly Muslim population in Egypt.
Egypt's Coptic Christian pope was one of the public figures who backed Mr Sisi when he ousted the Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 after mass protests against him.
The beheadings could pile pressure on Mr Sisi to show he is in control of Egypt's security, even though he has already made progress against Islamist militant insurgents in the Sinai.
Egypt upgrades military hardware
Mr Sisi, who has called for a global effort to eradicate militancy, which he says is harming Islam, sees radical groups in Libya as a major threat to Egypt's security.
Fears that the crisis could spill across the border have prompted Egypt to upgrade its military hardware.
France has said Egypt will order 24 Rafale fighter jets, a naval frigate and other equipment in a deal to be signed in Cairo worth more than $5.7 billion.
French president Francois Hollande said he and Mr Sisi wanted the United Nations Security Council to discuss Libya and take new measures against IS, whose influence has spread rapidly from its original Syrian base.
Egypt, the Arab world's most populous nation, has not taken part directly in the US-led air strikes against IS strongholds in Iraq and Syria, focusing instead on the increasingly complex insurgency at home.
The United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Mr Sisi, said it "would put all its capabilities to support... Egypt's efforts to eradicate terrorism and the violence against its citizens", according to the UAE foreign minister.
Reuters/AFP
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, terrorism, egypt, libyan-arab-jamahiriya
First postedBelow is a list of the leading fair trade producer nations based on the number of fair trade certified producer organizations operating within that country during 2011. The total number of such producers (for all products with coffee, tea, and cocoa being the top three) was 1,030 per the Fair Trade USA 2011 Almanac.
Peru – 96
Columbia – 80
India – 69
Kenya – 64
Mexico – 50
Brazil – 44
South Africa – 35
Cote d’Ivoire, Mauritius, and Nicaragua – 32 each
Dominican Republic – 31
Bolivia – 30
Cuba and Ecuador – 27 each
Ghana – 25
Honduras – 24
Guatemala – 21
Chile – 20
Tanzania – 19
Palestine – 17
Sri Lanka – 16
Burkina Faso and Costa Rica – 15 each
Source: Fair Trade USA 2011 Almanac
AdvertisementsCopyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Kip Kenneth Richmond
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Kip Kenneth Richmond
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- A 20-year-old man has been charged with intoxication manslaughter after the passenger in his car was killed Monday night in a West Austin crash, according to an arrest affidavit. Kip Kenneth Richmond told police he was driving 50 mph in the 1900 block of Manana Street, where the posted speed limit is 25 mph, at the time of the crash, the document says.
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved
Authorities said Richmond's car left the roadway about 10 p.m. and stuck a tree and fence in along the residential road. His passenger, a man in his 20s, was ejected from the car. Medics performed CPR on Richmond's passenger for several minutes, but he died at the scene.
During a sobriety test, police said Richmond's breath smelled like alcohol, his speech was slurred and his eyes were watery and bloodshot, the warrant states.
If convicted, Richmond faces between 2-20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
This was Austin's 42nd deadly traffic crash and the 44th death of 2015. At this time in 2014, there were 21 deadly crashes and 27 traffic deaths.TORONTO – Ten days after volunteering to fight ISIS in Syria, he was on the front lines, a six-year veteran of the Canadian Forces wrote in a blog post Monday.
Brandon Glossop, a 26-year-old from Sidney, British Columbia joined the fight against ISIS in February, he said, and quickly found himself in the midst of the war.
“In that time we bounced back and forth between 6 different camps and bases, were issued a rifle, 5 magazines, a pineapple grenade, cigarettes, and a Kurdish war name (I was given the name “Zinar”),” Glossop wrote in a lengthy blog post published Monday.
Glossop, who said he volunteered with the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – a Kurdish force fighting ISIS – detailed liberating several villages along with YPG forces, many of whom are teenagers, and the female YPJ units, commanded by a woman in her mid-thirties “with a master’s degree in genetic biology that spoke four languages.”
“About 100 YPG and YPJ soldiers sat around the sides of the road smoking cigarettes and chewing sunflower seeds. It was a straight shot to the city that stood 2 km away and was blossoming in mushroom clouds, each one proceeded by the heavy thud of a coalition airstrike,” he wrote.
Glossop joined the Canadian Forces in 2007 and completed a tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2009 before finding work in Fort McMurray, Alberta. He joined the fight against ISIS in February after becoming incensed that it was targeting Canada, according to a report in The Province soon after he joined.
READ MORE: 2 Montreal teens charged over suspected terrorist activities
Glossop said YPG and YPJ forces liberated seven villages over the next week and encountered little resistance. In some villages, he wrote, they only found “bodies and ISIS propaganda still taped to the walls.”
Brandon goes on to say that he, and another man identified as British veteran Daniel Meally, requested to be pushed “forward to where the action was.” Two days later, he wrote, he came under heavy machine gun fire from over a kilometre away. He was with Meally and a handful of Kurdish fighters who offered the sniper rifle and machine gun to the two westerners.
“Rounds peppered the berm below us and sliced the air above us, but all the Kurds seemed concerned about was that my first firefight with them was as satisfying as possible. Flattered, I took the 7.62 Dragnov with a half decent scope, and Dan, being an ex machine gunner took the PKC,” he wrote.
Global News has been unable to verify Glossop’s account.
READ MORE: Twitter says it suspended 10,000 ISIS accounts. So what?
Meally posted on a Facebook fan page for Glossop saying they were the only two westerners in the group.
“And yes we are winning hard,” he wrote.
But his first blog post does provide a glimpse into the mentally exhausting side of war for Kurdish rebels. He described three men going into uncontrollable, epileptic-like fits, with six others being forced to hold a man down in one instance. His comrades said it was “the war sickness” – or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“Dan and I have both witnessed the symptoms of PTSD in fellow veterans, but never in such violent, isolated fits, but where our soldiers typically deploy for 6 or 7 months at a time, these men have been at war for years, and without the mental and physical healthcare provided by our modern militaries,” Glossop wrote.
“When you put a man under the kind of pressure only a war can apply and keep him under it and ignore the cracks and ruptures that form, eventually he will break.”True-believer syndrome is an informal or rhetorical term used by M. Lamar Keene in his 1976 book The Psychic Mafia. Keene used the term to refer to people who continued to believe in a paranormal event or phenomenon even after it had been proven to have been staged.[1][2] Keene considered it to be a cognitive disorder,[3][4] and regarded it as being a key factor in the success of many psychic mediums.[2]
The term "true believer" was used earlier by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book The True Believer to describe the psychological roots of fanatical groups.
Psychology [ edit ]
In an article published in Skeptical Inquirer, psychologist Matthew J. Sharps and his colleagues analyze and dissect the psychology of True Believers and their behavior after the predicted apocalypse fails to happen. Using the 2012 Mayan apocalypse prophecy as example, and citing several other similar cases, Sharps contributes four psychological factors that compel these people to continue their belief (or even stronger belief) despite the conflicted reality.[5]
Subclinical dissociative tendencies : While not suffering from mental illness, people with subclinical dissociative tendencies have a higher inclination to experience disconnection with immediate physical reality and propensity to see highly improbable things with enhanced credulity. Such subclinical dissociation is usually associated with paranormal thinking. [5]
: While not suffering from mental illness, people with subclinical dissociative tendencies have a higher inclination to experience disconnection with immediate physical reality and propensity to see highly improbable things with enhanced credulity. Such subclinical dissociation is usually associated with paranormal thinking. Cognitive dissonance : The more one invests in a belief, the more value one will place in this belief and, as a consequence, be more resistant to facts, evidence or reality that contradict this belief. Some of the True Believers in the Keech case in the example above had left their spouses, jobs and given up their possessions to prepare to board the alien spacecraft. When the world did not end, cognitive dissonance-reducing activity (belief disconfirmation response) provided an enhancement of their beliefs and outlet for their heavy investment and discomfort in front of reality. [6] [5]
: The more one invests in a belief, the more value one will place in this belief and, as a consequence, be more resistant to facts, evidence or reality that contradict this belief. Some of the True Believers in the Keech case in the example above had left their spouses, jobs and given up their possessions to prepare to board the alien spacecraft. When the world did not end, cognitive dissonance-reducing activity (belief disconfirmation response) provided an enhancement of their beliefs and outlet for their heavy investment and discomfort in front of reality. Gestalt processing : In the continuum in human information processing, people with Gestalt processing will consider a concept without detailed analysis (as opposed to feature-intensive thinking) and accept the idea as a whole relatively uncritically. Sharps suggests a relationship between dissociative tendencies and gestalt processing. People who incline to believe paranormal activities will be more likely to credulously entertain the ancient Mayan prophecies whose details most people know little about. [5]
: In the continuum in human information processing, people with Gestalt processing will consider a concept without detailed analysis (as opposed to feature-intensive thinking) and accept the idea as a whole relatively uncritically. Sharps suggests a relationship between dissociative tendencies and gestalt processing. People who incline to believe paranormal activities will be more likely to credulously entertain the ancient Mayan prophecies whose details most people know little about. Availability heuristic: Under the mental shortcut of availability heuristic, people place more importance and give more weight to a belief when examples related to the idea are more readily recalled, most often because they are recent information and latest news.[7] The information of Mayan prophecies has been abundantly available, especially in the media, before the expected apocalyptic date. People's judgments tend to bias toward this latest news, particularly those with dissociative tendency toward supernatural and favor gestalt processing.[5]
Examples [ edit ]
M. Lamar Keene and "Raoul" [ edit ]
In his book The Psychic Mafia, Keene told of his partner, a psychic medium named "Raoul" in the book. Some in their congregation still believed that Raoul was genuine even after he openly admitted that he was a fake. Keene wrote "I knew how easy it was to make people believe a lie, but I didn't expect the same people, confronted with the lie, would choose it over the truth.... No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie."[1][8]
José Alvarez and "Carlos" [ edit ]
According to The Skeptic's Dictionary, an example of this syndrome is evidenced by an event in 1988 when stage magician James Randi, at the request of an Australian news program, coached stage performer José Alvarez to pretend he was channelling a two-thousand-year-old spirit named "Carlos". Even after it was revealed to be a fictional character created by Randi and Alvarez, many people continued to believe that "Carlos" was real.[4] Randi commented: "no amount of evidence, no matter how good it is or how much there is of it, is ever going to convince the true believer to the contrary."[9]
Marian Keech and "Clarion" [ edit ]
In the book When Prophecy Fails, Festinger and his colleagues observed a fringe group led by "Marian Keech" (researchers' pseudonym) who believed that the world would be destroyed on December 21, 1954 and the true believers would be rescued by aliens on a spaceship to a fictional planet, Clarion. When nothing happened, the group believed that their devotion convinced God to spare the world and they became even more feverish in proselytizing their belief. This is one of the first cases that led Festinger to form the theory of cognitive dissonance.[6]
Harold Camping's 2011 end times prediction [ edit ]
American Christian radio host Harold Camping claimed that the Rapture and Judgment Day would take place on May 21, 2011,[10][11] and that the end of the world would take place five months later on October 21, 2011, based on adding the 153 fish of John 20 to May 21.[12][13] Camping, who was then president of the Family Radio Christian network, claimed the Bible as his source and said May 21 would be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment "beyond the shadow of a doubt".[14] Camping suggested that it would occur at 6 pm local time, with the Rapture sweeping the globe time zone by time zone,[15][16] while some of his supporters claimed that around 200 million people (approximately 3% of the world's population) would be 'raptured'.[17] Camping had previously claimed that the Rapture would occur in September 1994. Following the failure of the prediction, media attention shifted to the response from Camping and his followers. On May 23, Camping amended that May 21 had been a "spiritual" day of judgment, and that the physical Rapture would occur on October 21, 2011, simultaneously with the destruction of the universe by God.[18][19] However, on October 16, Camping admitted to an interviewer that he did not know when the end would come,[20] and made no public comment after October 21 passed without his predicted apocalypse.[21]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Keene, M. Lamar and Spraggett, Allen (1997) The Psychic Mafia, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1-57392-161-0Big shocker: Microsoft isn’t supporting Adobe’s Flash in its brand new Windows Phone 7 operating system.
Windows Phone 7 joins Apple’s iPhone and iPad in snubbing the widely-used plug-in.
The news was delivered to Information Week, which received a surprise email from Adobe saying:
“While the newest version of Windows Phone won’t support Flash at initial availability, both companies are working to include a browser plug-in for the full Flash player in future versions of Windows Phone. More details will be shared at Microsoft MIX next month.”
Information Week is skeptical. It says it’s not clear if Flash is coming to WinMo 7 at all.
Microsoft launched WinMo 7 on Monday to great acclaim. Blogs like Gizmodo and Wired’s Gadget Lab, which got to play with the new system at the Mobile World Congress, say it looks better and is easier to use than the iPhone. (Giz: Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple; Gadget Lab: Hands-On With Windows Phone 7 Series
Of course, Microsoft makes its own Silverlight platform, a rich-media platform which competes with Flash on the web.
Although Apple has remained officially mum on the issue of Flash, it’s widely understood that the company views the plug-in as buggy and power-hungry.
Not all smartphone makes are snubbing Flash, however. Adobe just announced Flash for Google’s Android platform, it’s first step into mobile.
Information Week: Windows Mobile 7 Won’t Get Flash
Via Gadget Lab.Vance Gilbert
Vance Gilbert burst onto the singer/songwriter scene in the early 90's when buzz started spreading in the folk clubs of Boston about an ex-multicultural arts teacher who was knocking 'em dead at open mics. Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, Vance started out hoping to be a jazz singer, and then discovered his affinity for the storytelling sensibilities of acoustic folk music. Once word got out about Gilbert's stage-owning singing and playing, Shawn Colvin invited him to be special guest on her Fat City Tour. Noted not only for being the ever consummate performer, Gilbert has recorded 12 albums, including 4 for Philo/Rounder Records and a duo album with friend Ellis Paul. Along with being opener of choice for artists as varied as Aretha Franklin, Arlo Guthrie, and Anita Baker, 2006 and 2007 found Gilbert opening 140+ shows for comedian George Carlin. Most recently he’s the opener of choice for Paul Reiser and The Subdudes.
Considered by many to be an integral part of the national folk scene, Gilbert's approach to the acoustic singer songwriter idiom is significant. Gilbert's compositions, while frequently employing sophisticated melodies and harmonies that attest to his jazz roots, remain sublime attestations to the storyteller's craft. He even has a tune on a Grammy Nominated children’s album. How rounded is that?[click to print] Skinny Confetti Cake Batter Milkshakes
Yields four 1 cup servings
Author: Heather Baird
2 cups nonfat frozen yogurt
1 cup nonfat Greek yogurt
1/4 cup yellow cake mix (dry)
1 cup skim milk
1/4 cup confetti sprinkles
1/2 cup nonfat dairy whipped topping (I like Reddi Wip)
4 maraschino cherries
Place the frozen yogurt, Greek yogurt, dry cake mix and skim milk in a blender pitcher. Blend on high speed until all of the ingredients are well combined. Pour the mixture into four 1 cup capacity glasses.
Stir 1 tablespoon confetti sprinkles into each glass. Top each glass with two tablespoons whipped topping and 1 maraschino cherry each. Serve immediately.
Yields four 1 cup servingsAuthor: Heather Baird2 cups nonfat frozen yogurt1 cup nonfat Greek yogurt1/4 cup yellow cake mix (dry)1 cup skim milk1/4 cup confetti sprinkles1/2 cup nonfat dairy whipped topping (I like Reddi Wip)4 maraschino cherriesPlace the frozen yogurt, Greek yogurt, dry cake mix and skim milk in a blender pitcher. Blend on high speed until all of the ingredients are well combined. Pour the mixture into four 1 cup capacity glasses.Stir 1 tablespoon confetti sprinkles into each glass. Top each glass with two tablespoons whipped topping and 1 maraschino cherry each. Serve immediately.
link Skinny Confetti Cake Batter Milkshakes By Heather Baird Monday, April 27, 2015 Monday, April 27, 2015 Skinny Cake Batter Milkshake Recipe ByPublished:
Hello and happy Monday to you! Let's get this week started in the right direction with a tall frothy milkshake -I rely on this lightened up recipe when I'm craving a slice of birthday cake but I just don't have the time (or a good excuse) to bake one. It's hard to believe it's a "skinny" recipe because it's delicious and totally satisfying!I don't decorate my milk shake glassestime I make this drink (I mostly just stir them right into the shake) but if you're entertaining or throwing a birthday party, amakes the cutest presentation. You just need some honey, maple syrup or corn syrup (anything sweet, thick and syrupy) and a small paintbrush. Check out the video below to see how I make them.The sprinkle decoration can be made a day ahead of time if you're on a schedule. Confetti quinns will have the most staying power. Jimmies from the ice cream aisle would work well, too. Multicolor nonpareils (a.k.a hundreds and thousands) will begin to dissolve and the colors will bleed almost immediately, so choose your sprinkles wisely.This treat tastes so much like birthday cake and has a delicious Greek yogurt tang. I couldn't help but add a tiny puff of aerosol whipped cream and a cherry on top - speaking of those cherries, they're! I couldn't believe my luck finding pink cherries at my local grocery store. They are also sold online in bulk or you can buy a single jar here Cheers!"Tina Swithin is correct that the Family Court system is generally not educated about personality disorders, which creates several serious problems. Personality disorders are not obvious on the surface, which is why many people marry those with these disorders and why many courts are easily misled by them -- for months or years. To really understand what is going on takes looking under the surface and knowing what patterns of behavior to look for. This takes time and special knowledge, which family courts don't have, so decisions often favor those with the desperate emotions or the calculating control of those with personality disorders.
The adversarial process of the court brings out the worst behavior for those with personality disorders. They become extremely defensive and often much more dangerous, as they resort to extreme efforts for power and control over the other party, the children, the professionals and the judge. This can include lying, spreading rumors, hiding money, hiding children, false allegations and even violence. Many cases that I have read of family court related shootings happen within 2-3 weeks of a court hearing.
Family courts need more training, more time and more money for services for parents stuck in high-conflict cases. None of these are likely to occur any time soon -- in fact, the opposite is occurring. Yet society reaps what it sows and this is the future for many of the next generation. This is a mental health problem and a public health problem, and needs to be recognized as such."TOKYO (Reuters) - The Japanese government, fretting over the future of Toshiba Corp’s flagship memory chips unit, is prepared to block a sale to bidders it deems a risk to national security, sources said, a stance that gives U.S. suitors a major advantage.
FILE PHOTO - A logo of Toshiba Corp is seen outside an electronics retail store in Tokyo, Japan, February 14, 2017. REUTERS/Toru Hanai/File Photo
The government would use Japan’s foreign exchange and foreign trade laws to control the auction if need be, one of the sources said. The sources are directly involved in the sale process, but declined to be identified because it is not public.
“The United States is the only feasible partner from Japan’s national security standpoint,” said another source, noting that cutting-edge chips are at the heart of robotics, artificial intelligence and connected devices.
Seeking to plug an upcoming $6.3 billion writedown for its U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse and create a buffer for future potential losses, Toshiba is rushing to sell most or even all of the unit - world’s second-biggest NAND chip producer - which it values at at least $13 billion.
With Westinghouse woes deepening to the point of it hiring bankruptcy lawyers to explore a possible Chapter 11 filing, the Japanese industrial conglomerate is also leaning towards U.S. suitors given the potential for friction with the United States.
“It’s obvious U.S. players are more suitable bidders,” a Toshiba executive said. “We’ll probably need to fight over Westinghouse (with the U.S.), so we could cooperate over chips in exchange.”
U.S. suitors include data storage firm Western Digital which operates a Japanese chip plant with Toshiba, rival Micron Technology Inc and financial investors like Bain Capital, sources have previously said.
Preferring those bidders would exclude others including South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc, Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, and TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chip manufacturer.
Only Foxconn has publicly said it plans to bid while SK Hynix has said it is considering an offer. A Toshiba spokeswoman declined to comment on the specifics of the sale process.
Japan is concerned the firesale could hand key capabilities to rival China, sources with knowledge of the matter have said.
Japan’s Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act dictates that an overseas company looking to buy a Japanese company with technology considered key to national security must obtain government permission in advance.
It has been rarely used directly but in 2011, the law deterred foreign suitors from bidding to buy a stake in medical equipment and camera maker Olympus Corp as optical technology is also used in military equipment, financial sources said.
Japanese Trade Minister Hiroshige Seko at a parliamentary committee on Wednesday declined to comment when asked if Toshiba’s memory chips would be considered sensitive technology.
The sale is being conducted as Toshiba faces a March 14 deadline to publish its earnings after postponing their release a month ago so that it could probe potential problems at Westinghouse. If it misses that date, it has eight working days to March 27 to file or face a possible delisting from the Tokyo bourse.
People familiar with the matter have told Reuters that Westinghouse, hit by huge cost overruns at two U.S. projects, had brought in law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP as an exploratory step, but had not yet taken a decision on a bankruptcy filing.
Japan’s finance minister said on Friday the company should decide in the coming weeks whether to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, freeing it up to report up to date earnings.Paul Roos says he'd be happy to trade to get Patrick Dangerfield to Melbourne
MELBOURNE coach Paul Roos is "absolutely interested" in brokering a trade for star Crow Patrick Dangerfield, but says the club is yet to officially offer him a contract.
Dangerfield is contracted to Adelaide for next season, but is set to become a restricted free agent at the end of 2015.
Speculation has increased that the Crows may consider a trade this offseason to ensure they get maximum value for the star midfielder, before potentially losing him for nothing if he walks from the club at the end of 2015.
The star midfielder has already indicated he wants to remain at the club, but that hasn't stopped other teams enquiring about his services.
“I haven't (spoken to Dangerfield) but I think it's been fuelled by (Mark) Ricciuto's comments. Of course it pricks everyone’s interest," Roos told the Herald Sun.
“We would absolutely be interested in him but he’s a contracted player. It gives you an insight into the future."
Trading impending free agents before their contracts expire is a trend that Roos sees becoming more commonplace in the next few years.
“You are going to see as early as this year or next year with someone like Dangerfield, clubs trading them a year before free agency," the Melbourne coach said.
“There is no question it is going to happen. When exactly will it happen? I don’t think anyone can be certain but you can sense clubs (with players about to become free agents) are a little bit on edge."
The Demons are still in the dark about the movements of James Frawley, although it is understood he is almost certain to leave the club.
The club is hoping to gain a first-round compensation pick, which means it would have two picks (and possibly three) to offer for trade.
Roos said the club needed to look at all its options in regard to luring high-profile players to the Demons.
"We are clearly talking to all clubs about pick two. Our fans can’t wait for another three or four years, we have to get cracking to become more competitive," Roos said.
Patrick Dangerfield uses his trademark pace to get away from Farren Ray. Picture: AFL MediaWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has agreed with Singapore on a first deployment of the U.S. P8 Poseidon spy plane in Singapore this month, in a fresh response to China over its pursuit of territorial claims in the South China Sea.
A U.S. Navy Poseidon P8 maritime surveillance aircraft taxis before taking off at Perth International Airport, in this March 28, 2014 file photo. REUTERS/Jason Reed
China, which is at odds with Washington over the South China Sea, said on Tuesday the move was aimed at militarizing the region.
In a joint statement after a meeting in Washington on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Singapore Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen welcomed the inaugural deployment of the aircraft in Singapore from Dec. 7 to 14.
A U.S. defense official said further deployments in Singapore could be expected. The move comes at a time of heightened tensions in the South China Sea.
China claims almost the entire energy-rich waters, through which more than $5 trillion of maritime trade passes each year. The Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan have overlapping claims.
“I think this kind of increase in military deployment by the United States and pushing regional militarization does not accord with the joint long-term interests of the countries in this region,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing.
China believes that Singapore, like other countries in the region, wants to see a peaceful and prosperous Southeast Asia, she added.
The United States already operates P8s from Japan and the Philippines, and has also conducted surveillance flights from Singapore’s neighbor, Malaysia.
The statement said the P8 deployment in Singapore would “promote greater interoperability with regional militaries through participation in bilateral and multilateral exercises, while providing timely support for regional HADR and maritime security efforts.”
HADR is an acronym for Humanitarian and Disaster Relief operations.
The United States and Singapore have long-standing defense ties and the announcement of the P8 deployment was part of an enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement signed by Carter and Ng, which also covers cooperation in fighting transnational terrorism and piracy.
Washington has criticized China’s building of artificial islands in the South China Sea’s disputed Spratly archipelago, and has conducted sea and air patrols near them recently.
Last month, U.S. President Barack Obama called on countries to stop building artificial islands in the sea and militarizing their claims. He said the United States would continue to assert its freedom-of-navigation rights.
China responded by saying it would continue to build |
including four members of one family, were killed when their twin-engine plane crashed during takeoff Sunday morning at a small airport about 40 miles east of Tampa.
The plane, a Cessna 340, was taking off from Bartow Municipal Airport just after 7 a.m. in a dense fog when it crashed and caught fire, said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.
There were no survivors and "no chance of survival," he said.
"It is a tragedy any day of the week," Judd said. "It is a worse tragedy on Christmas Eve."
More pictures of the crash at Bartow airport. @PolkCoSheriff is getting ready to brief us. @BN9 pic.twitter.com/57BWqoNsxv — Stephanie Claytor (@ClaytorReports) December 24, 2017
The pilot was identified as 70-year-old John Shannon, an attorney from Lakeland, Florida. Two daughters, a son-in-law and a family friend were also killed, Judd said.
Read MoreVideo essays exist in a no man’s land between film practice and theory. They use an artistic language for academic reflections. That arguably makes them the ideal format to bridge the divide between praxis and analysis.
French filmmaker Robert Bresson tried to bridge that gap in his own way. His thirteen terse feature films gained him renown for their almost ascetic style and uncompromising rigor. But Bresson also put pen to paper and theorized about his craft in very succinct aphorisms. (Their brevity is a nice fit for the boiled down narrative style of his films).
His Notes sur le cinématographe (1) is a gem. It offers a window into the mind of a maker who is acutely aware that every artistic choice is also an ideological one. His peculiar directing of actors (he called them his “models”, as opposed to the classic stage variety of “actors”), his emancipation of sound, his belief in minimalism to achieve maximum effect… It is all spelled out in concise yet expressive maxims.POPE Francis has allowed atheists to use their brains independently of God.
Francis became the first Pope since the founding of the Catholic Church to grant non-believers some limited control over their own thoughts.
In a letter to an Italian newspaper, the Pontiff said that atheists could now decide for themselves what was right and wrong using something called a ‘conscience’.
But he added: “Don’t go crazy with it, because we all know what you’re like.”
Tom Logan, an atheist from Stevenage, said: “Thanks Pope, that’s really nice of you.
“I have been struggling with whether or not to use my conscience in everyday life.
“I do tend to use it most days, but I don’t really trust it because it didn’t come from heaven.”
Logan added: “I promise I won’t go on a massive killing spree.”
Helen Archer, a non-believer since 1997, said: “It’s good to know that thinking independently is something to which I can ‘opt-in’.
“I plan to use it mostly at the weekends and for watching television.”
Theologian Professor Julian Cook, added: “The last Pope wouldn’t have let you think for yourselves in a million years.
“You’re very lucky, you know.”Kobach goes on and says "It's not a huge jump" to believe President Obama intends to suspend the laws of the country in order to make sure African Americans cannot be prosecuted.
Kris Kobach is Secretary of State of Kansas. He is also an attorney in Kansas, and considered one of the driving forces behind ALEC written legislation. His demeanor in consoling a caller who implies laws may be suspended for African Americans continues the race baiting policies that have epitomized his time in Kansas.
There is certainly a responsibility of those in power to deal with reality - and Kris Kobach would have none of it. By playing to the fears and base suspicions of his base, he continues to whip up those who believe in this claptrap.
Update
Kris Kobach has went on the record defending these comments:
http://www.kansas.com/...Four thieves vinegar (also called Marseilles vinegar, Marseilles remedy, prophylactic vinegar, vinegar of the four thieves, camphorated acetic acid, vinaigre des quatre voleurs and acetum quator furum [1] [2] ) is a concoction of vinegar (either from red wine, white wine, cider, or distilled white) infused with herbs, spices or garlic that was believed to protect users from the plague. The recipe for this vinegar has almost as many variations as its legend.
A 17th century bottle
This specific vinegar composition is said to have been used during the medieval period when the black death was happening to prevent the catching of this dreaded disease.[3] Other similar types of herbal vinegars have been used as medicine since the time of Hippocrates.[4]
Early recipes for this vinegar called for a number of herbs to be added into a vinegar solution and left to steep for several days. The following vinegar recipe hung in the Museum of Paris in 1937, and is said to have been an original copy of the recipe posted on the walls of Marseilles during an episode of the plague:
Take three pints of strong white wine vinegar, add a handful of each of wormwood, meadowsweet, wild marjoram and sage, fifty cloves, two ounces of campanula roots, two ounces of angelic, rosemary and horehound and three large measures of champhor. Place the mixture in a container for fifteen days, strain and express then bottle. Use by rubbing it on the hands, ears and temples from time to time when approaching a plague victim.[3]
Plausible reasons for not contracting the plague was that the herbal concoction contained natural flea repellents, since the flea is the carrier for the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis.[5] Wormwood has properties similar to cedar as an insect repellent, as do aromatics such as sage, cloves, camphor, rosemary, campanula, etc.[6] Meadowsweet, although known to contain salicyclic acid, is mainly used to mask odors like decomposing bodies.[7]
Another recipe called for dried rosemary, dried sage flowers, dried lavender flowers, fresh rue, camphor dissolved in spirit, sliced garlic, bruised cloves, and distilled wine vinegar.[8]
Modern day versions of four thieves vinegar include various herbs that typically include sage, lavender, thyme, and rosemary, along with garlic. Additional herbs sometimes include rue, mint, and wormwood. It has become traditional to use four herbs in the recipe—one for each thief, though earlier recipes often have a dozen herbs or more. It is still sold in Provence. In Italy a mixture called "seven thieves vinegar" is sold as a smelling salt, though its ingredients appear to be the same as in four thieves mixtures.[9]It was money, of course. A little over $1 million is not much when the rewards of privatizing community corrections are so great.
Earlier this month, AFSC of Arizona, Grassroots Leadership, and the Southern Center for Human Rights issued a report, TREATMENT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: How For-Profit Prison Corporations are Undermining Efforts to Treat and Rehabilitate Prisoners for Corporate Gain. The report looks into three areas that are being transformed by privatization.
Private interests are moving into the civil commitments and psychiatric care facilities. Since commitment to one of these facilities carries the potential of a lifetime sentence, the potential for profit is great.
Corporations are also moving into subcontracted prisoner mental health and medical care, the fastest-growing sector in the treatment industrial complex. It is a $3 billion a year business for the private companies that provide close to a third of all state correctional health care.
But the incursion of the profit industry into the field of community corrections must surely be what attracted the $1.25 million from B. Wayne Hughes, Jr.
Community corrections include corrections programs outside of jail or prison walls: probation and parole services including halfway houses; day reporting centers; drug and alcohol treatment programs; home confinement; electronic monitoring; and an array of supportive services such as educational classes and job training. Community corrections is a huge business, with three times as many people under “community corrections” programs as currently incarcerated in prison facilities.
Over the past 30 years of our War on Drugs, the private prison industry has profited handsomely as we locked up more and more people for longer and longer periods of time. State and federal prisons ran out of beds. And as ready as the Wall Street investment banks were to finance the bonds that would be used to build the prisons that would house even more American citizens, it still wasn't enough. So corporations like the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), offered to help out.
However, today the federal prison population is being reduced for the first time since 1980. The Department of Justice has announced that the reduction for the year ending in September 2014 was 4,800 prisoners, and a further reduction of 10,000 could be anticipated over the next two years. The reductions are due to a more reasonable approach to sentencing for non-violent offenders.
As states have followed suit, the private prison industry has expanded its operations, with the main players buying up smaller operations that provided "health care, mental health and substance abuse treatment; 'alternatives to incarceration' such as electronic monitoring; re-entry services; and community corrections."
As reported in Truthout, Human Rights Watch has issued a report, Profiting from Probation: America's 'Offender-Funded' Probation Industry:
Every year US courts sentence several hundred thousand misdemeanor offenders to probation and place them under the supervision of for-profit probation companies. These companies charge courts nothing for their services. Instead, they charge those they supervise a range of fees that sometimes become exorbitant – often with minimal judicial or government supervision of how they treat probationers or how much money they collect from them in fees....Many of those affected are guilty only of minor traffic offenses and would not be on probation at all if they had the money to pay their fines immediately.
What do people actually owe to these companies in fines and supervision fees? Harriet Cleveland, an Alabama mother of three, was ticketed for traffic offenses. She could not pay her fines in full and so was sentenced to two years of probation with a for-profit company, Judicial Correction Services (JCS), one of the industry behemoths. The only job she'd been able to find was as a part-time custodian, for which she was paid $7.25 per hour. JCS required her to pay $200 per month, $40 of that amount going to supervision fees, to settle fines amounting to several hundred dollars. She scraped to find the money, and even turned over a $2,000 tax rebate to JCS, only to discover, over time, that she now owed almost $5,000 in fines and fees. As she fell behind on payments, JCS employees dunned a number of her relatives, threatening to send her to jail if the debt wasn't paid. Eventually, she did go to jail. She was among the few people whose dilemma comes to the attention of attorneys fighting such injustice. The lawsuit filed on her behalf – alleging denial of Cleveland's right to counsel, due process, and equal protection – not only got her released from jail, but has exposed negligent court handling of fines she had paid and JCS financial practices that sometimes steered most or all of a payment into their own coffers without applying funds to reduction of her court costs.
Little more than debt collectors, these firms use abusive methods in their collection operations, up to and including threats of imprisonment. From Truthout And while these firms badger misdemeanor offenders for payment for their own probation, courts around the country are levying fees on top of fines for misdemeanors like traffic violations. In San Leandro, California, the fine for running a red light is $100. However, the state has added a state penalty assessment of $100, a county penalty assessment of $70, a DNA identification fund fee of $50, court construction for $50, a state surcharge of $20, emergency medical services gets $20, emergency medical air transportation is $4, court operations cost $40, the conviction assessment runs $35, night court another $1, for a total of $490 for the ticket. Plus $59 for traffic school for a grand total of $549.
The problem with all of these add-ons, as Radley Balko pointed out earlier this year in The criminalization of poverty, is the way they drive the working poor farther into the shadows:
With driving infractions, a failure to pay fines can also result in a suspension of your license. In areas of the country where a car is really the only way to get to your job, to the doctor, or to pick up your kids, many low-income people have no choice but to continue driving without a license, an offense that can also land them in jail.
Which comes with even more fines and fees. Yes, some states now charge prisoners for room and board as well as court costs, public defender fees, and of course, fees for probation or parole supervision.
The price of justice seems be inversely proportional to one's income. The less you have, the more it costs.Heavily armed, well funded, and organized as a professional, standing army, the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) swept southward into Iraq from Turkey and northeastern Syria, taking the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, and now threaten the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad itself. The United States was sure to prop up two unfounded narratives – the first being that US intelligence agencies, despite assets in Iraq and above it in the form of surveillance drones, failed to give warning of the invasion, and that ISIS is some sort of self-sustaining terror organization carving out a “state” by “robbing banks” and collecting “donations” on Twitter.
The Wall Street Journal in its report, “Iraqi Drama Catches U.S. Off Guard,” stated:
The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.
In another WSJ post, “U.S. Secretly Flying Drones Over Iraq,” it claimed:
A senior U.S. official said the intelligence collected under the small [secret US drone] program was shared with Iraqi forces, but added: “It’s not like it did any good.” The rapid territorial gains by the Islamist forces loyal to Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, an al Qaeda offshoot, caught the U.S. by surprise, the officials said.
Image: ISIS has convoys of brand new matching Toyota’s the same vehicles seen among admittedly NATO-armed terrorists operating everywhere from Libya to Syria, and now Iraq. It is a synthetic, state- sponsored regional mercenary expeditionary force.
Despite drone flights collecting intelligence, and a 3-year ongoing CIA program (here, here, and here) all along the Turkish-Syrian border to “monitor” and “arm” “moderate” militants fighting the Syrian government, the US claims it was caught “by surprise.” If drones and CIA operatives operating in ISIS territory weren’t enough to detect the impending invasion, perhaps the CIA should have just picked up a newspaper.
Indeed, the Lebanon Daily Start in March 2014 reported that ISIS openly withdrew its forces from Latakia and Idlib provinces in western Syria, and redeployed them in Syria’s east – along the Syrian-Iraqi border. The article titled, “Al-Qaeda splinter group in Syria leaves two provinces: activists,” stated explicitly that:
On Friday, ISIS – which alienated many rebels by seizing territory and killing rival commanders – finished withdrawing from the Idlib and Latakia provinces and moved its forces toward the eastern Raqqa province and the eastern outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo, activists said.
The question remains, if a Lebanese newspaper knew ISIS was on the move eastward, why didn’t the CIA? The obvious answer is the CIA did know, and is simply feigning ignorance at the expense of their reputation to bait its enemies into suspecting the agency of incompetency rather than complicity in the horrific terroristic swath ISIS is now carving through northern Iraq.
Described extensively in the full New Eastern Outlook Journal (NEO) report, “NATO’s Terror Hordes in Iraq a Pretext for Syria Invasion,” the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, have funded and armed terrorists operating in Syria for the past 3 years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – coincidentally the same amount that ISIS would require to gain primacy among militant groups fighting in Syria and to mobilize forces capable of crossing into Iraq and overwhelming Baghdad’s national defenses.
Image: The most prominent routes into Syria for foreign fighters is depicted, with the inset graph describing the most widely used routes by foreign fighters on their way to Iraq, as determined by West Point’s 2007 Combating Terrorism Center report “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” (page 20). These same networks were then used to invade and attempt to overthrow the Syrian government itself in 2011, with the addition of a more prominent role for Turkey, and today in 2014, to re-invade Iraq once again.
The NEO report includes links to the US Army’s West Point Countering Terrorism Center reports, “Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout: al-Qa’ida’s Road In and Out of Iraq,” and “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” which detail extensively the terror network used to flood Iraq with foreign terrorists, weapons, and cash to fuel an artificial “sectarian war” during the US occupation, and then turned over to flood Syria with terrorists in the West’s bid to overthrow the government in Damascus.
What’s ISIS Doing in Iraq?
The NEO report would also post Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article, “The Redirection,” documenting over the course of 9 pages US, Saudi, and Israeli intentions to create and deploy sectarian extremists region-wide to confront Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hersh would note that these “sectarian extremists” were either tied to Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda itself. The ISIS army moving toward Baghdad is the final manifestation of this conspiracy, a standing army operating with impunity, threatening to topple the Syrian government, purge pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, and even threatening Iran itself by building a bridge from Al Qaeda’s NATO safe havens in Turkey, across northern Iraq, and up to Iran’s borders directly. Labeled “terrorists” by the West, grants the West plausible deniability in its creation, deployment, and across the broad spectrum of atrocities it is now carrying out.
Image: ISIS’s alleged territory spans across both Iraqi and Syrian territory. If it is able to establish a NATO-backed buffer zone, it will be able to launch attacks with impunity into Syria, Iraq, and Iran – in a region-wide sectarian war the West has been engineering for years.
It is a defacto re-invasion of Iraq by Western interests – but this time without Western forces directly participating – rather a proxy force the West is desperately attempting to disavow any knowledge of or any connection to. However, no other explanation can account for the size and prowess of ISIS beyond state sponsorship. And since ISIS is the clear benefactor of state sponsorship, the question is, which states are sponsoring it? With Iraq, Syria, and Iran along with Lebanese-based Hezbollah locked in armed struggle with ISIS and other Al Qaeda franchises across the region, the only blocs left are NATO and the GCC (Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular).
With the West declaring ISIS fully villainous in an attempt to intervene more directly in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, creating a long desired “buffer zone” within which to harbor, arm, and fund an even larger terrorist expeditionary force, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and others are offered an opportunity to preempt Western involvement and to crush the ISIS – cornering and eliminating NATO-GCC’s expeditionary force while scoring geopolitical points of vanquishing Washington’s latest “villain.” Joint Iraq-Iranian operations in the north and south of ISIS’s locations, and just along Turkey’s borders could envelop and trap ISIS to then be whittled down and destroyed – just as Syria has been doing to NATO’s proxy terrorist forces within its own borders.
Whatever the regional outcome may be, the fact is the West has re-invaded Iraq, with a force as brutal, if not worse than the “shock and awe” doctrine of 2003. Iraq faces another difficult occupation if it cannot summon a response from within, and among its allies abroad, to counter and crush this threat with utmost expediency.We are geeky parents. We love science, and we try hard to instill a passion for learning in our kids. So how many times has it come around to the time to choose a science fair project, and we've been totally at a loss. We ask our kids what they're interested in:
"I dunno."
We ask them if there are any projects on the suggested list that strike their fancy:
"Not really."
We fight the urge to bang our heads on the table, and go back once again to the syllabus to try to figure something out. Well, I say nevermore!
My wife teaches 4th grade, and has to help guide 30+ kids and their parents in choosing appropriate and interesting science fair projects, and this year she learned about Science Buddies. The idea is simple: "Free science fair project ideas, answers, and tools for serious students." The site indexes over 800 ideas, most with complete step-by-step instructions and educational frameworks for assembling a complete project. Projects are categorized by subject and grade/difficulty level, and include information on cost, completion time, materials required, and safety issues. Many include videos to help in building the project, and there's even a project idea wizard to guide kids to finding just the right project.
And it's all free (the site is run by a non-profit foundation). So, next time the science fair rolls around and you're out of ideas, check out Science Buddies.Many Florida craft beer consumers have looked forward to this day for years – the 64 oz. growler is now legal for a brewery to fill in this state.
This happened because of the efforts of the Florida Brewers Guild’s board of directors, who engaged in some give-and-take during this last state legislative session with the lobbying groups for the beer distributors. One of the end results is that the previously illegal half-gallon size is now OK to fill.
Though this legislation was supposed to clarify uncertainties in the law, there are still some unclear aspects on what is and isn’t allowed under the new law.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve sought illumination by having discussions online and/or in person with brewers, beverage attorneys, retailers, trade group reps, and knowledgeable consumers. What follows is a breakdown of the general consensus of these folks, targeted to the consumer. This is by no means intended to be legal advice and should not be interpreted as such.
First, here are the two lines of the final bill that are directly relevant to growler purchases by consumers.
“Notwithstanding any other provision of the Beverage Law, a malt beverage may be packaged in a growler, which is an individual container that holds 32, 64, or 128 ounces of such malt beverage if it is filled at the point of sale.”
…
“A growler must include an imprint or label that provides information specifying the name of the manufacturer, the brand, and the anticipated percentage of alcohol by volume of the malt beverage. The container must have an unbroken seal or be incapable of being immediately consumed.”
WHAT IS CLEAR
“A malt beverage may be packaged in … an individual container that holds 32, 64, or 128.”
Growlers can be one of those three sizes only. Previously, the law allowed growlers, cans and bottles in containers up to 32 oz. or 128 oz. or above (which covered kegs). This means odd-size growlers – 16, 22, 24 oz. or metric sizes – will no longer be able to be filled.
WHAT IS UNCLEAR
“A growler must include an imprint or label that provides information …”
The consensus among those I spoke with is that the “or” in this part indicates that a brewery or licensed retailer will be able to fill any legally sized growler even if it has the logo of another business on it, or no logo at all, as long as a sticker with “the name of the manufacturer, the brand, and the anticipated percentage of alcohol by volume” is affixed. A hangtag with the info might be sufficient as well. But because the law does not specify the form of the label, it’s open to interpretation.
“The container must have an unbroken seal or be incapable of being immediately consumed.”
This is the muddiest part of the new regulations because the law does not define “unbroken seal.” Methods I’ve heard include wrapping electrical tape around the lid, heat-shrink wrap or, if a swing top-type container, a zip-tie through the hardware.
Then there’s the “or.” A growler with a cap on it or a secured swing top is technically “incapable of being immediately consumed” – you have to open it first! So is a secondary seal even necessary?
What this boils down to is each brewery and retailer will need to settle on its own interpretation of the nuances of the law, and most already have. A few probably will play it safe and abide by the strictest interpretation by not filling other breweries’ growlers and ensuring there is a tight, not easily broken seal on each one sold. Others will use some combination of the methods outlined above and hope that suffices.
The best case will be that a standard method or methods will develop organically, and no one will run afoul of a state regulator and have to prove they were abiding by the law.
If you’ve been following this at all, you know there a lot more new and updated regulations involving the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages, but they really don’t affect the consumer as much as those discussed. You can read the entire final bill here.
Again, remember that this is a summary of various conversations I’ve had with people in different levels of the industry and should in no way should be taken as legal advice. Please talk to an actual lawyer who specializes in this stuff if you have any questions, or post them on the Florida Brewers Guild Facebook page.
Regardless, a slew of special events are planned today at brewery taprooms across the state. The Florida Brewers Guild has listed a lot of them at its member breweries here on its Facebook page. In addition, there will be a Statewide Growler Toast at 6:40 p.m. to celebrate.
Cheers!
Florida Brewery Map and ListI love history – and especially the medieval period, so lists like this are a real pleasure to put together. This is a selection of facts that I hope most people will be unfamiliar with. If you think there are any interesting facts that have been left out, let us know in the comments.
1 Facts 1 – 5
1. The famous Battle of Hastings did not take place in Hastings! It was actually waged at Senlac Hill – which is about 6 miles (10km) north-west of Hastings. “The battle at Senlac Hill” certainly doesn’t have the same ring to it as “The Battle of Hastings”!
2. One of the earliest versions of the London Bridge was destroyed in 1014 when the Saxons rowed up the Thames, tied ropes to it, and pulled it down! This helped regain London for the Anglo-Saxon king against the Danes. It is possible that this event may have been the inspiration for the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is falling down”.
3. Berengaria of Navarre was the Queen of England by her marriage to King Richard The Lionheart. Little is known of her life – but what is known is that she is the only Queen of England never to step foot in England! The entire time that she was married to Richard, she lived in Europe. In fact, Richard himself only spent about 6 months in England as he was so busy traveling on crusader business.
4. In 1086, 10% of the population recorded in the Domesday Book (a large census) were slaves. In some areas, there were as many as 20%.
5. England used to be the native home of Brown Bears, but they became extinct around the 11th century. In latter parts of the Middle Ages, the bears were imported into England for sport.
2 Facts 6 – 10
6. There is much evidence to suggest that King Richard I (the Lionheart) was a homosexual. There is a possibility that he met his wife Berenegaria whilst in a sexual relationship with her brother, the future King Sancho VII of Navarre. It is also reported that he and King Philip II of France were involved. A historian of the time, Roger of Hoveden said they “ate from the same dish and at night slept in one bed” and had a “passionate love between them”.
7. It was not uncommon in England during the medieval period, for animals to be put on trial for crimes. Animals could be sentenced to death if found guilty of their crimes. Take that PETA!
8. The Middle English term “pygg” referred to a type of clay. In the middle ages, people would often keep coins in jars or pots made of pygg – these were called “pygg jars”. By the 18th century, with the evolution of language, these came to be known as a “pig bank” or “piggy bank”.
9. Contrary to popular belief, medieval English people bathed quite regularly in public baths designed for that purpose. This was due to the belief that “cleanliness is next to Godliness”. Public baths were eventually opposed by the Protestants in the 16th century because of prostitution being common there.
10. Most common folk had to produce their own food. For this reason rye and barley bread was common amongst the poor who could not afford the large quantities of manure needed to grow wheat for white bread.
3 Facts 11 – 15
11. Trial by ordeal was common in England in the middle ages. In this trial, the accused would be subjected to a very painful task (such as being burnt by a hot iron) – if they survived the trial, or their wounds healed quickly, they would be found not guilty as it was believed that God had performed a miracle to help the accused. The Catholic Church forbade participation in these trials and demanded the use of compurgation instead. Compurgation was the taking of an oath of innocence by the accused which 12 peers must believe.
12. One bizarre recipe for a medicine to protect against the plague involved drinking ale that has had crushed roasted egg shells, leaves and petals of marigold flowers, and treacle added to it. Needless to say this was not particularly effective.
13. The Barber’s pole symbolizes blood and bandages, as most barbers also performed the roles of surgeons and dentists in their towns. Bandages stained with blood would be washed and hung from a pole outside the barber’s shop – these would then twist in the wind to form the spiral pattern we are all familiar with today. Macabre but true.
14. Prior to the introduction of surnames in England in 1066, everyone born had just one name. When surnames were introduced they would often include a nickname – such as Robert Red (symbolic of his hair color). If Robert went bald over time, his name could change to “Robert Ball” (ball meaning bald in Middle English). In time, the system evolved to a point where people would take the same name as their father – giving us the modern surname system.
15. Contrary to popular belief, gargoyles were not added to Churches and buildings to ward off evil spirits – they were drain pipes! True gargoyles project out of a wall (decorative monsters are not gargoyles) and rain water flows out their mouths away from the building, rather than down the side of the building causing damage. Their true purpose can be seen quite clearly in the photograph above of St Mary’s Church in Adderbury. Gargoyles can be found all over Great Britain and are visible on virtually every Church built there during the middle ages.
Follow us on Facebook or subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter so you don't miss out on our latest lists.China’s property bubble
Takatoshi Ito
One objection to the calls for China to let its currency appreciate argues that the yen's appreciation during the 1980s was a cause of Japan’s “lost decade”. This column instead blames policymakers for not dealing with Japan’s property bubble early enough. China should learn from these mistakes with its own property bubble and let the renminbi appreciate.
Many of our Chinese friends who live in Shanghai and Beijing are telling us that the property inflation rate exceeds 50% – and 100% in some areas. Available housing for a young couple is far from downtown, closer to one-hour commuting distance, and still more than ten times the average salary. There are also reports that the state government is borrowing with “protected” forest land as collateral (Dyer 2010). However, these stories do not match the Chinese official data (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2010a). The Chinese official statistics say that the average increase (year-on-year) in property prices was 10.7% in February. The increase is accelerating from a year-on-year rise of 9.5% in January.
The official data may be significantly underestimating the real price increases, due partly to a statistical bias to be explained below. Some break down of statistics is available. The rate of price increases of newly-built residential buildings (at 90 square meters and below) in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are 19.3%, 11.6% and, 19.6%, respectively (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2010b). In the same category, the highest property inflation was in Sanya, Hainan Island, at 57.9%. However, the location (within a city) and quality (beyond “new” vs. “used”; and “average” and “small”) of the buildings are most likely not controlled for in the official statistics. Granted, the 70-city breakdown is available, but not within the city; “new” and “used” is differentiated but no information on how old the used units are; and statistics on “smaller” units are available, but still each break down category is still coarse. Beyond “average prices,” no detailed statistical description is available.
Suppose that prices are rising uniformly at the same rate in downtown and in the suburb. Since more expensive properties are less demanded, more units in the suburb (at lower price levels) will be supplied to the market. Thus, the “average” price increase will be lower than the uniform, true rate of the price increases. More buildings are sold in the second-tier suburbs than the first-tier, and even less in the downtown area, the “average” price may be lower than the location-controlled index. The official statistics most likely underestimates the size of housing bubble.
In real estate economics, the location-adjusted, and quality-adjusted property price index can be constructed by:
the sampling of repeated-sale (identical) properties (like the Case-Shiller index),
by running a hedonic regression (in many academic studies for particular cities), (Ito and Hirono 1993 on Japanese housing data), or
housing data), by using expert appraisal (like the frequently-quoted Japanese land price index). Having a location- and quality-adjusted property price index is critical for timely policy decisions.
Reminiscent of the Japanese bubble
What is happening in China now is familiar to any Japanese who lived through the bubble in the second half of the 1980s (and its subsequent burst). From the mid-1980s to 1990, Japan experienced one of the largest property bubbles in history. The land price index tripled in five years. The 6-large city price index for residential land rose from 39.2 in September 1985 to 105.8 in September 1990. The commercial land price rose from 27.9 to 104.5. At the initial stage, the land price rose in the central part of Tokyo, then spread to first-tier suburbs in Tokyo, then to other large cities and second-tier suburbs, and finally to rural land and forest. The recent US housing bubble had a similar process of moving from prime to subprime mortgages. The quality of borrowers progressively worsened both in Japan and the US. The loan-to-value ratio rose sharply toward the end of bubble.
Is this bubble now being repeated in China?
Yes, Chinese property prices increases seem to share many of the features of the Japanese property bubble in the 1980s. Of course, that does not necessarily mean that the Chinese bubble would collapse like Japanese. Chinese economic growth potential now is much higher than Japan in 1990. Chinese banks are still under heavy control of the state, so that any policy restraints on further fuelling to the bubble would be more effective in China than in Japan.
It is important to learn what caused a bubble, why it could not be stopped before it became too big, what went wrong in crisis management when it burst. In the following, I provide a short summary (see Cargill et al. 1997 and 2001 for a comprehensive analysis).
Lessons from the Japanese bubble and burst
The Japanese property price started to increase with strong fundamentals and financial deregulation in the mid-1980s. In the beginning (say, 1984 to mid-1987), property price increases seemed reasonable and well-justified with strong macro fundamentals. Real demand came from a few booming sectors, like newly deregulated financial services. Foreign investors were interested in Japanese assets including stocks and real estate. Monetary policy remained very lax (i.e., the official discount rate being 2.5%, a record low at the time) from mid-1987 to mid-1989. Both stock prices and land prices kept rising, partly helped by the low interest rate. However, some time later (mid-1987 to end-89), the process became a bubble – that is, people invest in the property only to aim at capital gains. A leverage ratio became higher in pursuit of higher yields and as banks became more confident that the value of collateral would continue rising.
The first lesson is that a bubble, which can be suspected from rising loan-to-value ratio, rising price-rental (dividend) ratio, increasing bank lending to the real estate sectors, and real estate developments in further-away suburbs, should be restrained by a higher interest rate and prudential regulation on banks’ behaviour. In the second half of the 1980s, monetary tightening and stronger regulatory measures should have been applied in 1987-89. The bubble might not have been completely avoided purely by monetary tightening, but the damage might have been reduced by |
vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.In the course of running your business, you’ve probably encountered more legal fine print and formalities than you ever thought possible. In this post, we’ll break down the “Doing Business As” (DBA) to see if your business needs one.
What Is a DBA?
In the U.S., a DBA lets the public know who the real owner of a business is. The DBA is also called a Fictitious Business Name or Assumed Business Name. It got its origins as a form of consumer protection, so dishonest business owners can’t try to avoid legal trouble by operating under a different name.
When someone files a DBA, it’s normally circulated in some kind of print newspaper (maybe you’ve noticed all those “fictitious business name” entries in the local classifieds). It lets the community know exactly what people are behind a business.
Do You Need a DBA?
In general, there are two reasons why a business in the U.S. will need to get a DBA:
1. For sole proprietors: If you’re operating your business as a sole proprietor, then you’ll need to file for a DBA if your business has a different name than your own name. So, let’s say I’ve started a gardening business called Spring Flowers Gardening; I’ll need to file for a DBA for “Spring Flowers Gardening.”
There are a few other details to know. In some cases, you don’t need a DBA if your business name is a combination of your name and a description of your product or service. In this case, if my business was called Nellie Akalp’s Gardening Service, I may not need a DBA. But, if it’s just my first name (aka Nellie’s Gardening Service), then a DBA is required. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry; just touch base with your local (town or county) clerk’s office and ask them if you’ll need a DBA.
2. For corporations and LLCs: If you have filed to become a corporation or LLC, then you’ve already registered your business name and don’t need a DBA. However, you will need to get a DBA if you plan on conducting business using a name that’s different than the name filed with your LLC/corporation paperwork.
So back to my Spring Flowers business… I incorporated my business as Spring Flowers Gardening. My business will need to file a DBA in order to operate under “SpringFlowersGardening.com” or “Spring Flowers.” Likewise, if I opened a Garden Shop, I’d need a DBA for “Spring Flowers Garden Shop.” In short, you’ll need a DBA to operate with any kind of variation of your original name.
The Importance of a DBA
I’m sure this sounds like a lot of unnecessary, extraneous paperwork. Yet there actually are a few important reasons to get your DBAs in order.
1. It’s the easiest way to register your name: If you’re a sole proprietor, then filing for a DBA is going to be the simplest and least expensive way to use a business name. You can create a separate professional business identity, without having to form an LLC or corporation. And for sole proprietors, a DBA is required in order to open a bank account and receive payments in the name of your business.
2. For LLCs or corporations, a DBA will let you operate multiple businesses without having to form a separate LLC or corporation for each business. Let’s say your business wants to expand into multiple websites, stores, restaurants, services, etc. You can create a corporation with a relatively generic name and use a DBA for each individual business. This will cut down on your paperwork and expenses when you’re operating multiple projects.
3. Keeps your business compliant: If your business is an LLC or corporation, you enjoy certain legal protections. However, these protections may be invalidated if you’re operating under a different name and didn’t file for a DBA. For example, I may have incorporated Spring Flowers Gardening, Inc. But if I sign a client contract under Spring Flowers (or some other variation like that), that contract may not hold up in court.
Filing a DBA
The rules, requirements, forms and fees associated with filing a DBA are different in each state and county. The U.S. SBA provides a chart which details DBA filings state-by-state. By using a legal document filing service, you can make sure that you’re following your county and state requirements perfectly and won’t be accidentally operating outside of the law.
Wondering what business structure is right for you? See Nellie’s post on business structures.
FreshBooks about the author FreshBooks is the #1 accounting software in the cloud designed to make billing painless for small businesses and their teams. Today, over 10 million small businesses use FreshBooks to effortlessly send professional looking invoices, organize expenses and track their billable time.Adrian Clarke says goalkeeper key to Liverpool revival needs to be vigilant against Crystal Palace
It was a disappointing start to 2017 for Liverpool, but Jurgen Klopp’s men have found their feet recently and are on a seven-match unbeaten run.
Ahead of their Premier League match at home to Crystal Palace, Adrian Clarke analyses the reasons behind their upturn.
Learning to control their instincts
Liverpool’s natural urge is to swarm all over their opponents.
This positive approach has helped them score 69 goals, the highest in the division, but with the door sometimes left ajar at the back, no club in the top seven have conceded more than their 40 goals.
The 3-1 loss to Leicester City on 27 February appears to have been the catalyst for change.
Liverpool's loss at Leicester in February was the catalyst for a change of tactical approach, says Clarke
It was the fifth time Liverpool had lost a match they had dominated territorially, and the response from Klopp has been to temper their compulsion to fly forward in numbers.
Their full-backs Nathaniel Clyne and James Milner have since been more selective with their overlaps, and in central midfield the occasional use of Lucas Leiva as a sitting midfielder has added an air of stability.
While injuries to Jordan Henderson, Adam Lallana and Sadio Mane would always affect his tactical approach, Klopp seems to have focused on a slightly calmer, more disciplined style.
Comparing Liverpool's average position maps from last Sunday’s 1-0 win at West Bromwich Albion and the defeat by Leicester (see below) demonstrates this shift.
Liverpool's average player position at West Brom
Liverpool's average player position at Leicester City
After beating Burnley at home last month Klopp expressed delight at “the first ugly game we have won” and it could be argued the pattern has continued.
Their last two victories on the road, at Stoke City and West Brom, were results borne out of patience a dogged attitude.
When succumbing to those shock defeats to five bottom-half sides, Liverpool pressed hard for goals, spending an average of 34.8% of the matches inside the final third.
Liverpool have spent less time forcing the issue in the final third in their previous seven matches
Across the last seven PL contests that number has reduced to 26.5%.
They will still attack with verve at the right times, but Liverpool have been less desperate to camp themselves in advanced areas.
With the forwards at Klopp’s disposal it makes sense to spring breaks from deeper positions anyway, and as results are outlining, it suits them to perform from a firm base that does not expose them to counters.
Liverpool defeats in 2016/17
Liverpool's last seven matches
Firmino on fire
Roberto Firmino has been in tremendous form.
He has been taking up positions to the right of centre in his last three appearances, with Divock Origi as the main striker, and the Brazilian forward has delivered inventive movement and end product aplenty.
Before the change of position Firmino was also influential as the focal point of Liverpool’s attack.
Roberto Firmino has three goals and three assists in his last six PL matches
The Brazilian offers a bit of everything, and that is what marks him down as such a key man.
He is quick and mobile, hardworking, and able to create or finish different types of chances.
Firmino’s last three strikes for example: ghosting into the box to produce a composed finish (v Arsenal), a superb burst down the middle followed by a long-range hit (v Stoke) and a well-placed header from a set-piece (v West Brom) outline his versatility in front of goal.
Firmino form
Last six apps Total Minutes played 473 Goals scored 3 Assists 3 Chances created 17 Shots 16
Coming out on top in 59 aerial duels this season, the third highest at the club, Firmino’s ability to win headers also sneaks under the radar. He has scored three times with his head this term.
As the man who hits the target with more efforts than any other Liverpool player, wherever he pops up against Crystal Palace, this in-form forward must be closely monitored.
See: Players ranked by shots on target
Magical Mignolet
One of Liverpool’s most improved players this season has been goalkeeper Simon Mignolet.
Since reclaiming his place from Loris Karius in December, the Belgian has grown in influence, earning Liverpool extra points with a string of match-defining saves.
His manager described Mignolet’s reflex stop to deny Saido Berahino a certain goal at the bet365 Stadium as “one of the best I’ve ever seen”, and his goalkeeper was just as impressive when denying Matt Phillips in a one-v-one at The Hawthorns.
Simon Mignolet will be full of confidence heading into Sunday's match after two recent match-defining saves
Mignolet's confidence at dealing with crosses also appears to have increased.
Palace are a side who love to deliver balls into the box so will provide a stern examination on Sunday, but he is playing well enough to handle it.
Mignolet improvement
Period Matches Goals conceded/match Save % ~13 Dec 5 1.60 55.6 13 Dec~ 18 1.11 63.0
A successful pairing
Clean sheets have been hard to come by, but at the heart of Liverpool’s defence they have a blossoming partnership.
Joel Matip and Dejan Lovren are unbeaten in the 13 PL starts they have made together.
They did not feature in the same XI during February or March, or in any of the Reds’ PL defeats, but the more they perform as a pairing, the more comfortable they look.
Joel Matip and Dejan Lovren are unbeaten in the 13 PL starts they have made together
Lovren is a dominant presence in the air, with 25-year-old Matip a terrific reader of the game. Each is comfortable in possession. It is a pairing that has natural balance.
In total Liverpool have conceded 11 goals in the 13 matches when Matip and Lovren have partnered each other, at a rate of 0.84 goals per match. The team’s season average is 1.21.
If Matip fails to recover from a knock in time to face Crystal Palace and this unbeaten partnership is broken up, it will be a blow to Liverpool's chances.
Passing the Palace examination
In-form Palace have the confidence and weaponry to hurt Liverpool if standards drop at Anfield. High levels of concentration will be required.
It has been interesting to note how high Liverpool’s defensive line has been in the last couple of matches.
Pushing up towards the halfway line, they caught Stoke and West Brom offside seven and six times respectively. These are high numbers.
Sam Allardyce, the Crystal Palace manager, will perhaps look to punish this tactic by asking his wide men to make driving runs in behind.
If their timing is good enough to beat the offside trap, the hosts could be in trouble.
Liverpool’s weakness in the air could also be problematic.
Klopp's aerial concerns
Liverpool Total PL rank Aerial battles lost 712 3rd Headed clearances 404 19th Headed goals conceded 8 8th
Less aggressive than most PL teams in the air, Liverpool have let in more headed goals than any other member of the top seven.
Several of their concessions from set-pieces have also stemmed from “second balls” after the initial header was lost.
Klopp will know that the former Liverpool striker Christian Benteke is the danger man.
The boss discusses Crystal Palace's attacking threat, Benteke and Sakho: https://t.co/tuNUZOwI7ppic.twitter.com/8F0WtMolr3 — Liverpool FC (@LFC) April 20, 2017
See: Direct approach helping Benteke thrive
The Palace forward has won over a hundred more aerial battles than any other Premier League player. His total of 280 is followed by Burnley’s Sam Vokes in second on 175, so the home side will need to make a plan to deal with him.
If that strategy goes to plan, Liverpool will have a great chance to extend their unbeaten run.I have been a full time Agorist since October 2012. That means I set my own hours, I don’t answer to an employer, and I have no one to blame for my failure but myself. I have jokingly called it, “bootstrapping through life.” Agorism is a species of market activism where people trade voluntarily in an untaxed, unregulated barter economy to avoid faceless corporations and intrusive bureaucracies. Agorism holds all coercion and fraud as moral evils, and aims at manifesting a society where all coercive systems are replaced by consensual competitors. Being an Agorist combines the skill set of an entrepreneur with the sensibilities of a radically anti-establishment political activist.
The first thing you learn as an Agorist is that the full weight of your decisions falls on your own shoulders, and no one else’s. It’s not a weekend waving signs for the politician that you want making decisions for you. It’s not a hobby. It’s not a game. The Agorist puts their livelihood on the line for their principles. I don’t live paycheck to paycheck, because I don’t get a paycheck. If I need more money I don’t beg for a raise or search for a better job. I’ve got to come up with a way to earn it.
Try to imagine this. I knew it was time to get out of the rat race when I realized that during the day I was sitting in a jail cell, designing achievement awards for the cops who were firing tear gas at me in the evening. You think I’m kidding? The shop I used to work in was converted from an old police station. The cops moved into a larger facility. My office was literally an old jail cell. The bars were gone, but it got plenty cold in that concrete block. I was doing production art for screen printing and laser engraving. The recession dried up a lot of our legitimate business, but somehow municipal clients always had plenty of money. I set up jerseys for high schools, lapel pins for bureaucrats, and yes… award plaques for same Oakland cops who evicted us from Occupy Oakland with tear gas. The irony was not lost on me.
I also lost a lot of good legitimate clients when I left. That’s my fault. I depended on the company to maintain the contact information for all these great relationships that I had spent years cultivating. I depended on the company to bring in sales, to advertise, and to seek out opportunities with new vendors. And because I spent those years content to keep my head down and do my art in isolation, I didn’t spend nearly enough time looking around to see how the business was run. Now these things are my responsibility. I maintain my contacts. I build my relationships. I advertise. And I invest in new products to launch.
The next thing you learn is that an Agorist lives and dies by the demands of their clients. Anyone who tells you that the free market isn’t controlled by the customers has never run their own business. I am constantly seeking customer feedback. Constantly over delivering. Constantly trying to improve the experience of my clients, because the food in my belly and the roof over my head are dependent entirely on my customer’s satisfaction.
My first successful Agorist enterprise, other than freelance work, was ShinyBadges.com. It is essentially a mockery of my previous work. I design products that parody government insignia. I am literally using my power for good instead of evil, which is a good feeling. I began with a simple black and yellow flag pin, similar yet entirely different from the flag pins worn by bureaucrats. What I discovered is that people are eager to ask about an embossed lapel pin in a way that they never ask about conventional political buttons, making them ideal for outreach.
Since then ShinyBadges.com has launched dozens of pin designs, full sized police badges, full sized and desk sized black and yellow flags, and a number of bitcoin themed iron on patches. It’s grown into an entire Agorist product line, and every new design is crowd tested before I ever go into production. I solicit feedback from previous customers. I post new designs on the ShinyBadges facebook page, so fans vote them up or down. Even the motto on my most popular pin, “Free the Market – Free the World,” actually derived from a highly popular Tweet that originally read, “End the Fed – End the War – Free the Market – Free the World.”
It may seem like there is a tension between being responsible for all your decisions, and being beholden to your customers, but not really. What you have to realize is that what customers say, and what customers are actually going to do, are different things. Fundamentally this is why markets succeed, and democracies fail. Because apparently political activists will clamor for gun-run health care, but when it comes time to actually register for it they stay home. Similarly, I received at least a dozen emails from left anarchists who wanted a black and red flag pin. So, I made it. In fact I made the whole rainbow of anarchist flag pins, and in over a year I have sold exactly two of the red pins. So, just like in politics, the Communists are all demand, and no supply. This is how we learn. The point is, the Agorist is not a slave to consumer demand, merely guided by it. Ultimately is it the Agorist who is taking the risk, and the reward.
And the third Agorist realization, profit is the key to sustainability and growth. Most political activism is a losing economic proposition. It relies on the irrational exuberance of the activists, and when that enthusiasm bubble pops it depends on the zeal of converts, which is a non-renewable resource. The unsustainable activist burns out, and soon can’t be bothered to do more than vote. Conversely, the Agorist typically doesn’t bother voting, seeking activism that might actually work, and profit is the dividing line between sustainable and unsustainable activity.
Enter SurvivorMax.com. When I do freelance art on commission it’s worthwhile on an hourly basis, but once the job is done that’s it. I can not continue to earn from that labor. I can choose like-minded clients, but I don’t really control the message. Shiny Badges gave me the ability to mass produce designs and sell them over and over, but I still have to manage an inventory, and shipping procedures. Survivor Max is a fast-paced adventure story about an eleven-year-old boy surviving alone in the zombie apocalypse. Luckily, his father imparted the training he needs to be prepared. It’s the first in a three book series. Like promotional products, a book series is mass produced, and I even solicit reader feedback on the Survivor Max facebook page when Max gets stuck and I don’t know how to get him out. But a novel allows me to introduce the philosophy of liberty to a young audience who has never heard it before, and in a fun and exciting way. And best of all it generates a passive income, which means that while it’s selling on Amazon and from the publisher, my time is freed to pursue other projects, making my activism that much more sustainable in general.
Most Agorists have one foot in the counter economy, and the other in some day job. We’re like superheroes with a secret identity. But the key to putting both feet in the counter economy is taking the initiative, soliciting feedback, and making a profit. Agorism provides the most sustainable activist strategies because it’s rooted in the market, not in the political system. But perhaps the most important lesson for successful Agorism is to cultivate the relationships and partnerships that will support you along the way. Striving to be self-sustaining shouldn’t mean being isolationists. We have to be willing to hire each other in mutually beneficial arraignments rather than trying to do everything ourselves.
Tags: Agorism, Shiny Badges, Survivor MaxIt's not a good sign when the best iOS features are imaginary ones designed by people who aren't getting paid to do it instead of, you know, Apple. Like this revamped vision for iPhone multitasking. Apple, steal this now.
Australian designer Jesse Head cooked up this rendering, which imagines a beautified, more versatile iOS that lets you jump between live apps via tiles. Yes, it's a lot like WebOS used to be, rest its soul. Yes, there are Cydia apps for jailbroken iPhones that can give you a pretty good approximation of this stuff—although that's excluding almost all normal people. And yes, Head's notion of jumping between apps like this isn't completely original, nor is multitasking bar that also lets you switch off WiFi and change screen brightness. But there's no bloat, which is nice:
As for the music controls, a scrubber was excluded as it would begin to blur the line between the switcher and an actual music app. My opinion, is that the switcher should provide important controls… accidentally start a loud song in the middle of a church service? Use the switcher to pause or lower the volume. Scrubbing through a song isn't quite as necessary.
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Still, we've seen these ideas before. In bits and pieces.
But we've never seen them look so good, or look so real—this looks like it could've come straight out of Cupertino. Head admits that the rendering might not completely jibe with Apple's design ethos at the moment, but it's not any kind of a reach to picture iOS 7 looking a lot like this, at least functionally. So for the love of god, Apple, please pay attention to this, and maybe hire Jesse Head, because he's doing a better job making iOS 7 than you are. [Jesse Head via TechBlock]NY Times Reporter Beclowns Self Trolling Trump for ‘Gold’ White House Easter Egg
The bias in the media against President Donald Trump shows up in unexpected ways. On Tuesday the official White House Easter eggs for the annual Easter egg roll were revealed online. The wooden eggs were in pastel colors with one gold colored egg that bears the embossed signatures of the president and First Lady Melania Trump.
Julie Davis, Twitter avatar.
New York Times White House correspondent Julia Davis jumped ugly on a photo of the ‘gold’ egg with the First Couple’s signatures, exclaiming, “Forget those silly pastel/rainbow colors of White House Easter Egg Rolls past; Trump’s Easter eggs will be GOLD”
Forget those silly pastel/rainbow colors of White House Easter Egg Rolls past; Trump's Easter eggs will be GOLD https://t.co/G3eeHmutnJ — Julie Davis (@juliehdavis) March 28, 2017
Here's a close-up of the official 2017 GOLD @WhiteHouse Easter Egg. All eggs have stamped signatures of @POTUS and @FLOTUS pic.twitter.com/rXNMrTDG7l — WH Easter Egg Roll (@wheastereggroll) March 28, 2017
The photo of the ‘gold’ eggs at the unofficial @wheastereggroll Twitter account was preceded by six minutes with a photo of the egg in context with pastel eggs.
The @WhiteHouse wooden eggs are available in blue, yellow, pink, and green for $8.50 each. The gold egg is $14.95. pic.twitter.com/b9wNb7G3op — WH Easter Egg Roll (@wheastereggroll) March 28, 2017
The tweets were promoting the souvenir sales of the eggs.
The official 2017 White House Easter Eggs are available for pre-order here: https://t.co/PlI4O1Il41 #EasterEggRoll pic.twitter.com/CrLvHuvSLw — WH Easter Egg Roll (@wheastereggroll) March 28, 2017
After being informed that she had egg on her face…
the tweet @wheastereggroll sent 6 minutes before showed that they will still have pastel colored eggs… — Stephen Jackson (@sdjacksondc) March 28, 2017
Wait, there are still pastel eggs! The gold version will set you back an additional $6+ — Julie Davis (@juliehdavis) March 28, 2017
Davis searched and found a photo of last year’s White House Easter egg’s that showed that then-President Barack Obama issued… a gold Easter egg.
Appears my memory of Easter Egg Rolls past was wrong. Seems Obamas had a golden egg too — not a Trump innovation https://t.co/zectzLccyC — Julie Davis (@juliehdavis) March 28, 2017
But the White House press corps is not biased.Tickets to Google I/O went on sale this morning at 7AM PDT and promptly sold out, despite the doubling in registration price to $900 for general admission and efforts to make the event more exclusive. The popular developer event has grown up over the years, and has become the company's premiere showcase for its upcoming products — and this year Google extended the conference, which will take place from June 27th to 29th at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, to accomodate additional sessions and more collaboration between attendees. For comparison's sake, Google says it took 90 days to sell out I/O 2009, 50 days to sell out I/O 2010, and 59 minutes to sell out I/O in 2011 — this year, Google says that the event sold out in just over 20 minutes.
Lame. Tried registering for Google I/O immediately at 7AM, never worked. Not going this year :( — koush (@koush) March 27, 2012
Update: Google's Vic Gundotra says that this year's I/O conference sold out in record time, with 6,250 queries per second hitting its servers at 7:01AM. Gundotra acknowledges that "it can be very disappointing and frustrating when an event sells out this quickly," and says that Google will stream the keynote and all key sessions live, and provide all session videos after 24 hours. Additionally, he says that Google I/O Extended will hold free viewing parties worldwide, which you can find here.Private prison corporations depend upon their relationships with government players to supply business. “Public-private partnerships”—established with local, state, and federal agencies—provide groups like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) the financial incentives that contribute to mass incarceration in the United States.
The contracts that make this happen are invaluable means of finding out what kind of deals governments are making with the incarceration industry. For example, In the Public Interest, a research group interested in the privatization of public services, first reported on the “lockup quotas” that require governments to keep facilities full, which they discovered via these contracts.
MuckRock has submitted requests for nearly every contract currently maintained between a government agency and CCA and plotted them by facility on the map below. Requests were submitted at the local, state, and (when applicable) federal levels, and the facilities are divided by agency holding the largest contract: a state or local government to host local inmates, a state government to hold inmates out-of-state, and then Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Marshals, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Many of these requests are fresh. If a particularly prison is interesting or relevant, be sure to follow the request and an alert will be sent when the request is updated. Check back in as additional requests are filled, or let us know if you’d like to file your own request!
As always, send comments, suggestions, questions, and insight to beryl@muckrock.com or info@muckrock.com.
Image of North Fork Correctional Facility via Oklahoma Department of Corrections1. We have appropriate dev resources available that can work on this project. The same can not be said for an MvC3 update. At the end of the day, this update is not being done at the expense of another... MVC3 couldn't be done either way. I'm not sure how many times I need to express that.
That said...
2. SFIV has outsold MvC3 in any way you'd care to slice the numbers.
3. SF we completely control. No licenses need to be done or fees paid. No approvals required on direction. We can "just go".
4. SSFIV:AE is still the biggest tournament draw in the FGC in terms of participants. Without question, it has the most active competitive base. One of the goals of the project is to keep it there for the foreseeable future.
I am in no way saying that there isn't demand for a UMVC3 update. There clearly is. But the fact we continue to support a title launched in early 2008 for five plus years, where there is very obviously also a demand, should be something you applaud, not criticize. I realize you'd like to see us working on your favorite franchise instead of this one and I appreciate your passion.
That deal was done as a part of the UMVC3 extension negotiation. Marvel wanted to see another digital release as a part of the deal. We felt that Origins was the best path forward, and we knew Iron Galaxy could pull it off as a part of the roadmap were setting for them (in short, a different and appropriate resource was available).Author and philosopher Noam Chomsky (Screen shot)
The world faces two potentially existential threats, according to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky.
“There are two major dark shadows that hover over everything, and they’re getting more and more serious,” Chomsky said. “The one is the continuing threat of nuclear war that has not ended. It’s very serious, and another is the crisis of ecological, environmental catastrophe, which is getting more and more serious.”
Chomsky appeared Friday on the last episode of NPR’s “Smiley and West” program to discuss his education, his views on current affairs and how he manages to spread his message without much help from the mainstream media.
He told the hosts that the world was racing toward an environmental disaster with potentially lethal consequence, which the world’s most developed nations were doing nothing to prevent – and in fact were speeding up the process.
“If there ever is future historians, they’re going to look back at this period of history with some astonishment,” Chomsky said. “The danger, the threat, is evident to anyone who has eyes open and pays attention at all to the scientific literature, and there are attempts to retard it, there are also at the other end attempts to accelerate the disaster, and if you look who’s involved it’s pretty shocking.”
Chomsky noted efforts to halt environmental damage by indigenous people in countries all over the world – from Canada’s First Nations to tribal people in Latin America and India to aboriginal people in Australia—but the nation’s richest, most advanced and most powerful countries, such as the United States, were doing nothing to forestall disaster.
“When people here talk enthusiastically about a hundred years of energy independence, what they’re saying is, ‘Let’s try to get every drop of fossil fuel out of the ground so as to accelerate the disaster that we’re racing towards,’” Chomsky said. “These are problems that overlie all of the domestic problems of oppression, of poverty, of attacks on the education system (and) massive inequality, huge unemployment.”
He blamed the “financialization” of the U.S. economy for income inequality and unemployment, saying that banks that were “too big to fail” skimmed enormous wealth from the market.
“In fact, there was a recent (International Monetary Fund) study that estimated that virtually all the profits of the big banks can be traced back to this government insurance policy, and in general they’re quite harmful, I think, quite harmful to the economy,” Chomsky said.
Those harmful effects can be easily observed by looking at unemployment numbers and stock market gains, he said.
“There are tens of millions of people unemployed, looking for work, wanting to work (and) there are huge resources available,” Chomsky said. “Corporate profits are going through the roof, there’s endless amounts of work to be done – just drive through a city and see all sorts of things that have to be done – infrastructure is collapsing, the schools have to be revived. We have a situation in which huge numbers of people want to work, there are plenty, huge resources available, an enormous amount to be done, and the system is so rotten they can’t put them together.”
The reason for this is simple, Chomsky said.
“There is plenty of profit being made by those who pretty much dominate and control the system,” he said. “We’ve moved from the days where there was some kind of functioning democracy. It’s by now really a plutocracy.”
Chomsky strongly disagreed with Smiley and West that he had been marginalized for his views, saying that he regretfully turned down dozens of invitations to speak on a daily basis because he was otherwise engaged.
He also disagreed that a platform in the mainstream media was necessary to influence the debate.
“If you take a look at the progressive changes that have taken place in the country, say, just in the last 50 years – the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, opposition to aggression, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and so on – they’re not led by any debate in the media,” Chomsky said. “No, they were led by popular organizations, by activists on the ground.”
He recalled the earliest days of the antiwar movement, in the early 1960s, when he spoke in living rooms and church basements to just a handful of other activists and they were harassed – even in liberal Boston – by the authorities and media.
But that movement eventually grew and helped hasten the end of the Vietnam War, and Chomsky said it’s grown and become so mainstream that antiwar activists can limit wars before they even begin.
He said President Ronald Reagan was unable to launch a full-scale war in Central America during the 1980s because of the antiwar movement, and he bitterly disputed the idea that antiwar activists had no impact on the Iraq War.
“I don’t agree; it had a big effect,” Chomsky said. “It sharply limited the means that were available to the government to try to carry out the invasion and subdue the population. In fact, it’s one reason why the U.S. ended up really defeated in Iraq, seriously had to give up all of its war aims. The major victor in Iraq turns out to be Iran.”
Despite these limitations, he said the Iraq War had been one of the new millennium’s worst atrocities and had provoked a violent schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims that had sparked regional conflicts throughout the Middle East.
“The United States is now involved in a global terror campaign largely against the tribal people of the world, mostly Muslim tribes, and it’s all over. The intention is to go on and on,” Chomsky said. “These are all terrible consequences, but nevertheless they’re not as bad as they would be if there weren’t public opposition.”2 civilians and 3 spldiers killed in US strike against Syria. Neocons and globalists are celebrating. Media is praising Trump. ISIS is using this to their advantage: https://www.rt.com/news/383826-isis-used-us-airstrike-syria/
This is the red line.
Trump's foreign policy was the most important issue to me. This is what got me interested in Trump in the first place. And he just flip-floped completely on it within 48 hours. He bombed Syria for something they didnt do. The gas attack was 100% a false flag, Assad is not fucking retarded, I am sorry. Watch infowars on the subject.
This is something I wouldve expected from Hillary, or Obomber. What happened to America first? What happened to "you cant fight two wars at the same time"? What happened to the FALSE song of globalism?
I pains me to say this, but I can no longer support the president. This is not a warning or a 4d chess move. He bombed people who were fighting ISIS there. I want to cry, but I am done.
I will 100% be accused of shilling. Well, look at my post history and judge for youselves.
And don't give me that "if this is all it took for you than you were never a real supporter" crap. People are fucking dead, and there is no hope for stabilization in middle east, or work with Russia against ISIS. Trump is doing what globalists like McCain want him to do.
New World Order won. Goodbye centipedes. It was fun while it lasted.You can setup virtually any Mac as a home theater media center, all you need is the right tools. Yes, that means your MacBook Pro, MacBook, Mac Mini, iMac, even Mac Pro, can all turn into a media center, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.
For the purpose of this article, we are going to assume you have an HDTV that supports HDMI input, and, preferably a Mac that supports HDMI output with audio (for Mac’s that don’t support direct HDMI output with audio, read on anyway there is a solution for you too). When you are finished with this article, you will be able to have a complete Mac Media Center hooked up to your TV, creating an awesome home theater, and you’ll be able to control the whole thing wirelessly from your couch.
Setting up a Mac Media Center
Here’s what you’ll need to setup a media center with your Mac:
HDTV that accepts HDMI input
that accepts HDMI input Mac that supports video/audio output (newer Mac models that support full HDMI highly recommended, the New Mac Mini is perfect)
is perfect) HDMI cable (and/or other appropriate cables if your Mac doesn’t support direct HDMI out)
(and/or other appropriate cables if your Mac doesn’t support direct HDMI out) Apple Remote Control
Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Wireless Mouse – these are optional but highly recommended if you want to browse the web and play games on your media center
and Apple Wireless Mouse – these are optional but highly recommended if you want to browse the web and play games on |
for access to the paper’s excellent content, they somehow make me feel like a piker if I’m not a subscriber to the print edition at nearly a thousand dollars a year.
I can access the Times through MIT, but decided that I read the paper often enough on other devices and outside of MIT’s network that I should become a digital subscriber. For a couple of weeks, I was a satisfied customer, reading far more than my allotment of ten free stories in my browser, and flipping through the paper on my phone when in transit or waiting on lines. But then the Times implemented its new “three articles a day” plan for mobile readers of the paper. My digital subscription – which costs $240 a year – includes a tablet and web version of the newspaper, but getting unlimited access via my phone costs an additional $180 a year.
Because the Times evidently takes its business cues from the widely despised cable TV industry, they like to bundle their content. As a result, the best way to get digital access is to purchase it bundled with the paper edition of the newspaper… which the Times won’t deliver to my rural address. I could also downgrade my bundle from web and iPad to web and phone, but it seems bizarre to me that digital data paid for in one place can’t be used in another.
And so I’ve found myself in the space of Times hacking, looking for ways to get content I want to read for a less exorbitant price than the Times wants to charge. (My current strategies: I am using my web subscription to dump articles to Instapaper, which I then read on my phone. Take that, Big Media!) Here, I join a large cadre of people who proudly post their tips for defrauding the Times so they can continue reading for free.
Let’s compare this situation to another media organization many New York Times readers rely on: public radio. No one writes articles bragging about how they avoided donating to NPR or how they get podcasts for free. In part, that’s because we don’t have to – public radio, for technical and historical reasons associated with the challenge of monetizing broadcast radio, is free by default, supported by voluntary donations. But there’s another reason: people love public radio, want to support it and feel guilty when they don’t.
I don’t intend to argue that the New York Times should become member supported. But I do want to make the case that they would benefit from thinking about the relationship public radio stations and shows have built with their members.
There’s a diagram that often gets drawn on napkins or whiteboards when media people get together: a Pareto, or long-tail curve, where the Y axis represents how engaged with content your readers are, and the X axis represents your reader population. Near the origin of the graph, the curve is very high – those are the small set of users who are deeply engaged with your content. Farther from the origin, as the curve flattens out, we have the majority of readers, who engage with your content occasionally. For the New York Times, it’s key to turn the folks on the left of the graph into subscribers and to make money from the right of the graph through ads. And as we head towards Peak Ad, it’s increasingly important to move readers across the paywall that separates the left and right side of the graph.
Public radio stations, producers and podcasters face a similar graph. In their case, it’s critical to get the left side of the graph to become members or make donations. But instead of dropping a paywall, they use a combination of gratitude and guilt to persuade their most engaged listeners to support their programming. When they do it well, their listeners feel terrific: Ira Glass urges listeners to defray WBEZ’s bandwidth costs for delivering This American Life online, telling us that if we could give more than $5, we’d pay not only our costs but those of listeners who don’t donate. And if we don’t donate? We feel guilty, but not criminal. The New York Times, which reminds me how many of my three free stories I’ve read on my phone, makes me feel like there’s a security guard trailing me to make sure I don’t stuff an extra New York Times article down my pants.
I suspect the business folks at the Times are operating under the assumption that there are only two places to be on their subscriber/revenue curve – you can be a subscriber and pay $300-800 a year, or you can be an outsider and cover a tiny fraction of your free riding with ad views. But there’s another option: the Times could start thinking of its readers in terms of subscribers, fans and passers-by. The Times won’t monetize passers-by, except through ads – these are folks who stumble onto the site occasionally and may not even realize they are reading Times content. That’s frustrating, but that’s how the web works. And the Times should certainly cultivate subscribers and encourage more fans to become subscribers. But they might do a better job of that by courting their fans, instead of locking them out.
Fans could be encouraged to support content on the Times not through a threat of locking them out, but by encouraging them to support the paper, and especially, the parts of the paper they value the most. When I donate to WNYC, I always take the opportunity to tell WNYC that I’m not a customer of the station as a whole, but of On The Media, my favorite outlet for smart media criticism. I have to think that some Times readers would love the opportunity to give to the paper and say, “Please don’t give this to Maureen Dowd. I’m giving in the hope of more Ta-Nehisi Coates op-eds.”
A New York Times that courted its fans would help fans track how much content they access from the Times, and perhaps, from other sources as well. It would take a suggestion from Doc Searls’s ideas about tracking usage of public radio and allowing users to donate to stations or programs that they listen to often. It might recognize that fans of the Times are fans of other publications, like The Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor or Planet Money, and band together with some of those other outlets to build a common tracking, membership and recommendations platform. (It would be very interesting for New York Times fans to discover they’re deeply dependent on the site’s content… or that they actually read other sources more than the times.) It could start treating fans who choose to subscribe as members, thanking them for making media accessible to others rather than making it clear that their content is only for those who pay.
Making news accessible for non-readers as well as readers is critical. News organizations have two bottom lines: they need to make enough money to keep the presses running, and they need to have a civic impact, holding the powerful responsible and giving citizens the information they need to participate in a democracy. As ad revenues decline, there’s a tendency for paywalled news sites to provide information only to the small group of people who subscribe to the paper. In the process, it’s possible that newspapers will lose their broader civic impact. If sites could find a way to get support from non-subscribers as fans, they could open their content to a broader audience and have more civic influence.
This would require some serious rethinking for the Times, and it’s quite possible they can support their reporting without making this change in the short term. But if we’re moving to a world where people are less dependent on a single media source, like the Times, and more inclined to pick and choose news from multiple sites, the Times will need to realize that fans can’t pay $300 to each content provider they want to support. Perhaps it’s time for the Times to start embracing and celebrating those fans, instead of alienating them.Story highlights The photograph shows a woman standing in front of police
The image, shot by Jonathan Bachman, is already being called iconic
(CNN) Will this be the photograph that symbolizes this past week's protests?
An image of what appears to be a woman's peaceful resistance to police is garnering plenty of attention online.
Photos: Powerful images from a painful week Long after the hurt has healed and the anger has dissipated, it's the powerful images that will stick with us from a painful week in America: the killings of five Dallas police officers as well as the fatal shootings of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. Hide Caption 1 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week A young woman stands frozen -- clad in a flowing dress, armed only with a cell phone -- in the middle of a street as a pair of police officers move to arrest her. She was one of hundreds of protesters who blocked a Baton Rouge roadway during anti-police brutality demonstrations. The symbolism of a single person's nonviolent resistance against a large, heavily armed opposition is being viewed by some as the photo that symbolizes the week's protests. Hide Caption 2 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week Few other photos captured the sadness and grief of the shooting deaths of five Dallas officers as this photograph of a sobbing DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) police officer being comforted at the Baylor University Hospital. Hide Caption 3 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week The pain was just too much for Tawandra Carr to bear. Carr, who said she was best friends with Alton Sterling, cries when she and others gathered outside the Triple S convenience store where Sterling was killed by police, trying to make some sense of an incident that launched days of soul-searching in America. Hide Caption 4 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week Strength in numbers. All Lives Matter protesters come together for a group hug with Black Lives Matter activists in Dallas. All Lives Matter showed up to the Black Lives Matter Hide Caption 5 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week Kim Muyaka -- head bowed, eyes closed, hands tightly entwined with those of an East Baton Rouge police officer -- prays that God would "cover this Police Officer... and use his hands not to hurt or harm but to protect the citizens." Muyaka posted this now-viral photo to her Facebook page. Hide Caption 6 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week "I'm Black and I Matter" is the simple message of this sign, held up during a Black Lives Matter protest in London. A number of marches and demonstrations have popped up in other countries in solidarity with the U.S. protest movement. Hide Caption 7 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week A woman rages against the machine. Sirica Bolling, fist raised defiantly, marches down a street in Newport News, Virginia, during a Black Lives Matter protest. Hide Caption 8 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week Bishop T.D. Jakes, hugs first responder during a service that included a memorial to the five officers killed in Dallas. Hide Caption 9 of 10 Photos: Powerful images from a painful week Hands of comfort extend to Cameron Sterling, the son of Alton Sterling, outside the convenience store where Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police. Hide Caption 10 of 10
Shot by Jonathan Bachman for Reuters, the photograph shows a black woman in profile, standing in the middle of the street as two police officers in riot gear seem to be preparing to arrest her in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"Everyone was given proper instructions and a certain amount of time to clear the roadway. If they did not, then they were arrested," said L'Jean McKneely, spokesman for the Baton Rouge Police Department.
Powerful image of protester being detained near HQ of the Baton Rouge PD. via @reuters https://t.co/VVBnwixzqp pic.twitter.com/sM4QndNlfb — Jim Roberts (@nycjim) July 10, 2016
People are already calling the photograph iconic on social media.It seems that Noah’s Great Biblical Flood was caused by comet fragments striking the earth. Isaac Newton was the first one to come up with a theory connecting the flood to a comet strike, in 1680. According to an article at National Georgraphic.com, Newton declared that a comet had passed close to Earth thousands of years ago and came so close that it doused our world with water from its tail and exerted enough gravitational force to pull forth oceans from beneath our planet’s crust.
Now, a new theory provides evidence that backs up Newton’s idea that a comet was involved. According to this theory, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, a comet entered the earth’s atmosphere and broke up into thousands of pieces. Those fragments rained down fire and brimstone on the earth. Some of the fragments landed all over the world, including Europe and the Far East. It is estimated that over 500,000 fragments landed in north America alone.
C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) is a long-period comet discovered on 17 August 2014 by Terry Lovejoy. This photograph was taken from Tucson, Arizona, using a Sky-Watcher 100mm APO telescope and SBIG STL-11000M camera. (John Vermette/ CC BY SA 4.0 )
Carolina Bays
The craters and impressions left behind by the bombardments are now called Carolina Bays. They are found in North America along the Eastern Seaboard. Most of them are within the coastal states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and Nebraska. The people in Maryland refer to them as Maryland Basins.
Fragments also landed in the Gulf of Mexico and in the country of Mexico. This comet strike, which can be called the Carolina Event, left behind evidence that scientists can use to determine when the event took place. This area still needs research! Researchers will have to excavate more of the craters and examine the different layers of sediment. This would be similar to the way we examine the rings of a tree to determine its age.
This is a photo of a dozen or more Carolina bays. This is just north-west of Red Springs, North Carolina, USA. ( Public Domain )
Explaining a Worldwide ‘Myth’
The comet fragments that landed in the oceans caused worldwide flooding. This included all the shores and islands of both oceans. Tsunami waves backed up all the rivers, leading to the oceans including those in the Americas, Africa, and Europe, destroying everyone in the area. This would explain why all cultures all over the world have a flood (myth) story to tell.
The most deadly and disruptive floods would be talked about for years to come. Here Aztecs perform a ritual to appease the angry gods who had flooded their capital. ( Public Domain )
Tsunami waves would have destroyed everything in the low-lying areas. This includes people on shorelines, in marshes, around bays, and in near shore valleys. The fragments that hit the Atlantic Ocean would have created a continuous wall of water going across the ocean. All the islands in the Atlantic Ocean would have been covered with water. Both The Canary Islands and Great Britain would have been under water, except for their mountains.
‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ (c.1830-1833) by Hokusai. ( Public Domain )
Tsunami waves forced their way through the Strait of Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean Basin. The water going in filled up the basin because no water had time to come back out through the strait. As the basin overflowed, the water flooded towns, villages, and seaports. Sea-levels in the Mediterranean Basin got higher and higher until the runoff went out into the desert.
The flood covered everything; including Alexandria, Beirut, Cairo, Egypt, Italy, and Jerusalem. When the floodwaters began to recede from the land, tons of trees, boats, ships, lumber, buildings, and bridges were carried back into the sea. This floating debris converged at the strait and clogged the opening with floating ships, boats, lumber, and trees. Floodwaters would have carried dead bodies, grass, mud, and silt to the dam and sealed it to prevent the flow of water back into the ocean. According to an article by ABC News, floodwater overfilled the Basin of the Black Sea. You can also read this in the research of Robert Ballard: “Evidence Noah's Biblical Flood Happened.”
The Great Flood (circa 1450). ( Public Domain )
Marking the Giza Plateau
When the flood water drained back into the Mediterranean Basin from the desert, it left behind fourteen feet (4.27 meters) of organic sediment around the pyramids on the Giza Plateau. This silt contains seashells and fossils that have been analyzed by scientists. While analyzing the silt, researchers found evidence that helped to determine the age of the event. Radiocarbon-dating found that the silt was 11,600 years old.
Ballard was able to establish a timeline by carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, while looking for evidence of a catastrophic event. His finding shows that the Biblical Flood happened between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.
The Flood (Die Sintflut, Suendflut) by Lesser Ury. ( The Commons )
The water from the sea left a unique high water mark on the pyramid that stands the highest above sea level. Take a look at the walls of the three pyramids on the Plateau. The outside covering has been washed away from all of the pyramids except for the top part of the highest one above sea-level. That outside covering was washed away by floating flood debris, leaving only a cap. The cap now acts as the only high water mark showing the height of Noah’s Flood. Judging from the cap on the pyramid, the water may have risen as high as 65 feet (19.81 meters) above sea level in the desert.
The Giza-pyramids and Giza Necropolis, Egypt, seen from above. (Public Domain )
Also, when one of the pyramids was first opened, incrustations of salt one inch (2.54 cm) thick were found inside it. When a chemical analysis was conducted on the salt, researchers found that it had a mineral content the same as salt from the ocean. This evidence indicates that the pyramids were swamped by water that came from the ocean. You may find a reference to this information on the website provided by Martin Gray.
Also, according to Dr. Robert M. Schoch, erosion on the Sphinx could have only been caused by water. His research shows that the erosion took place about 11,700 years ago. This puts the timeframe of the Great flood in the same timeframe as the Carolina Event and the sediment around the pyramids. Find this reference at www.robertschoch.
Giza Plateau - Great Sphinx - front view. (Daniel Mayer/ CC BY SA 3.0 )
Top Image: ‘The Deluge’ (1805) by J.M.W. Turner. Source: Public Domain
By Dennis Brooks
The author of this article is asking other researchers and writers to study this subject and discuss it online. If you know of others who might be interested in Noah’s Flood, please tell them about this article.
Researchers can read the complete story in “Atlantis Pyramids Floods,” a book published by the author of this article.Paranormal author and investigator J. Nathan Couch goes in search of the Pope Lick Monster in Louisville, Kentucky, which is responsible for at least 3 deaths.
Wisconsin paranormal researcher J. Nathan Couch recently took a “legend trip” to Kentucky. Legend tripping is the act of visiting an allegedly haunted location to try and experience the legend for yourself. This is the second in a series of articles by Couch following the Waverly Hills Sanatorium tour.
Legend of the Pope Lick Monster
The Pope Lick Monster is said to be a strange, savage amalgamation. He’s often described as a large humanoid creature with furry, goat-like legs, alabaster skin, wide-set eyes, and horns that protrude from greasy fur. The monster is sometimes referred to as Goatman or even Sheepman. According to story, the beast was originally captured in the wilds of Canada around the end of the 19th century. The Goatman became the star of a circus’s freak show until an electrical storm caused a train derailment. This devil-like creature was supposedly the only survivor. Instead of returning to the vast northern wilderness, the Goatman made his way to the Pope Lick Trestle, and is said to reside there even now.
The monster is said to possess a wide array of supernatural skills to lure people out onto the trestle including mimicry, telepathy, and/or hypnosis. Once a victim is lured onto the trestle, the Pope Lick Monster uses its abhorrent physical appearance to frighten its intended victims, causing them to leap or fall to their demise. Some versions of the legend insist the monster waits for a train to approach—then from beneath the trestle—holds its charmed victim down until the train runs them over.
Climbing onto the trestle for a glimpse of the Pope Lick Monster has long been a recreational activity for reckless Louisville-area youths. While even entertaining the idea of such an absurd creature might make even the most ardent paranormal enthusiast feel foolish, the Pope Lick Monster has killed at least three people. That’s a fact.
The December 30th, 1988 Louisville Courier-Journal ran a front page article entitled Trestle of Death, in which it records two tragedies. Jack “J.C.” Charles Bahm II, a 17-year old Spalding University student, was struck and killed by a train February 18, 1987 while crossing the trestle. He has since been eulogized at the site of his death. “JC we love and miss you” is spray painted on the trestle’s base. In May 1987, 19-year-old David Wayne Bryant died of injuries obtained in 1986 when he jumped from the trestle to dodge an oncoming locomotive.
Versions of the Pope Lick Monster legend have been in circulation since the 1960s, and the area around the trestle was a popular party location for area youth, but it took the Louisville premiere of the 1988 short film “The Legend of the Pope Lick Monster” to persuade the railroad it needed something more daunting than trampled chicken wire to keep the public off the trestle. The night of said premiere, two boys were arrested when they attempted to climb out onto the trestle. Immediately thereafter, a six-foot high security fence was installed.
The fence, along with a heightened police presence still hasn’t kept people away from the tracks. In 2000, a 19 year-old Mount Washington man named Nicholas Jewell was shaken from the trestle by a train’s vibrations as he tried to hang from the trestle to avoid being hit by a train.
Exploring the Pope Lick Trestle
On July 27, 2013 I went in search of this trestle to see if I could understand why anyone would risk their lives in search of a monster. As I turned onto Taylorsville Road, I caught a glimpse of the ancient looking track as it ran parallel to the road, nearly hidden by the trees. I felt as if I’d caught a glimpse of an immense, sleeping serpent. I turned onto Pope Lick Road and the trestle immediately towered some 100 feet overhead. The narrow, curved road had a surprisingly high amount of traffic when I was there, and with no visible shoulder on the road, my only recourse was to park at a nearby gas station. As soon as I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a Louisville Sheriff’s Department patrol car sitting unmanned. I refused to be daunted by this; I’d come all the way from Wisconsin for this trip. There would be no turning back. Besides, I had no intention of going anywhere near the tracks, nor did I plan to climb any fences.
Despite my lawful intentions, I felt like a criminal as I navigated an astonishingly high amount of traffic to take pictures from a nearby bicycle trail. Next I walked down the shoulder of the road to stand beneath the tracks. I felt a strong need to gaze up. As I did, the light through the railroad ties was dazzling, and I felt dizzy on the uneven shoulder. My imagination conjured up the approach of a train. The trestle is 772 feet from end-to-end. If you’re stranded up there with a train coming, it’s impossible to out run the locomotive and the engineer has no hope of stopping in time. The body of one of the men that was hit was recovered a couple of miles from the trestle. I turned and examined the creek, which on this day barely qualified as a trickle. One’s only choice is to leap off the trestle, a jump that it’s vastly improbable to survive.
I envisioned the Goatman—a poorly disguised image of the devil himself—and I was reminded how certain members of the Jeffersontown and Louisville community believe the Pope Lick Monster—or some other supernatural force—DID persuade those kids out onto the track. As I walked back to my car, I took a final look at the antiquated, foreboding structure and I couldn’t put myself in those kids’ shoes at all. Having been a nervous and meek youth growing up, I couldn’t imagine needing a thrill so bad that I’d wander onto the trestle.
While I wouldn’t go as far as say supernatural provocation caused the death of those kids, the Pope Lick Monster DID lure them out onto the trestle, if only with his legend.
CAUTION: Trespassing ruins legend tripping for everyone. Also, never ever play or loiter on railroad tracks. Funerals aren’t fun for anyone.
Read more about the Pope Lick Monster in Goatman: Flesh or Folklore?If you are someone who would like to help a loved one change their relationship with substances or to make any behavioral change, there are four essential tools you can learn. First, Helping through Understanding or thinking about issues of addiction differently using the science we now have available. Second, Helping by Taking Care of Yourself as you need to be able to survive and thrive while trying to help. Third, Helping through Words or learning positive communication strategies that shift the conversation from negative to positive. And Fourth, Helping with Actions which are usually using positive reinforcement strategies.
As you approach the holidays and face lots of holiday moments with family and your loved one, it can be helpful to think about ways to improve communication patterns. One way to improve things with your loved one is to learn to avoid “conversational traps”. All of us fall into “traps” at times during conversations…ESPECIALLY when the conversation is about an emotionally charged topic. These “traps” are automatic “default settings” that are often emotional responses to not feeling heard or collaborated with. When communication has NOT been going well, these triggers are more likely, and when your loved one is being secretive, angry, argumentative, dishonest etc, it can be very EASY to fall into any one of these traps in an attempt to “break through” to them.
The problem? These traps tend to push communication into a worse place rather than a better one, leading to more frustration and misunderstanding! Here are some of the most common “traps” that can derail effective discussions.
The Information Trap: trying to make change happen by “educating” your loved one without getting an understanding of what they KNOW already.
The Lecture Trap: which is a more forceful version of the Information Trap, and is often a one-way street of communication…that is, talking at your love done rather than talking with your them.
The Labeling Trap: these are conversations that involve the use of labels (like “addict” or “loser”) and over generalizations like “you are total denial”. They tend to turn conversations into arguments because the person on the receiving end of the label is likely to disagree with you and will become very invested in showing you how you are wrong. Labels…in general…back people into corners.
The Blaming Trap: These conversations focus on finding the person at fault. Your loved one may BE at fault, but having that be the point of the conversation is not going to lead anywhere productive and most often leads to YOU getting blamed for something else.
The Taking-Sides Trap: these are conversations in which you become the voice of wanting change…”you need to stop drinking so much”. Unfortunately, your loved one gets into the position of defending his/her current behavior and may even argue AGAINST changing, “no I don’t, everything is fine.”
The Question-and-Answer Trap: these are conversations that look more like interrogations, with you asking lots of closed questions and your loved one answering with ONE word responses…. “Did you smoke pot today”…”nope”
All of these conversations traps are understandable. They are corners we get into when we’re feeling stressed, angry or frightened. Being aware of them can help you plan ahead and avoid driving down those dead end roads….and prevent either one of you from feeling trapped.After years as a food truck-only enterprise, last year Sam Choy’s Poké to the Max finally set down some permanent roots in Hillman City, an attractive fast-casual home for the company’s Hawaiian fare that Eater Seattle named the Poke Restaurant of the Year for 2016. The plan was to pepper the city with additional outposts, including Ballard and West Seattle, though the next up will be slightly farther flung in downtown Tacoma, at 1716 Pacific Ave.
Owner Max Heigh told Eater he’s excited to be a part of the University of Washington’s Tacoma community, and he’s hoping to open this latest expansion on April 1. That soft opening will be followed a few weeks later by a grand opening with special guests, including namesake and business partner Sam Choy, the chef often referred to as the Godfather of Poke for his work popularizing Hawaiian cuisine.
Grid View Courtesy of Sam Choy’s Poké to the Max
Courtesy of Sam Choy’s Poké to the Max
Courtesy of Sam Choy’s Poké to the Max
Courtesy of Sam Choy’s Poké to the Max
Courtesy of Sam Choy’s Poké to the Max
As evidenced by the preview photos shared by Heigh, the look and feel of the new addition to the chain will closely resemble that of the Hillman City original, as will the food menu. “Our menu will be a duplicate of our Hillman City menu with one or two special items catered just for this location,” Heigh said. That means a lineup including various types of Spam-based musubi, loco moco, teriyaki short ribs, and, of course, poke, from rice bowls to offbeat preparations like poke nachos and wraps.
The shop will also serve sake, beers from Kona Brewing (a “Hawaiian” brand currently being sued for deceptive advertising since most of its products are produced in the continental U.S., including Washington), and, on the weekends, tropical mimosas. There are plans for happy hour, too.
Sam Choy’s Poké to the Max Tacoma will be open Sunday to Monday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.Flat Robs in June & July
We thought it would be nice to update everyone on a few upcoming times Rob will be out of the office, and therefore Flat Rob will be coming out to play! The July dates will give everyone a chance to plan ahead. We hope everyone enjoys seeing Flat Rob on the map. Stay tuned for more announcements soon about some *events you’ll be able to meet him (and Matt) at. Flat Robs may appear in the store sporadically during these times with no warning or additional blog posts. Additional dates for FR (and FM) to join the map are still being worked on for July and August! (Maybe more in June too?)
Jun 8 – 13
July 4 – 16
July 21 – 23
July 28 – 31
Munzee On!
*Hint: Germany and Finland – get ready!WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, charged with leaking secret U.S. surveillance information, said the Obama administration was denying him his right to seek asylum, according to a statement released by the WikiLeaks organization on Monday.
“It is being reported that after promising not to do so, the President ordered his Vice President to pressure the leaders of nations from which I have requested protection to deny my asylum petitions,” Snowden said in a statement published on the WikiLeaks website, referring to President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. “This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile.”
The United States has been on an international manhunt for Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who faces espionage charges for leaking classified information about secret U.S. phone and Internet surveillance activity. He is believed to be holed up in the transit area of a Moscow airport.
“Although I am convicted of nothing, (the Obama administration) has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person,” Snowden said in a statement posted online by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
“Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum... Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.”
A Russian official on Monday said Snowden has applied for political asylum in Russia and Reuters saw a letter Snowden sent to Ecuador, thanking it for helping him get to Russia and examining his asylum request.
In the statement dated July 1 and signed “Edward Joseph Snowden,” he blamed the Obama administration for adopting “the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon” in its efforts to block his search for asylum and said he was “unbowed in his convictions.”
Snowden is traveling with Sarah Harrison, an activist with WikiLeaks. The group’s founder Julian Assange has been granted asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, where he has been for just over a year.New York City FC embark on a tough stretch of away matches this weekend – 4 matches in 14 days, starting Sunday night in against FC Dallas.
New York City are coming into the game on the back of a very impressive 3-1 home victory over Atlanta United FC. David Villa, Rodney Wallace and Maximiliano Moralez were all on target for City as they put Atlanta away with ease.
NYCFC dominated for large parts of the match and were ahead just 17 minutes into the game. Villa and Wallace both linked up before the latter set El Guaje up to finish the ball into the net.
12 minutes later and Atlanta were equal. Carlos Carmona hit a lovely volley into the top corner, leaving Sean Johnson stranded in the middle of his goal. From then on out it was all City. In the 60th minute City went 2-1 ahead through Wallace – just one minute later Moralez added to City’s 2-1 lead, and sent Atlanta home with their tail tucked between their legs.
FC Dallas are also heading into the match with a win up their sleeve. Dallas defeated Real Salt Lake 0-3 away from home, thanks to a Maximiliano Urruti brace and a goal from Matt Hedges.
As the scoreline may suggest, Dallas were not tested whatsoever by RSL in this one. Just three minutes into the game, Dallas won a penalty which Urruti tucked away – the penalty set the tone for the rest of the game and had Salt Lake chasing the game from minute 1 to 90.
An RSL lineup with no Nick Rimando, Kyle Beckerman or Joao Plata were left to fend for themselves against the only unbeaten side left in MLS in this season. Hedges doubled Dallas’ lead in the 67th minute and Urruti added salt to the wounds of RSL in the 91st making it 3-0 at Rio Tinto.
The Last Time We Met
The last time NYCFC faced FC Dallas the game ended with both sides sharing a point.
The game ended 2-2 with goals from Tommy McNamara, Maxi Urruti, Michael Barrios and Khiry Shelton.
NYCFC were trailing up until the 78th minute until Shelton netted the equalizer.
Key Players
For New York City I believe that Alexander Ring will be vital against Dallas. Unfortunately for Patrick Vieira his side will be without Yangel Herrera while he is away on international duty. With Herrera unavailable for selection, it’s likely that Andrea Pirlo will be back in the NYCFC starting XI.
Ring will undoubtedly have to do the work of two players on the defensive end, with Pirlo looking closer and closer to retirement in every game he plays. The Finnish international has been great so far this season and another great performance will be needed if City are to win.
As for Dallas, Kellyn Acosta will need to have a big game for Dallas. The 21-year-old has played eight games so far this season and has contributed two goals and two assists so far.
There’s no doubting Acosta’s talent and potential, and he will certainly be crucial for Dallas going forward in attack.
Team News
NYCFC will be without the services of Shelton (hamstring), Ronald Matarrita (high ankle sprain) and Herrera (U20 World Cup).
Dallas will have to do without Mauro Diaz (torn Achilles) and Paxton Pomykal (ankle strain).
Predicted line-ups
NYCFC (4-3-3): Johnson; White, Chanot, Callens, Sweat; Ring, Pirlo, Moralez; Harrison, Wallace, Villa.
FC Dallas (4-4-2): Gonzalez; Grana, Zimmerman, Hedges, Figueroa; Barrios, Ulloa, Acosta, Lamah; Akindele, Urruti.Limit watches, established in 1912, has a reputation for high-quality and lasting design, making for a timepiece you can rely on. The Watch Shop selection here includes pieces for men, women and children, meaning the whole family can enjoy their very own Limit watch. Analogue and digital watches are available at a very reasonable price, but don't think that just because these items are affordable that they compromise on quality - Limit creates watches that last, making them the perfect every day choice, even for those with a busy or physically demanding lifestyle. Bright and colourful pieces are available for children who are just learning to keep time; classic and delicate pieces are perfect for women who enjoy vintage style, while men's Limit watches range from beautifully traditional to totally practical for sport and other activities. Browse the full range of Limit watches, or explore other value Watches.
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312 ISIS militants killed |
affairs programme, but its researchers were evidently too busy to read the legal analysis on the position of the UK pound which the Government, the House of Commons and others have published, leaving its hapless presenter to ask the Chief Secretary to the Treasury why his Government were refusing to apportion the pound as an asset and failing to correct the First Minister when he said that the Bank of England is an institution of which an independent Scotland would have a share. An all-party House of Lords committee explained as long ago as April 2013 that the SNP’s plans for sharing the Bank of England post-independence were “devoid of precedent and entirely fanciful” but, since then, neither the Scottish Government nor its Fiscal Commission have done anything to explain why these conclusions were mistaken. One can only assume that this is because they know damn well that they are not mistaken.
As for Scotland refusing its share of the national debt, this is basket-case economics. The debt is currently the UK’s. In order to reassure creditors (and to preserve its credit-rating) the Treasury has made plain that it will continue to honour the debt even in the event of Scottish independence. But this does not mean that Scotland would be born debt-free. On the contrary, as part of the separation negotiations the rUK would secure from Scotland an agreement to service an equitable share of the UK’s debt. There is no chance that Scotland could walk away from this obligation without punishing consequences being imposed at the hands of the international money markets. An independent Scottish state would need to borrow from day 1. There is no question about this (for those in doubt, Ian Smart explains it here). A responsible Scottish Government would do everything it could to ensure that it was able to borrow on the most favourable terms possible. This precludes absolutely any refusal to service a fair share of the UK’s debt.
Conclusion — where does this leave us?
The intervention of the “three Chancellors” has generated a lot of heat. Nationalists are furious. Iain Macwhirter said on television during the week that the Scottish Government genuinely did not see this coming. Their hysterical over-reaction would suggest that, on this score, Macwhirter is correct. But I have to say I find this extraordinary because, as I set out in the opening paragraphs of this post, all the signs were there for those who bothered to read them. As usual with political heat, it will soon die down. And, when it does, we will be able to see that the intervention of the “three Chancellors” has also shone a welcome and penetrating light on an aspect of the independence debates that the SNP had tried valiantly to keep obscure.
This goes back to the point made above about “honourable and dishonourable cases” for independence. The SNP’s entire approach to independence is to do as if, having voting Yes, Scotland will breezily and unilaterally be able to cherry-pick exactly which bits of the old British state it wishes to keep and which bits it wishes now to discard. The currency is just one of several bits that the SNP want to keep. But they present this as if it is a policy that poses no problems: the mere fact that they want it will be enough. Mere assertion that it is Scotland’s pound, as long as it is repeated often enough, will be sufficient to make it so, even when both the law and the interests of the rest of the UK point in diametrically a different direction. Those with long memories will recall that we saw the same tactic deployed in 2011-12, when the argument was whether the Scottish Parliament, without help from Westminster, enjoyed the legal competence to pass legislation authorising a referendum on independence. The SNP insisted, wholly without legal foundation, that it did. The SNP was wrong yet, when the UK Government suggested a solution, they were abruptly shouted down with cries of Westminster “boots” “stomping” all over “Scotland’s referendum”. Over the course of some long months, it was patiently and calmly shown that on analysis, the UK Government had got the law right and the SNP had got it wrong, and Nationalist talk of boots and stomping was replaced with rather more mature language of co-operation and respect. It was the same again with last year’s stramash over “automatic” EU membership. And now we’re on our third go around the same loop. This week’s cries of “bullying” and “economic aggression” will sooner or later give way to a cold, hard realisation that everything the Chancellor has said is based on clear, authoritative, expert and independent economic analysis, all of which has been put freely into the public domain. You can read it for yourself. And, when you do, you will see that it really is not in the interests of the rUK to enter into a currency union with an independent Scotland; that this really is not an unlawful power grab for “Scotland’s pound”; that this really is not a bluff; that a currency union really has been taken off the negotiating table; that it really is not going to happen; and that the UK has compelling reasons for having arrived, calmly and rationally, at this conclusion.
This shines light on the question which we in Scotland have to answer on 18 September: should Scotland be an independent country? Independence means independence from the United Kingdom. Independence means leaving the UK behind. And independence mean leaving the UK’s institutions behind, including the UK’s pound. By all means use the UK’s pound as a foreign currency. Be Panama if that is what you want. It’s your right to choose that for your national destiny if that’s what you want. But be clear about one thing, good people of Scotland. Independence means leaving the UK. Vote for that and you cannot then turn around to demand that the bits of the UK you actually like (such as the pound) come with you. Are you in, or are you out? Are you staying, or are you going? It’s your choice, Scotland. And this week, thanks to the Chancellor, we found some much needed clarity about what, precisely, that choice entails.General Mills chose Star Wars Day — May the Fourth — to announce a new and permanent addition to its cereal lineup: Star Wars breakfast cereal.
Similar to its existing Lucky Charms cereal, the new Star Wars cereal will feature marshmallow bits in six themed shapes, including a Storm Trooper, Yoda and a pair of light sabers.
The corn-based part of the cereal also contains three shapes: a Tie Fighter, an X-Wing fighter or the Millennium Falcon, said Mike Siemienas, a spokesman for Golden Valley-based General Mills.
The cereal will make its official debut in June. And gradually, as new Star Wars movies enter the theaters, the selection of marshmallow bits will change, too.
“As time goes on, both the boxes and the marshmallows will be updated,” Siemienas said.
General Mills has offered limited-edition Star Wars cereals before, including a “Star Wars Episode II Clone Crunch” from 2002, according to the company’s corporate blog.
But this time around, the plan is for the cereals to continue, even after the latest Star Wars movie leaves the theaters. The packages are labeled “limited edition box,” but it’s the artwork on the cover that’s limited.
Monday’s announcement was timed for the unofficial Star Wars Day, an homage to the movie’s line, “May the Force be with you.”
Said Siemienas, “We thought that ‘May the Fourth’ day was a great day to launch this cereal.”
Tom Webb can be reached at 651-228-5428. Follow him at twitter.com/TomWebbMN.(CNN) — Thanks to digital effects, filmmakers today can create almost anything -- monsters, aliens, tornadoes, tsunamis -- on movie screens.
But when it comes to spectacular natural scenery, it's hard to replicate the pristine beauty and wonder of real-life wilderness.
Ask the makers of "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier": A computer-generated rock face can't measure up to the grandeur of Yosemite's El Capitan.
Or George Lucas, who used Death Valley National Park, along with Tunisia, as scenery for the desert planet Tatooine in the first "Star Wars."
Or the makers of the original "Planet of the Apes," who thought the red-rock landcape of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area would make a neat monkey planet. So when Hollywood needs a gorgeous or otherworldly backdrop, it has long turned to federally protected wilderness.
Over the past 50 years America's natural wonders have filled in onscreen for the Old West, for wintry Siberia and even for planets in a certain galaxy far, far away.
Here's a look at some of their most notable movie cameos:
'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial'
Visit California/Carol Highsmith
Steven Spielberg shot most of "E.T." on soundstages that doubled for Elliott's suburban home.
But for the forest scenes at the beginning and end of the movie -- when E.T. is stranded on Earth, and later when he reconnects with his spaceship to fly home (say it with me: "I'll be right heeere") -- Spielberg ventured to the dense redwood forests of Northern California, near Crescent City.
These redwoods also portrayed the forest moon Endor in "Return of the Jedi."
'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
This classic outlaw movie was filmed all over the American West and Mexico (filling in for Bolivia).
The famous scene where Butch and Sundance leap off a cliff into a river to avoid their pursuers was shot in Colorado, but the movie's most spectacular backdrops were at Zion National Park, in southwestern Utah
The scene where Paul Newman squires Katharine Ross around on a bicycle was filmed just outside the park in the ghost town of Grafton, whose faded buildings are now being restored to their frontier glory.
'National Lampoon's Vacation'
Courtesy of Xanterra Parks & Resorts
Remember that scene where the Griswolds stop at the Grand Canyon and Clark, having just stolen from the lodge's cash register, gazes at it for about two seconds before hustling his family back in the car?
Props to director Harold Ramis, who hauled a crew to Arizona just to film that brief scene at the classic El Tovar lodge and an overlook on the canyon's South Rim.
'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'
MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images
Many Americans weren't aware of this strange geological feature until Spielberg spotlighted it in the climax of his 1977 movie about friendly aliens who decide to touch down on Earth -- in northwestern Wyoming.
Devils Tower, a dramatic butte that rises 1,267 feet above the surrounding hills, is popular with climbers and is a sacred site to some Native Americans.
'Dances with Wolves'
Marnie Hunter/CNN/FILE
Most of this Kevin Costner epic Western was shot on private ranchland in South Dakota, although the Badlands makes a brief early appearance on Lt. Dunbar's wagon train ride from Fort Hays to his lonely frontier outpost.
The park's trippy landscape also became an alien planet filled with giant warmongering insects in "Starship Troopers."
'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade'
GERO BRELOER/AFP/Getty Images/File
One of the highlights of the third movie in the Indiana Jones series was the prologue sequence, which explained how young Indy (River Phoenix) got his fedora, his chin scar and his fear of snakes.
The scene opens in Arches National Park, where Indy encounters a band of grave robbers in a cave before a madcap chase on a circus train.
The unique red-rock formations of Arches, in southeastern Utah, also hosted the cop-in-the-trunk scene in "Thelma and Louise."
'The River Wild'
NPS photo
Yep, that really was Meryl Streep doing some of her own rafting stunts in this 1994 adventure thriller, which was filmed on the rugged Flathead and Kootenai rivers in and around Glacier National Park in Montana.PM to lead No 10 talks though some groups, including the Royal College of General Practitioners, appear not to have been invited
David Cameron begins the fight to save his NHS bill on Monday by convening a summit of health practitioners to look at how to implement his health reforms.
The Downing Street round table, likely to be attended by the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has already experienced controversy because some professional groups claimed to have been excluded owing to their hostility to the bill.
Cameron has said little in detail about the health reforms since the Conservative Home website called for the bill – which is in the Lords – to be dropped, and claimed at least three cabinet ministers were urging that it be shelved.
The prime minister is determined to ride out the criticism,but knows he has to win back alienated health professionals.
His aides said Cameron was not planning a second pause on the bill and was focused on getting the measures on to the statute book by the end of spring.
The Health Service Journal, which broke the news of the summit, claimed a number of professional groups were angry over who had or had not been invited.
No 10 declined to give details of attendees, but the list is thought to include the presidents of some of the royal medical colleges, NHS Confederation chief executive, Mike Farrar, and British Medical Association chairman, Hamish Meldrum.
It indicates the government intends to press on with implementing its health bill rather that discussing dropping it or making significant changes.
The Academy of Royal Colleges chair, Sir Neil Douglas, wrote to the Royal College presidents, saying: "Some of you will have been invited to a meeting with the prime minister on Monday. This is being titled as a meeting to discuss implementation of the NHS reforms which would indicate where the government is coming from."
He added: "Just to clarify, this is not the meeting between the colleges and the PM that many of us discussed three weeks ago in BMA house but is a Downing Street initiative. We are not yet clear of the invitation list but it appears to be selective and definitely broader than the colleges."
The chief of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Clare Gerada, confirmed her organisation had not been invited. The colleges of radiology and pathology have also not been invited.
However, the meeting will be an opportunity for Cameron to gauge the source of the controversy surrounding the bill and how readily it can be overcome. He is bound to face calls to drop the third part of the bill that focuses on extending competition, a position recently adopted by the Liberal Democrat peer Lady Williams to the surprise of some senior Lib Dems.
Aides to Nick Clegg are aware they are in danger of loyally defending a bill as part of the coalition agreement only to find the Conservatives retreat at the last minute.
Andy Burnham, Labour's shadow health secretary, said: "This has all the hallmarks of an event thrown together in a last-ditch desperate bid to shore up collapsing support for the bill. It would appear to be so last-minute that a number of important organisations have been left off the invite list, or maybe it's because the PM wouldn't like what they've got to say.
"It's a sure sign of a prime minister who is no longer listening and putting his political pride before the best interests of the NHS."
News of the meeting came as the number of signatures on an e-petition on the government website calling for the bill to be dropped rose above 120,000.
It is required that any petition with more than 100,000 signatories has to be referred to the backbench business committee for consideration for Commons debate. But there have been a large number of health debates, and indeed Labour has called a debate on Wednesday to urge the government to publish the national risk register.
Ed Miliband made the claim on Friday that he will make the future of the NHS the defining issue of the general election in 2015. It caused surprise that Labour could know the issue that will define an election three years away, and it also risked suggesting Labour was not prepared to fight the election on the economy.Respawn Speaks Out on People Treating Titanfall 2 Tech Test as the Final Game
While we mostly liked what we played of Titanfall 2 during the tech test weekends, some fans (from gaming forums and Reddit, etc.) of the original Titanfall weren’t as pleased with the then current state of the game and assumed the final version would be the same.
At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, PlayStation LifeStyle had the chance to speak to Respawn’s Art Director Joel Emslie, and Chief Operating Officer Dusty Welch, and we asked what they thought of people assuming that the Titanfall 2 tech test would be the same thing as the final product.
PlayStation LifeStyle: Is it a little bit annoying to see comments (based on a tech test) as if it were the final product? Do you wanna just get in there and say ‘No, you don’t understand!’ Joel Emslie: I don’t know if it’s an annoyance, it’s more of like…it makes me scratch my head. You know, I think it’s more about…I wonder why they thought that. Like, I saw a headline that said we ignored our fans, absolutely, and didn’t listen to a word they said. I just was– PSLS: Was that headline referring to the original Titanfall or the Titanfall 2 tech test? Joel Emslie: The tech test. I was really…I wasn’t upset, I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I was confused by it. Maybe we’re not getting the message out to everybody — press and game community alike — that we’re insanely flexible. We listen and agonize over every piece of, you know, NeoGAF, and people saying things. Sometimes it’ll be sent around the office. It’ll go out to artists and design teams and say thing like ‘Hey this person had a REALLY big problem with this? Why do they feel that way? How can we make that better?’ That’s what we’re really interested in. So hearing a bold statement that we just ignore everything and make games all day in a bubble seemed absolutely confusing and completely inappropriate. Dusty Welch: It’s an ignorant comment, unfortunately. Joel Emslie: I didn’t understand it. I don’t understand where it came from. It doesn’t help make the game better. What we’re really looking for is some constructive criticism. That’s the stuff that we really love. And if it’s constructive and it comes from… you know, ‘Hey, I hated this. I hated this part of the game and I wish you could do something different.’ Like, that’s the stuff that we’re really after. That’s the gold that we’re after.
Do you agree with Respawn’s answers? Were people overreacting on a sample of the game or are the issues they have with it too significant that it can’t be changed in just a few months’ time?
Stay tuned to our full interview set to hit the site later this week where as about the online reaction to the tech test, paid microtransactions and more.Today the Ethereum foundation announced plans for an Ethereum hard fork to recover the funds from the DAO exploit.
This hard fork is planned to occur at block 1,920,000, which should be on July 20th or 21st depending on your time zone.
In anticipation of this hard fork we will suspend all deposits and withdrawals starting at block 1,919,744 (approximately one hour before).
We will reenable deposits and withdrawals when we are confident that the longest valid chain has been clearly decided.
During this time exchange trading, margin trading, and margin funding will all continue to operate as usual.
Upon re-enabling deposits and withdrawals we will put up a notice on the website as well as bitfinex.statuspage.io, and Twitter (@bitfinex), so please monitor any one of these mediums to stay up to date.
If you have any questions don’t hesitate to let us know, you can email us at [email protected]Google’s newest gadgets are bringing science fiction to real life.
The tech giant’s lab for advanced projects unveiled some of its hottest new innovations last Friday, which included finger control technology and a pair of smart jeans. As with all things Google, they proved extremely impressive.
We’ll start off with the finger control technology. Dubbed Project Soli, the gadget takes the form of a radar that can detect precise hand movements and translate them into commands. In other words, it’s just like touch screen technology, only it doesn’t require the screen. During a showcase, Google presenters were able to kick a virtual soccer ball by flicking their fingers, or shift the hours on a clock by turning an imaginary dial.
It actually functions a lot like the holograms in Tony Stark’s lab:
You can check it out in action below:
As for Google’s smart jeans, they’re about to blow your socks off. The company partnered with Levis and found a way to engineer conductive cloth that it says is “indistinguishable” from regular fabrics, and can be controlled by a chip the size of a button. That means Google can turn your pants or other clothing items into a touchpad.
Strangely, Google doesn’t really have many ideas for this new technology. The company is calling it a “blank canvas” for designers and developers, so it looks like the innovation will be up to third parties. The search engine giant is simply trying to perfect the art of marrying technology with clothing in a seamless way. You can check out the new jeans, codenamed Project Jacquard below:Northern Californians work harder and are more creative.
Southern California clocks out earlier for some couch-locking L.A. Confidential.
Those are just two conclusions that can be drawn from a first-of-its-type analysis of California medical marijuana patient data, released this morning.
Popular San Francisco-based medical cannabis delivery app Eaze released today the first analysis of its user data. The service — which is like an Uber for medical cannabis, whereby patients can order buds to their location in 15 minutes or less — reaches more than 80 cities and over 100,000 patients.
Eaze’s data-centric approach generates tons of insights, which are just beginning to be mined. Here’s some highlights:
Northern California wants to get lifted, SoCal wants to get stoned
57% of NorCal prefers sativas over indicas. Sativas are generally more energetic, and cerebral. Indicas tend to induce sleepiness and couchlock. 61% of SoCal prefers indicas over sativas.
SoCal clocks out slightly earlier
48% of SoCal orders happen before 5 p.m. vs 42% of NorCal orders. SoCal also buys more bud during the day.
Lazy Saturday
Both NorCal and SoCal order 20% more cannabis on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Wake and Bakers
NorCal sees a 50% increase in relative demand from 10 a.m. – 11 a.m.
4/20 is a Holy Day
4/20/15 saw more than 2.5 times the number of orders relative to the two Mondays prior and after
Mom Does Not Approve
Patients order 15% less on Mother’s Day relative to the three Sundays before and after
Young, Male, iPhone owners
48% of patients are 18-25, 28%: 25-32, 13%: 32-40, 8%: 40-55, 3%: 55+
25% of Eaze patients are women
61% of mobile patients are on iOS, 39% Android
78% are mobile vs 22% desktop
What We Do in the Shadows
12% of 18-25 year-olds order after 10 p.m. (yes, you can do that), only 5% of people 40+ years old do
Cool Grandparent
Oldest Eaze patient: 90 years old
Baller Status
Most spent on a single delivery: $1180
Largest number of orders from one patient: 193
Why Do Folks Need It?
20% Chronic Pain
13% Insomnia
9% Anxiety
12% Migraines
3% Arthritis
Related News:
“New in App Store: medical pot doctor FaceTime”Buckfast Tonic Wine is a caffeinated fortified wine originally made by monks at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England, now made under a licence granted by the monastery, and distributed by J. Chandler & Company in the United Kingdom and Richmond Marketing Ltd in Ireland. It is based on a traditional recipe from France. The wine's distributor reported record sales of £43.2 million as of March 2017.[2]
Despite being marketed as a tonic, Buckfast has become notorious in Scotland for its association with the loutish ned culture and antisocial behaviour.[3] High retail sales are recorded throughout the Central Lowlands including Glasgow and the surrounding areas of East Kilbride, Hamilton, Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, Cambuslang, and Coatbridge.
History [ edit ]
A Buckfast Wine tanker on the A38 in Devon
The wine, which is still manufactured using many of the same ingredients, is based on a traditional recipe from France. The Benedictine monks at Buckfast Abbey first made the tonic wine in the 1890s. It was originally sold in small quantities as a medicine using the slogan "Three small glasses a day, for good health and lively blood".[4]
In 1927, the Abbey lost its licence to sell wine. As a result, the Abbot allowed wine merchants to distribute on behalf of the Abbey. At the same time, the recipe was changed to be less of a patent medicine and more of a medicated wine.[4]
The wine, which comes in distinct brands depending on the market, has achieved popularity in working class, student, and bohemian communities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, Buckfast is packaged in a darker bottle, has a slightly lower alcoholic strength, and lacks the vanillin flavouring present in the British version. Buckfast sold in Northern Ireland is the same as that sold in the rest of the UK.[5]
Versions [ edit ]
Buckfast contains 15% alcohol in the 750 ml green-bottled UK version, and 14.8% in the brown-bottled Republic of Ireland version, which equates to roughly 11.25 UK units of alcohol.
Both versions of the drink contain phosphate and glycerophosphate (each of these as the sodium and/or potassium salt).
The "brown bottle" Buckfast sold in Ireland has a caffeine content about equal to a strong espresso coffee (60mg/100ml) whereas the UK-sold "green bottle" Buckfast has a caffeine content about equal to strong black tea (25mg/100ml).[6][7]For this contest, Bicycle Design teamed up with Isuda, a pilot bike-share program in Singapore that relies on movable docking stations. Why movable? Because that way, Isuda workers can tow the stations around the city to the places where the most commuters are likely to be, depending on the time of day. The design imperative was to create a new bike that could easily couple with a mobile station, with points given for efficiency, durability, ease of transport and resistance to foul weather. Oh, and they obviously had to be unisex.
Every so often, the folks over at Bicycle Design like to stage a conceptual challenge. The last one asked designers to create a bicycle that would motivate a die-hard car person to get out and pedal. (Go figure – the winning idea looked kind of like a car.) Now, the website has put out a call to rethink a bike-sharing project in Asia, and the resulting entries are all sorts of weird and wonderful.
I've picked out a few of the more interesting entries, which you can see below listed by descending order of possible real-world production (which is the ultimate goal of the contest). You can see all the entries and vote on your favorite at the Bicycle Design competition page; the designer who reels in the most votes will get a free folding Isuda bike.
This concept from Matthew Boobyer has the best chance of seeing the light of day, in my highly uninformed opinion. Just look at all the features: A station that quickly folds up into a flatbed trailer to hitch onto the back of a truck, a light signal that tells you if bikes are available from a block away, sturdy-looking bikes with storage space for groceries and city maps displayed on the handlebars. The thing that really sold it to me, though, was the "umbrella holder." You gotta have one of those nowadays!
It took me a while to comprehend Vincent Pommel's concept for an animalistic bike share, and even now I'm not sure I understand it all. Basically, it's an e-bike that has a lion for a head and a fish tail for a rear, referencing the mythical "Merlion" that's become Singapore's bizarre mascot. Its seat is raised and lowered by a gas piston, and the onboard electrical system that powers the motor and the lights is charged whenever it's docked at its station. That station is somehow lightweight enough that one person riding a Merlion can hook up to it and drag it through the city, like this:
I'm not sure what mind-altering substances Marcus Burnam was on when he conceived of this barmy bike share, but I want some. Who can't get behind the idea of bike stations floating through the city on stately hot-air balloons? Burnam says the balloons are meant to draw attention to the existence of bike sharing, and explains how the system works this way:
The bikes will be transported between locations by increasing the heat pumped into the balloon so that it may float into the sky with the rack of bikes connected. Once the balloon is at a suitable height a grappling rope can by discharged down to its next docking station using GPS tracking. A member of staff will then connect the grappling rope to the docks winch, so that the balloon can release some of its heat and be slowly drawn down to its next destination. Once the balloon is docked, customers can come and collect a bike by placing their credit/debit card into the bike and entering their pin code, this will release the locking mechanism on the bike allowing the customer to take it away for a ride.
This idea doesn't seem to have a lot to do about bike sharing, but it's kind of nutty so I'm including it anyway. This concept vehicle swaps out a bike's circular tires for a tread system akin to tanks or snow mobiles. Its creator, Abhimanyu Rajvanshi, says the unconventional "wheels" are meant to help fold the bike and minimize the effect of punctures:
Images used with the permission of Bicycle Design.Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi looks on before his meeting with Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe in Rome's Palazzo Chigi April 30, 2009. REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico
NAPLES (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has compared himself to Jesus Christ and Napoleon, boasted on Friday that he was the world’s most popular leader.
The conservative premier, in his third term in office, said opinion poll findings in his possession showed his popularity at just over 75 percent, making him far more popular than U.S. President Barack Obama — or any other head of government.
“The opinion polls I know say that he (Obama) is at 59 percent. Only (Brazilian President Luiz Inacio) Lula tops 60 percent — he is at 64 percent. So mine is a record high,” he told reporters in Naples where he attended a May Day concert.
On his way out of the concert hall, the 72-year-old Berlusconi — who has proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Italian politics and once said he was second only to Napoleon, except taller — was heckled by protesters who shouted “Go Away!.”
Commentators agree Berlusconi enjoys high popularity ratings despite the economic crisis — the International Monetary Fund expects Italy’s economy to contract by 4.4 percent this year — although perhaps not as high as he claims.
A poll published last month by left-leaning La Repubblica daily said support for Berlusconi stood at 56 percent and had risen in April for the first time since October thanks to his hands-on response to a deadly earthquake.
Berlusconi, who regularly complains of unfair treatment by the media despite directly or indirectly controlling 90 percent of Italy’s television, put his own popularity at 75.1 percent.
“These are independent surveys, but they are not promptly published,” he said.A controversy is smoldering over the distribution of a creationist book to schools in Poland. According to Gazeta Wyborcza (March 2, 2016), unsolicited copies of Maciej Giertych's Ewolucja, Dewolucja, Nauka (Evolution, Devolution, Science) were sent to the biology teachers in public and private secondary schools across the country in early 2016.
A dendrologist and socially conservative politician, Giertych is also a persistent critic of evolution. For example, in 2006, as Ulrich Kutschera reported in Reports of the NCSE, Giertych moderated a seminar at the European Parliament (in which he was then representing Poland) in which evolution was criticized by a number of creationists.
Giertych also appeared in the 2008 creationist propaganda film Expelled, in which he asserted that evolution is incapable of producing new genetic information. Ironically, while Expelled blamed the acceptance of evolution for the Holocaust, Giertych wrote a booklet that the European Jewish Congress condemned as anti-Semitic, as Reuters (February 19, 2007) reported.
Giertych told Gazeta Wyborcza, "The book accessibly shows the inconsistencies in the theory of evolution and the lack of evidence for it, as well as a growing number of evidences against it." But Jacek Graff, a biology teacher in Krakow who received the book, was not so enthusiastic, describing it as "hair-raising" and "a frightening fantasy."
Szymon Drobniak, an evolutionary biologist at the Jagiellonian University, outlined and rebutted the major claims of Giertych's book in a column for Gazeta Wyborcza (March 2, 2016). "Giertych conducts his whole discussion in a very biased view," he summarized, "avoiding hard evidence and not presenting a single truly scientific source."
Drobniak also organized a petition asking the ministry of education to inform schools that the book is not endorsed by the ministry and to refer teachers to authoritative sources on evolution, which will enable them to rebut the misconceptions and misrepresentations of Giertych's book. The ministry has yet to respond.Telcos Lobby for New CISPA With CNN's Help Privacy Eroding Bill Gives You More Privacy, Trust Us! CISPA, a bill that would significantly erode consumer privacy and expand Internet activity surveillance under the guise of "cybersecurity," (see the EFF's excellent primer) recently rose from the dead. Phone companies are of course in support of CISPA, given it gives them a blank check to violate consumer privacy laws. Fearing another SOPA-esque backlash, the phone companies this week brought out their lobbying heavy hitters to try and argue that CISPA is actually good for you. directs our attention to the fact that CNN this week helped the phone companies by running more privacy. Effectively, the lobbyists try to argue that CISPA means more security, and more security means more privacy (also, hey, trust us!): quote: The debate on cybersecurity has produced a sideshow centered around the belief that added security means a reduction in privacy. Such views are nonsense. Quite simply, digital privacy cannot exist without cybersecurity. Weak security equals weak privacy. Want better privacy? Raise your security game to prevent hackers from stealing private data. Let the experts from the private sector and government communicate with each other so when they see threats, they can alert others and work together to create a solution. Mike Masnick at quote: Except... no one is complaining about experts in the private sector and the government communicating with each other. So their whole argument is based on a lie. The worry is that CISPA also gives companies blanket immunity for sharing personal information of their users/customers with the government, and then allows the government to do whatever the hell it wants with that information. That's the opposite of "good security." In fact, it guarantees that it's more likely that this information will leak and be available to bad or malicious players. As is usually the case with most media outlets, CNN helps nudge the whole circus along by failing to note that Rick Boucher, once a champion of fair use rights, now lobbies for AT&T full time. Meanwhile, "cybersecurity" continues to be a bogeyman catch all used to justify all manner of anti-consumer behavior. Techdirt directs our attention to the fact that CNN this week helped the phone companies by running an editorial by Rick Boucher (who we've previously noted is now a very busy AT&T lobbyist ) and Steve Largent (the wireless industry's top lobbyist) that tries to argue CISPA actually provides users withprivacy. Effectively, the lobbyists try to argue that CISPA means more security, and more security means more privacy (also, hey, trust us!):Mike Masnick at Techdirt does a fantastic job eviscerating the editorial point by point. As Masnick correctly notes, nobody is arguing that "experts" shouldn't be allowed to communicate, they're arguing that CISPA effectively gives these companies and the government total immunity to do whatever they'd like with your data:As is usually the case with most media outlets, CNN helps nudge the whole circus along by failing to note that Rick Boucher, once a champion of fair use rights, now lobbies for AT&T full time. Meanwhile, "cybersecurity" continues to be a bogeyman catch all used to justify all manner of anti-consumer behavior.
News Jump Tuesday Morning Links Monday Morning Links TGI Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links - Valentines Edition Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links ---------------------- this week last week most discussed
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join:2002-04-10 2 recommendations jc10098 Member Trust US Trust US - Big Brother has your best interest at heart....
(UN)Patriot(IC) Act
FISA
CISPA
Warrantless Wiretaps
Drone Program
All for your safety folks. Please don't ask too many questions. It's for the good of national security we know your every move. Mum is the NRA who seems tunnel visioned on firearms. Funny, what rights are they going to defend when we have none left?
Bush started this whole fiasco and Obama continues the travesty. Thanks U.S. Government. You've shown the world how to truly erode democracy.Another day, another Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim |
an abundance of caution, authorities issued a shelter in place directive because of the potential of toxic fumes and smoke. It was lifted at 1:30 p.m. and state Environmental Conservation Commissioner Basil Seggos said air monitoring systems and water collection systems were being brought in as precautions. Governor Cuomo placed the full resources of the state at the disposal of local officials to handle the event. In addition to Seggos, the state health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, and State Police Superintendent George Beach were on the scene. Verla has been cited by OSHA in the past for violations of workplace conditions.Amazon Coins, the virtual currency introduced by the e-commerce giant last spring, are now available on Android devices, including both smartphones and tablets, in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. This is the first time the Coins have been offered outside Kindle Fire tablets, which is where they first launched.
The goal of Coins to date has been multi-fold: to encourage developers to build for the Amazon Kindle platform; to reduce the “sticker shock” of paying for things in dollars (something that Android users seem especially sensitive to in comparison with their iOS counterparts); and to increase the revenue-generating opportunities for both developers and Amazon.
The idea is to get consumers to think of paying for purchases not as “99 cent” downloads, but rather as a number of Coins they deduct from a bigger stockpile. It’s an idea that’s a holdover from console and PC gaming platforms, but one that is not offered today on either Apple or Google’s official app stores.
Customers can earn Coins by shopping for their apps from Amazon’s Appstore, earning achievements in select titles (currently over 3,800 apps are listed), and they can buy them directly at a 10 percent discount. The more Coins you buy, the larger the discount, which encourages users to purchase the currency in bigger quantities. (100 Coins are worth $1.)
The Coins can be used to buy games and apps, purchase extra features within apps, like extra lives in “Candy Crush,” unlock new levels, and more.
Developers continue to receive a 70 percent revenue share whether the customer spends Coins or dollars, Amazon notes.
In order for Android users to take advantage of Coins, they’ll need to install or update their version of the Amazon Appstore client on their device, which can be done from here: www.amazon.com/getappstore.How to Avoid Dreaded Spring Allergies Spring is the season when trees and flowers bloom and release pollen into the air. Pollen particles can travel for miles in the air. Once the pollen comes into contact with our bodies, our immune systems take them for infectious agents and release antibodies, which are substances that fight harmful bacteria and viruses. As the antibodies attack the pollen, a chemical called histamine is released into the blood causing a running nose, irritation in the eyes and other allergic symptoms. This condition is known as spring allergy. No vaccine exists to permanently prevent spring allergy, so the best you can do is take a few precautions. Reduce outdoor activity Pollen count is highest from 5 a.m to 10 a.m in the morning. Reduce outdoor activity during this time. If it is unavoidable to go out during these hours, wear a pollen mask so that your nose is protected from invading particles. Also keep the windows in your home and car shut so that you don’t invite any pollen inside. If you are allergic to grass, get someone to mow any overgrown grass that you may have in your lawn. With a face mask, you could also do it yourself. Keep your personal space clean Also remember to keep your personal space clean and dust free. Using a vacuum cleaner to clean your home helps a great deal because it can easily get rid of dust particles on the carpet, furniture and walls. Run the cleaner over clothes and bed linen to get rid of any pollen. Change the filter every few times you use the cleaner. Using an air purifier indoors is a good option to keep the air clean. Hot showers are also a good way to keep air-borne pollen and molds away. Avoid using attic or window fans that can actually bring more into pollen into your home. Treat symptoms immediately Despite taking these precautions, if you start to exhibit allergic symptoms, it is best to start a course of nasal irrigation. Nasal irrigation involves using a saline to wash out the nasal cavity. This can remove any pollen particles that may have entered your nose. Honey is very beneficial in preventing any allergic symptoms from occurring. Consuming two tablespoons of honey a day for about two months before the onset of spring helps to ward off any symptoms of allergy. But in case of a serious infection consulting a doctor would be a safer option. Allergies Hayfever & Allergy Remedy
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save $5Amazon has produced a dramatized version of the rise of Playboy magazine and its founder, Hugh Hefner: American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story. Like everything else Amazon does, it is pretty awesome in my opinion!
Why should anyone care about this? The social issues and conditions that enabled Playboy to thrive are no longer relevant. Even if you don’t care about what might have interested men back in the early 1950s, I think the series is rewarding for its coverage of a rapidly growing startup company. Though he didn’t do it all while wearing a bathrobe (that came later?), Hefner did an amazing job of managing growth, extending the brand into television and physical clubs, and achieving his vision.
The series is interesting also for a seamless blend of documentary footage and modern dramatized footage. A lot of cameras were rolling back in the 1950s and there are also some interesting retrospective interviews from the early 1990s.
If you’re interested in a genetic basis for success, as explored in The Son Also Rises, the story is kind of interesting. Hefner was a remarkably successful person and his children, notably former Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner, turned out to be remarkably capable as well. (Young Cooper Hefner has recently taken over as Chief Creative Officer.) The practical genius behind the Playboy Clubs, Arnie Morton (later founder of Morton’s steakhouses), had a son who co-founded the Hard Rock Cafe chain and additional children and grandchildren who have been successful in the notoriously challenging restaurant business.
Students of cultural change will also be interested in the series. Footage from the 1950s shows a nation (well, at least hundreds if not thousands of Americans as the cameras panned around) of thin people. Americans who were out dining and drinking every night were as slender as today’s Hollywood actors. Lay off the Cheetos when watching…
What about economic change? Detroit and Baltimore were thought to have sufficient promise, in the 1960s, that Playboy developed Clubs in both cities. How about real estate? The company supposedly paid $2.7 million for a 37-story skyscraper, the Palmolive Building, in downtown Chicago! (Wikipedia makes it sound as though Playboy bought only “the leasehold of the building”.)
Some things haven’t changed as much as we might think. As covered in The History of Divorce, the big no-fault revolution in family law statutes happened in the 1970s. But Playboy’s first issue, December 1953 (available on archive.org), describes a system in which divorce can be easily obtained by a plaintiff (i.e., a de facto no-fault system). Pages 6-8 contain an article “Miss Gold-Digger of 1953.”:
subtitle: when a modern-day marriage ends, it doesn’t matter who’s to blame. it’s always the guy who pays and pays, and pays, and pays. [unlike in the old days when only rich defendants paid] alimony has gone democratic... Even the simplest wench can make a handsome living today. … The wife may be a trollop with the disconcerting habit of crawling in and out of bed with the husband’s friends. … When the judge grands the divorce, he will also grant the little missus a healthy stipend for future escapades and extravagances. it’s important to remember that the modern gold digger comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. She’s after the wealthy playboys, but she may also be after you.
As in today’s family courts, judges 64 years ago were calculating a plaintiff’s profits according to a hypothetical theory of what a defendant might be able to earn:
a wife asked for an allotment that exceeded what her ex-husband was earning. … [The judge] ordered the man to “stop fooling around [with a commission-based sales job] and get a regular job.”
As with nearly all U.S. states (see Real World Divorce for the specifics), alimony profits varied with the judge:
there are very few actual laws regulating alimony. Most states don’t have statutes that set requirements for alimony payments. That leves each case in the hands of the presiding judge.” The alimony deck is heavily stacked against any man in the game.
The economic incentives around divorce, custody, and child support haven’t changed…
The courts aren’t interested in whether a woman is capable of earning her own living. In fact, their decisions discourage any thoughts an ex-missus may have of returning to work. They penalize the girl who is willing to earn her own way by reducing or eliminating her alimony payments. It doesn’t take a very sharp sister to figure it’s a lot easier to stay home afternoons and play Scrabble with the girls and let the ex-hubby pay the bills.
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton’s narratives of women being victimized in the workplace counterbalanced against statistics showing that many women actually do work was being played out in 1953 more or less word for word:
The whole concept of alimony is a throwback to the days when grandma was a girl. A couple of generations ago, this was a man’s world, and a nice young woman without a husband had a difficult time making her own way. Nothing could be further from the truth in 1953.
In other words, the 1950s that we look back on as a period when women stayed home was perceived by at least some contemporaries as a time when women were peers in the office! (The series actually shows that Playboy depended heavily on women in creative and managerial roles, though top managers were mostly men until Christie Hefner took over.)
The series shows Hef being challenged by interviewers as a smut peddler. His mind was in the gutter while well-bred American men were occupied with loftier topics than sex. Hef’s standard reply seems to have been “I am making a magazine that covers the interests of men today and men are keenly interested in sex.”
It is pretty obvious that the Hefner family leaned on the scale during the production. At times, the magazine is portrayed as being primarily about social justice. Hef and associates were colorblind and working practically hand-in-hand with Martin Luther King, Jr. If true, why did the first black Playmate appear in the Centerfold in 1965, 12 years after the magazine’s founding? Wikipedia(!) says that the first Asian Playmate was in 1964. The bias is so obvious, however, that it doesn’t really take away from the series. You know that you’re getting the founders’ and insiders’ view of the project. It is a bit wearing to see Playboy’s quest to free Americans from the horror of having sex with the same person day after goddamn day aligned with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quest to free Americans from race-based discrimination. And sometimes it is misleading. For example, the series implies that the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan had something to do with a reaction against the civil rights movement.
Politics and government control the company’s fortunes to a large extent. Playboy has to pay a $100,000 bribe to New York officials to get a liquor license, without which its $7+ million investment in a Manhattan club would have become worthless. The magazine is nearly shut down by local officials in Chicago and Hefner is tried on obscenity charges. He doesn’t exactly beat the rap; the jury was deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of acquittal.
The series proves that nobody cares about aviation. In a long segment about the company’s private jet, the type (turns out to be a DC-9) is never mentioned. It sure look as though Hef had more fun in his converted airliner than did Donald Trump!
If the series covers the decline of Playboy I haven’t gotten that far yet. I don’t think it is fair to blame Hef for the fact that Playboy had only 20-30 years of being culturally significant and commercially vibrant. The company was an expression of one person’s vision and when Hef got older it wasn’t reasonable to expect that young men would want to adopt his vision. Perhaps more significantly, Playboy set itself up in opposition to the conventional-in-1953 idea that every American adult should aspire to be part of a married couple with kids in a suburban fortress. In the 1960s, however, the Federal government began a multi-trillion-dollar assault on this idea with a welfare system that made single motherhood a smarter economic choice at the low end of the income spectrum. By 1980, nearly every state had adopted no-fault divorce. By 1990, many states had adopted child support guidelines that made single motherhood a potentially smarter economic choice at the high end of the income spectrum (e.g., because a brief sexual encounter with a high-income partner was more lucrative than a long-term marriage with a middle-income partner). Once the government opened its treasury and courthouses for the purpose of destroying traditional ideas of family, how would it have been possible for any private individual to have a significant ongoing impact?
Another way to measure Hef’s success as a thinker is to consider that Friedrich Nietzsche‘s views on religion shocked contemporaries, but only a few decades later they made people shrug. Hefner’s ideas remained fresh for about as long as Nietzsche’s. That’s not a bad run for anyone.
One interesting question is why there isn’t a successor to Playboy. Perhaps today’s young men wouldn’t be interested in the same things that Hef found interesting circa 1953, but why isn’t there a mass-market magazine catering to men in general? Aren’t we kind of back to where things were in the early 1950s, with Esquire and a bunch of hunting, fishing, and sports magazines? Playboy peaked at roughly 7 million issues sold in 1972. These circulation figures show that no men’s magazine today comes close to that, despite more than 50% growth in U.S. population. Is today’s population more fragmented? More androgynous? More static so that there is no point in learning about changes in the social environment?
Related:Lessons from my first multiplatform Kotlin project
Marcin Moskala Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 3, 2017
I have just finished Kotlin multiplatform project in good multiplatform architecture with 3 different clients:
The beauty of this solution is that all these clients are sharing business logic! (Check out the article that describes how it is possible). During the implementation, I had to challenge myself a lot. I started with some ideas and understanding but I had to update them during the implementation process. These are valuable lessons that I want to share with you. I believe that they are important because Kotlin multiplatform development is going to be big. It gives enormous possibilities of code sharing while keeping all platforms native. Hope that one day you will also join this trend. For now, enjoy what I have learned ;)
Idea behind expected declarations
In Kotlin Common module, we can define expected declarations for which we need to specify actual declarations in every Platform module (see docs or this article to read about Common, Platform and Regular modules). This is really important and powerful mechanism because without it we wouldn’t be able to use platform-specific types in Common module.
Example from the project is DateTime — object that represents concrete point in time. Since I defined it as expected declaration in common module and I provided actual declarations in common-jvm and common-js, I was able to use it in News class of data model. It might sound innocent, but News is used nearly everywhere in the project! It is used in all clients in all layers. I used it in the API (I had to define serializes for that) and in backed logic. Fact that I can freely use platform specific types for such object is very important. It highly improves expressiveness of our data model and without it I would be forced to serialize or deserialize such object before every usage.
Platform module is JS, JVM or Native. Not Android or iOS
When I started my project I was imagining that I will omit common-js module and directly provide expected declarations in web module. It could be profitable because it is currently the only Kotlin/JS module in this project. It is not how it is working. web, android, ios and desktop are all Regular modules and they cannot be Platform modules (without workarounds).
Initially I treated it like a problem — this forces me to extract additional module. When I defined network repositories as expected declarations, it forces me to share networking between Android and Desktop. I worried that it might cause some problems. It actually didn’t and I discovered that this is actually beneficial! It forces us to define elements in Platform module instead of defining them for every client. Another profit is that from the fact that I had to extract Kotlin/JS repositories in separate modules, now I know that when I will be adding Firefox and Chrome extension clients then I will already have networking implemented. This solution made whole structure a little bit more complex, but at the same time it forced better code reusability and better scalability for new platforms.
MVP works perfectly with multiplatform design
I was wondering if MVP architecture will fit into such massive-multiplatform project. Worries were reasonable — different platforms represents a totally different way of thinking. This is why I was shocked when I discovered how well this design pattern fitted to all currently implemented clients. Nearly all Presenters were initially written for Android, and then easily reused in all clients.
You can find more about it in this article, but to give you some intuition how MVP fits different modules, let’s see how we express that view is during loading state. Only Presenters can decide that view is in this state, and they signalize that by changing its view property:
class NewsPresenter(val view: NewsView) : BasePresenter() {
fun onRefresh() {
view.refresh = true
...
}
...
}
To make views universal and testable, they are hidden behind interfaces. loading is represented there as a Boolean type property:
interface NewsView: BaseView {
var loading: Boolean
...
}
In Android I use KotlinAndroidViewBinding to bind this property with progress visibility:
override var loading by bindToVisibility(R.id.progressView)
In TornadoFX there are objects called properties used to represent view state. We can easily bind them with Kotlin property:
private val loadingProperty = SimpleBooleanProperty()
override var loading by loadingProperty
Progress bar visibility is bound to this property:
progressbar {
removeWhen(loadingProperty.not())
}
In React, view state is represented by a single object for each component (this is how we call React views). Every time some changes are applied in this object, then displayed view changes too (changes must be done in setState block). In this architecture we can use observable delegate to always change the state when property value changes:
override var loading: Boolean by observable(false) { _, _, n ->
setState { state.loading = n }
}
Whenever loading property of state is true, we show loading view:
override fun RBuilder.render(): ReactElement? = when {
state.loading!= false -> loadingView()
state.error!= null -> errorView(state.error!!)
state.newsList!= null -> newsListView()
else -> div { }
}
As you can see, MVP fits every architecture in totally different way, but it actually works great with all of them.
Ways of two-way communication
There are different ways to communicate between different types of modules. There are 3 types of modules:
Common modules (e.g. common, common-client )
, ) Platform modules (e.g. common-js, common-jvm )
, ) Regular modules (e.g. android, desktop, web )
Every module can use everything from higher-layer modules. In Regular module, we can use everything from all its dependent Platform modules and from all their dependent Common modules. Similarly Platform module can use everything from its dependent Common module.
It is harder to communicate in other direction. What if upper layer needs something from lower layer? When Common module needs something from Platform module, then we can handle it by specifying expected declaration. Language will force us to specify actual declarations for every Platform module.
I had bigger problem when I needed values in Common and Platform modules that could be only specified in Regular modules:
UI — UI context for coroutine.
— UI context for coroutine. BaseURL — Base URL address of the API. It differs because in Android simulator different address needs to be used to direct computer localhost.
There are two ways how we can handle this problem:
All upper-layers elements are created by Regular modules, so we might pass such values to all objects that need them (we might pass UI via constructor to all Presenters during their creation). Sadly this solution would not be really scalable.
via constructor to all Presenters during their creation). Sadly this solution would not be really scalable. We can define public top-level properties or object declaration properties with notNull delegate and fill them during Regular module initialization.
This is how I ended in this case. I defined UI as a top-level property:
var UI: CoroutineContext by notNull()
It is filled with client-specific object during initialization:
class App: Application() {
override fun onCreate() {
super.onCreate()
UI = AndroidUI
...
}
}
Note that different value can be easily specified for unit tests:
@Before
fun setUp() {
UI = Unconfined
}
Even though this solution looks good, it should not be used more often than necessary. It is not intuitive to specify values this way and we should first consider passing such object as arguments.
Summary
These are important lessons about multiplatform Kotlin programming. I hope that it will help everyone who is starting its adventure in this area. The big lesson — the architecture that optimizes code reusage and project scalability and testability — can be found in this article.
Learned something? Click the 👏 to say “thanks!” and help others to find this article.
If you think that this is important, share it with others.
Do you need a Kotlin workshop? Visit our website (kt.academy) to see what we can do for you.
To mention me on Twitter use @marcinmoskala.
If you like it, remember to clap. Note that if you hold the clap button, you can leave more claps.Because we've received a huge demand for private test networks from developers and corporates a like, we have decided to reboot the IOTA Testnet and make it accessible for everyone to play around with IOTA for testing use cases and general prototyping.
How to participate
First of all, join our testnet channel on Slack so that you can directly communicate with other participants. In order to participate, you need to download a separate IRI client which we've prepared for you:
Download IRI Testnet v1.2.1: https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/releases/tag/testnet-v1.2.1
We are currently using the public-testnet branch on the IRI repo (https://github.com/iotaledger/iri/tree/public-testnet). Reason for that is that it allows a minWeightMagnitude of 9 (instead of 15 like on the mainnet). A GUI wallet will also be released for the testnet.
Find neighbors on Slack
In the public channel testnet-neighbors you will be able to find neighbors to join the testnet.
Run IRI
What's special for this release is that you have to run IRI with the --testnet flag. If you have previously participated in a testnet, make sure that your testnetdb folders are deleted. For all of your use cases, remember that you can use minWeightMagnitude 9.
If you have problems, just ask the team.City could miss out on Spanish starlet
Manchester City are losing in the race to sign Real Mallorca starlet Marco Asensio, reports talkSPORT.
The Premier League giants have fallen behind Real Madrid in the battle for the 18-year-old’s signature. Madrid are hoping to persuade Asensio to move to the Bernabeu instead of swapping countries for City.
Barcelona and Firoentina are also rumoured to be interested in the youngster, who has burst on to the Segunda División stage, but has just a £3.3million release clause. However, teams will need to trigger that this summer, as in 12 months time the clause will increase to £7.4million.
The playmaker has only scored one goal for 10th placed Mallorca, but the playmaker has caught the eye of the European giants with his flair and technical ability. But with Real Madrid desperate to avoid a bidding war with any of their European rivals, they are eager to activate Asensio’s current release clause as soon as possible.
City haven’t just used Sheikh Mansour’s finances on the first team. The club have completely redeveloped their academy, in an attempt to produce some of the world’s best future stars. And City will want to add Asensio to their youth squad, as they look to build for the future. But they will have to act fast to beat Real Madrid this summer.Members of the Travis County Republican Party on Thursday began moving to oust their elected chairman, conspiracy theorist Robert Morrow, days after he created a stir by protesting against Donald Trump during the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign swing Tuesday through Austin.
Morrow, whose antics have embarrassed GOP officials, became vulnerable to being thrown out of office by filing in Texas to run as a write-in candidate for president, party officials said.
State law doesn’t allow county or precinct chairmen of a political party to run for federal, state or county office, said David Duncan, the Travis County party’s executive vice chairman.
Morrow effectively resigned when he filed to run for the White House, Duncan said, adding that Travis County Republican officials will be able to elect a new chairman when they next meet.
"I hope that will put this issue behind and we’ll be able to move forward," Duncan said. "We certainly wish Morrow well in his future endeavors."
State GOP Chairman Tom Mechler also joined the dump-Morrow movement Thursday, saying he looked forward to working with Morrow’s replacement.
"There is absolutely no place for rhetoric as distasteful as Mr. Morrow’s in the Republican Party of Texas," Mechler said.
Morrow said he didn’t believe the party had the authority to remove him.
"I am the chairman of the party, so who are these people?" Morrow said. "I will tell you this: If they try to remove me as party chairman, they have no legal right to do that. The case law on this is probably very thin for whatever pretext they’re going to try to do."
Morrow — who objects to the label "conspiracy theorist" and prefers to be called a political researcher or muckraker — said he believes the removal attempt was motivated by his appearance outside of Trump campaign events Tuesday.
Wearing his signature jester’s cap, Morrow stood behind a large red sign that accused his party’s nominee of child rape, citing an anonymous lawsuit filed in a New York federal court. There is no additional evidence that Trump has engaged in pedophilia, a crime that Morrow has accused other public figures of engaging in as well.
Morrow told passers-by that he also was running for president, noting that his platform included bikini contests on the White House lawn.
"If I’m elected president, every Fourth of July, we’re going to have a wet T-shirt contest at the White House," he added.
The Travis County party will hold a Friday morning news conference in Austin to discuss the ouster of Morrow. The announcement referred to Duncan as "acting chairman."
According to the Texas secretary of state’s office, Morrow met the requirements to be a certified write-in candidate for president by submitting a declaration that included signed consent forms from his vice presidential running mate — his handyman, Todd Sanders — and from 38 registered voters willing to serve as his presidential electors.
Write-in candidates must be certified for their votes to count.
Evan McMullin, an independent candidate seeking to make a national run for president, wasn’t certified as a write-in candidate because one of his electors wasn’t a registered voter, the office said.
Morrow’s shocking March 1 victory, in which he unseated James Dickey in the little-watched, down-ballot race for county GOP chairman, made international headlines after reporters delved into his vulgar, pornographic and profane social media history.
Since his election, local party officials have debated whether it was better to tackle Morrow head-on by attempting to remove him or by downplaying the situation while trying to go about business as usual.
As Morrow took office in June, the party’s precinct chairs stripped him of many powers and responsibilities typically held by the county party chairman. Morrow went along with that plan, saying he was more focused on spreading his political research than on running, or disrupting, the party’s operations.Democracy is not the most potent political force of the 21st century. If the world wants to see global solidarity of nations, the tribes may need to win first. By Parag Khanna
Last week, the world’s most globe-spanning empire until the mid-20th century let its fate be decided by 3.6 million voters in Scotland. While Great Britain narrowly salvaged its nominal unity, the episode offered an important reminder: The 21st century’s strongest political force is not democracy but devolution.
Before the vote was cast, British Prime Minister David Cameron and his team were so worried by voter sentiment swinging toward Scottish independence that they promised a raft of additional powers to Edinburgh (and Wales and Northern Ireland) such as the right to set its own tax rates—granting even more concessions than Scotland’s own parliament had demanded. Scotland won before it lost. Furthermore, what it won it will never give back, and what it lost it can try to win again later. England, meanwhile, feels ever more like the center of a Devolved Kingdom rather than a united one.
Devolution—meaning the decentralization of power—is the geopolitical equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: inexorable, universal entropy. Today’s nationalism and tribalism across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East represent the continued push for either greater autonomy within states or total independence from what some view as legacy colonial structures. Whether these movements are for devolution, federalism, or secession, they all to varying degrees advocate the same thing: greater self-rule.
In addition to the traditional forces of anti-colonialism and ethnic grievance, the newer realities of weak and over-populated states, struggles to control natural resources, accelerated economic competition, and even the rise of big data and climate change all point to more devolution in the future rather than less. Surprisingly, this could be a good thing, both for America and the world.
* * *
Woodrow Wilson brought his fierce anti-colonialism to the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, insisting on national self-determination as one of his famous “Fourteen Points.” But stubborn Western Europeans held on to their imperial possessions until World War II bankrupted them. The dismantling of the British and French empires over the course of the 20th century gave birth to more than 75 new countries within four decades. Decolonization was followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which created 15 independent states. All told, the jackhammer of devolution has more than tripled the number of countries around the world, from the 51 original member states of the United Nations to its 193 members today.
Strangely, international law as enshrined in the UN Charter appears to work against these trends, strongly privileging state borders as they are as if to freeze the world map in time. But to paraphrase Victor Hugo, there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. People can no longer be cheated (for long) out of their legitimate aspirations for self-rule.
Devolution helps to sensibly reorganize large and unwieldy post-colonial states. Take the example of India, where more than 60 years of independence have brought little development to peripheral and rural states in the east and northeast of the country. Rather than fostering economic growth outside the capital, New Delhi’s priority instead has been imposing either the Hindi (Mahatma Gandhi’s preference) or English languages across the country. But such malign neglect has only stoked devolutionary pressures. Since 1947, the number of states in the Indian federation has doubled, with the 29th (Telangana) created earlier this year. As state boundaries better conform to ethnic and linguistic boundaries, provincial units can focus more on their internal growth, rather than on having to defend themselves against the center. Notice how the second-largest contributor to Indian GDP besides Mumbai’s Maharashtra state is Tamil Nadu, the state that is geographically farthest from notoriously corrupt New Delhi.
Another accelerant of devolution is ubiquitous data. Much as modern nation-states seem to have lost their monopoly on armed forces, so too has evaporated their dominance of information flows and narratives. Call it the triumph of transparency: Whether through free media, leaks, hacks, democracy, or legal pressure, people increasingly know how their countries are run—and crucially how their money is spent. This March, participants in a nonbinding online referendum in Venice overwhelmingly supported an unofficial “declaration of independence” from Italy. The reason? Venice pays 70 billion euros in taxes per year, but receives only a fraction back in fiscal transfers, meaning support from the capital.
Catalonia, with its unique language and centuries of cultural traditions, made similar calculations with respect to Madrid and is set to vote on independence in November. Spain and Italy’s constitutions forbid secession, but to avoid severe internal unrest beyond that which has already beset them since the financial crisis, both governments will likely grant more autonomy to these important provinces. Ultimately, these upstart—or start-up—regions want the “devo-max” deal the Basques of northern Spain have: complete fiscal autonomy with no taxes paid to the capital.
Even global warming can drive devolution: As Greenland’s ice sheet melts, its 60,000 Inuit have greater access to abundant and valuable reserves of resources such as uranium and natural gas. This creates an incentive for Greenlanders to hoard the potential windfall rather than send it to Copenhagen, which has retained some governing authority over the island since Denmark seized and colonized Greenland nearly three centuries ago. The 2021 date proposed for a Greenland independence vote provides an eerie parallel to Scotland’s referendum, which took place roughly 300 years after that country joined the United Kingdom. Unlike Scotland, however, Greenland’s vote for independence wouldn’t even be close. Make way for another seat at the UN.
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Shrill warnings against devolution ignore the evidence that it is also a logical consequence of connectivity. In the days before Scotland’s independence referendum, Gordon Brown, the Scotland-born former British prime minister, made a passionate appeal to his countrymen to choose unity over independence. Scotland’s “quarrel should be with globalization, rather than England,” he said. But on whose terms should that tug-of-war for jobs be waged? Smaller states and smaller economies have less of a margin for error when it comes to their own survival. Would Scotland have outsourced its manufacturing base to Asia in the way that far-off London capitalists so enthusiastically did? Would Scotland, as politicians in London warned, really have been unable to establish its own currency within 18 months? As even the anti-independence Economist noted, 28 new central banks have been created in the past 25 years; Estonia set up its own central bank and currency in a week. A connected world—the result of Brown’s bogeyman of ‘globalization’—has turned such bureaucratic hurdles into commoditized tasks.
The more cities and provinces attain quality infrastructure—courtesy of investment from their own governments and foreigners—the more they can leverage these new capacities. In America, fiscal federalism is a crucial driver of economic dynamism. For example, Texas has made itself the most business-friendly state in the country by minimizing regulations and keeping taxes low; it now boastsan $8.8 billion surplus. California also experiments at the state level with immigration and greenhouse-gas emissions reduction policies that are best suited to its own needs and goals. Oil-rich British Columbia and gas-and-mineral-rich Western Australia have their own resource wealth funds that have propelled infrastructure investment and growth in cities such as Vancouver and Perth first, before a share of the profits is sent to the distant capitals Ottawa and Canberra.
In Europe, devolution has become a healthy form of competitive arbitrage—a perpetual negotiation to get maximum freedoms from under-performing national governments so that over-performing provinces can get on with their own priorities. An independence movement is brewing in Sardinia, for instance, that would see the already autonomous Italian island sell itself to landlocked (and far better governed) Switzerland as a maritime canton.
Can all devolution be handled so peacefully? With all the world’s terrain claimed, one’s gain (of independence) must equal another’s loss (of territorial integrity). Borders can therefore either change violently, or can be softened through devolution. Devolution is why the Basques and Quebecois are at peace today. To attempt to stem the pro-Russian rebel tide in Ukraine, the parliament in Kiev last week granted self-rule to the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk as a gesture to keep them within the Ukrainian orbit. Devolution today is thus not just a force of tribalism but a tool of peacemaking.
This kind of thinking will be necessary for remapping the Middle East as the century-old Sykes-Picot map of the region crumbles. The near-total dissolution of the Arab political cartography embodies the most severe entropy, fragmentation, and disorder. Today only the oil-rich micro-states of the Persian Gulf such as Qatar and the UAE have purchased long-term security. But we do not yet know what will replace the current Syria and Iraq—to say nothing of the Islamic State’s plans for Jordan, Lebanon, and beyond.
Yet if one rule of counterinsurgency is to find, protect, and build stable enclaves, that is also a bottom-up approach to replacing Arab colonial cartography with a more legitimate order based on smaller and more coherent islands of stability. Rather than artificial nations, the future Middle East order will likely consist of robust tribal states like Israel and Kurdistan, and urban commercial centers with mixed populations that will protect themselves and their trade routes.
Perhaps a world of smaller states would bring globalization more into balance, with each state maintaining the necessary production and jobs essential for social stability, even if not optimizing global comparative advantage. A world of smaller states might |
such as from childhood vaccines. Chelation therapy supposedly removes mercury from the body, which chelation supporters say cures autism -- but there's no evidence of a link between mercury exposure and autism. In addition, chelation therapy can be associated with serious side effects, including potentially deadly liver and kidney damage. There's no cure for autism. As a result, many unproven alternative therapies are often suggested. However, these alternative therapies are usually found to be ineffective and sometimes harmful. [Mayo Clinic, accessed 3/1/11]
Further, in her statement to Media Matters, Tran wrote that "[t]here are doctors... who have also exploit[ed] these children's famil[es] for large profits," such as by recommending "chelation of heavy metals even in those who have had no thimersol vaccines. Many parents ask me to order level metal screens and all have come back without any abnormal levels." [Media Matters, 3/2/11]
Chelation Has Also Been Shown To Be Fatal In Some Cases. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), chelation therapy was associated with at least three deaths between 2003 and 2005, including one 5-year-old boy who was being treated for autism. The CDC notes that the only drug recommended for chelation in children, CaEDTA, itself warns, "The use of this drug in any particular patient is recommended only when the severity of the clinical condition justifies the aggressive measures associated with this type of therapy." [Centers for Disease Control, 3/3/06]An European regulatory panel has recommended approval for GlaxoSmithKline’s Strimvelis, a gene therapy for the treatment of Bubble Boy disease. It would be the first children’s gene therapy approved in Europe if it receives final marketing clearance from the European Commission.
Bubble Boy disease is formally called severe combined immunodeficiency, and Strimvelis is meant to treat one form of the extremely rare ailment in patients who can’t land a suitable bone marrow donor. The condition stems from faulty genes which are inherited from both parents and inhibits the proper production of white blood cells. Left untreated, children with Bubble Boy disease usually die within one year.
Gene therapies tend to be as process-intensive as they are pricey. For instance, Strimvelis works by extracting bone marrow cells from patients, repairing them by adding the missing enzyme, and then reinserting them. The EU panel recommendation was clearly influenced by Strimvelis’ stellar clinical trial results—100% of patients treated in a clinical trial survived the condition after an average follow-up time of seven years.
It’s a method that Glaxo hopes to replicate down the line.
“Going forward, we hope to apply this gene therapy platform technology across other diseases, enabling many more patients to benefit from this innovative treatment approach,” said Patrick Vallance, president of R&D at Glaxo, in a statement.
There is just one other gene therapy with conditional approval in Europe: uniQure’s Glybera, which costs more than $1 million per treatment.
Over on this side of the pond, Spark Therapeutics (once) is closest to securing the first-ever FDA approval for a gene therapy. It had a $161 million IPO at the beginning of 2015.France is allowing free access to previously classified police and legal archives from the Vichy era, one of the darkest chapters in the history of the country when the regime collaborated with Nazi occupiers during World War II.
Starting Monday the archives can be "freely consulted" by the civil service, citizens and researchers "subject to the declassification of documents covered by national defense secrecy rules," according to an order.
The archives, many of which were already available to researchers, show the extra-legal prosecution of members of the French Resistance and proceedings against French Jews, among other things.
The Vichy regime, led by Philippe Petain (left), collaborated with Nazi Germany
The Vichy regime, led by World War I hero Philippe Petain, collaborated with the invading German army from 1940-1944. During the period, one of the most painful moments endured by the French people, the government helped the Nazis deport 76,000 Jews from its territory.
Documents dating from as late as December 31, 1960 are also covered by the new rule, provided the files relate to events that took place between September 1939 and May 1945.
Speaking to French LCI television, Gilles Morin, a French historian, said the archives would offer a window into the operation of the collaborationist regime led by Petain.
ap/se (AFP, AP)*This post should have gone up at least 48 hours ago because er, its a Christmas post, but I decided to listen to my body and just take a break, man I needed one. So apologies for this belated post, but I figured you’d understand, us being friends and all.
A couple of weeks ago, over the phone with my younger sister (also an observant Muslim like me), I had the following conversation:
Me: Have you gone shopping, been to the malls?
Her: No, but I want to, I just love seeing all the Christmas stuff
Me: Me too! I love the songs, the lights, the decorations hehehee
Her: I knoooooowwwwww….its the most wonderful time of the year!
Clearly, we have drunk deeply of the Christmas spirit kool-aid, and fatwa or no fatwa, we’re going to hold on to our unrequited love of this holiday season.
Two things I want to share with this post. First, a reprint of a Christmas blog I wrote a couple of years ago, which first appeared on Patheos. Second, at the very bottom of that piece, a gift for the readers.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS, DEAL WITH IT”
The Chaudrys always rolled with the punches during the holidays. Despite the fact that we are a Pakistani-American Muslim family, my childhood is filled with as many holiday and Christmas memories that a self-professing believer could possibly have within the boundaries of Islamic theology. We didn’t “do” interfaith, we lived it. It was good times. Things were simpler thirty-odd years ago.
I and my younger sister sang in the school choir faithfully from elementary to mid-high school. We happily took part in Christmas programs, often taking leads in certain parts due to our brown exoticism. The three wise men? Little sister and I played two of them more than once. “O Holy Night” and “Silent Night” could move me to tears, though once I was old enough to realize lines such as “Christ is the Lord” and “Son of God loves pure light” were Islamically problematic, I opted to silently move my lips without saying anything — just for those particular lines.
One year the chorus instructor decided to open Little Drummer Boy with a solo tenor. And, thanks to Punjabi hormones-gone-wild, as a 12-year-old girl, I happened to be the manliest of the seventh grade boys. No one could deeply intone “tarum pa pum pum” more impressively than me, at least not till high school when the boys section wrestled back their vocal manhood from my increasingly feminine range. Curse you puberty!
My parents were almost always present at these concerts, my mother getting dressed to the nines in mortifying shalwar-kameez suits (mom, nooooooooo!), and my dad in the Desi-dad uniform. (Button down half-sleeve shirt and dress pants, whether mowing the lawn or going to a wedding.) They were thrilled at our performances, happy I suppose that their little girls were fitting right in to the U.S. of A.
My mother, the more religiously rigorous of our parents, insisted most years to put up Christmas lights outside the house. “It is part of our religion to be happy and celebrate with our neighbors,” she’d say, and if that theory didn’t convince my dad her alternate line of attack was “December 25th is the birthday of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan! These lights are for him!”
Bottom line was my mother wanted to be part of the holiday spirit and would drag my father to neighbors holiday parties, where they wondered where the real food was and how Christians could live on cheese and crackers. They stopped going after both were pounced upon by their hosts under some well-placed mistletoe. For years my mother fumed about how my father very much enjoyed the next-door lady’s lips on his dimpled cheek.
The highlight of most years for us during the holiday season was visiting my father’s best friend, whose daughter happened to be my best friend. They were also Pakistani-American but Christian. You’ve never seen Christmas celebrated with such vigor as you will in a Punjabi household. Dholki played next to the Christmas tree? Check. Brown Santa looking suspiciously like Raja Mamu bellowing “HO, HO, OYE TERI!” Check. Holiday classics such as goat korma and tandoori chicken? Check.
Without ever having celebrated Christmas in our own home, we managed to collect many warm holiday memories. We were happy being happy with others. We enjoyed being with friends, colleagues and neighbors — seeing them laugh, giving them gifts and feeling like a collective, loving unit of humanity. There was little or no complication. We were comfortable in our faith, and we were open to sharing the joy others found in theirs.
Things have changed since then. The past decade or so has brought zealousness to many Muslims, as it has to others, which demands hyper-sensitivity to actual or perceived threats against Islamic tenets. The holiday season has become replete with Muslims across social networks warning of the sin and danger of wishing someone a “Merry Christmas,” regardless of the fact that many scholars have said it’s just fine. If there is ever a case of misplaced priorities, this is it.
It’s also a symptom of a greater illness among Muslims — missing the forest, almost every for the trees. We have become caught up in minute matters of fiqh, thinking this will please Allah (swt), instead of actively fighting for social justice. We strive to draw lines in stone between us and others, without acknowledging the Islamic imperative act with mercy, kindness and in peace with people of all faiths. We want to withdraw into our own spaces, blocking out anything and everyone that discomforts us. We forget that being ambassadors for Islam means being out there, out everywhere.
I’m getting better and better and rooting out the haraam-police (Is it wrong to call them “haram-ees?) on Facebook and from my real life, ironically drawing my own circle closer. Ugliness will always exist, but why let it into your world? I feel no threat to my faith, or to my identity by wishing others well in their time of celebration.
Every so often we are lucky enough to see public Eid greetings, which lift the spirits of Muslims, feel like a gift and give me the warm fuzzies. When my local television station flashes an “Eid Mubarak” greeting, I am pretty sure it’s not because they have suddenly embraced Islam. Likewise, wishing others a Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, or joyous Kwanzaa takes nothing from our own personal faith.
With New Year’s Day upon us, the holiday season is almost behind us; hopefully you didn’t let a contrived controversy over the words “Merry Christmas” stop you from doing what Islam commands — being kind and of the best manners. Remember that Allah (swt) judges us by our intentions. If you’re troubled by wishing others well during the holidays, you may want to check yours.
BACK TO ADNAN
We’ve raised over $37,000 for Adnan’s legal defense in the past week. I am deeply grateful to all of you for helping make that happen. We have three more weeks to raise funds online, and are yet a long way from our goal. If you loved Serial, enjoyed my blog, and think there was a miscarriage of justice, please consider giving a gift towards this fund if you haven’t already.
As I said earlier I’ll start publishing the trial transcripts, starting today with opening statements from the first trial from December 1999 (my electronic documents are broken up by day). I thought long and hard about the redaction dilemma and consulted with lawyer friends and colleagues that there would be no legal issues in publishing “as is” (and there is no legal issue with it by the way). I was wisely advised to ignore detractors (who both clamour for me to publish it all ASAP with or without redactions, but then have a shit fit when I mistakenly leave a name unredacted from previous documents), and instead see what my friends, colleagues, and Adnan’s supporters think, because they’re actually the only ones that matter to me.
So I crowdsourced the question on Facebook, and that actually helped me really suss out what my dilemma was.
Most of the responses said to publish without redactions (by the way, anyone can follow me on Facebook, and this post was public so the responses are open for public viewing), but a few voices I respect very much said to redact. Here is where my problem lies: I don’t want to expose people to harassment by internet trolls (though I second guess that too because my name is public, my brother is public, Adnan’s family is public, and really Jay and Jen are public names already too, and no one has been harassing the people I personally know), and at the same time the witnesses in this case are the people whose testimony sent an innocent 17 year old to prison for life. I don’t feel like I owe them anything; I feel like they owe Adnan and his family, at a minimum, being able to face public scrutiny for their testimony.
So here is where I’ve come down on the situation. I’m going to only redact the last names of witnesses who were kids in high school at the time of the murder or are vulnerable (Neighbor Boy, Mr. S, Nisha – particularly these three because of how Sarah has framed their situations to me), No one else gets redacted.
Here is the transcript for December 9, 1999, which opens with remaining voire dire issues and concludes with the opening statements of the prosecution and defense counsel.
OpeningStatements1What is Ovulation?
Ovulation is when a mature egg is released from the ovary, pushed down the fallopian tube, and is made available to be fertilized.
Approximately every month an egg will mature within one of your ovaries. As it reaches maturity, the egg is released by the ovary where it enters the fallopian tube to make its way towards waiting for sperm and the uterus.
The lining of the uterus has thickened to prepare for the fertilized egg. If no conception occurs, the uterine lining, as well as blood, will be shed.
The shedding of an unfertilized egg and the uterine wall is the time of menstruation.
The President of the American Pregnancy Association wrote the book, the Essential Guide to Getting Pregnant, specifically to help those who were trying to get pregnant. The book shares what each couple needs to know to maximize their chances to conceive.
Fairhaven Health is a corporate sponsor and they provide effective and affordable ovulation prediction tools. You can learn more here.
Key Facts of Ovulation:
An egg lives 12-24 hours after leaving the ovary. Click To Tweet
Normally only one egg is released each time of ovulation Click To Tweet
Ovulation can be affected by stress, illness or disruption of normal routines. Click To Tweet
Some women may experience some light blood or spotting during ovulation. Click To Tweet
Implantation of a fertilized egg normally takes place 6-12 days after ovulation. Click To Tweet
Each woman is born with millions of immature eggs that are awaiting ovulation to begin. Click To Tweet
A menstrual period can occur even if ovulation has not occurred. Click To Tweet
Ovulation can occur even if a menstrual period has not occurred. Click To Tweet
Some women can feel a bit of pain or aching near the ovaries during ovulation called mittelschmerz, which means'middle pain' in German Click To Tweet
If an egg is not fertilized, it disintegrates and is absorbed into the uterine lining. Click To Tweet
How To Track Ovulation:
A woman’s monthly cycle is measured from the first day of her menstrual period until the first day of her next period.
On average, a woman’s cycle normally is between 28-32 days, but some women may have much shorter or much longer cycles.
Ovulation can be calculated by starting with the first day of the last menstrual period (LMP) or by calculating 12-16 days from the next expected period.
Most women ovulate anywhere between Day 11 – Day 21 of their cycle, counting from the first day of the LMP.
This is what many refer to as the “fertile time” of a woman’s cycle because sexual intercourse during this time increases the chance of pregnancy.
Ovulation can occur at various times during a cycle and may occur on a different day each month. It is important to track your cycle and fortunately, there are a number of free fertility charting tools available to help women identify their peak fertile days.
If you are trying to get pregnant, this eBook shows you the quickest and easiest way: Essential Guide to Getting Pregnant
The Ovulation Cycle Divided Into Two Parts:
The first part of the ovulation cycle is called the follicular phase. This phase starts the first day of the last menstrual period (LMP) and continues until ovulation.
This first half of the cycle can differ greatly for each woman lasting anywhere from 7 days to 40 days.
The second half of the cycle is called the luteal phase and is from the day of ovulation until the next period begins. The luteal phase has a more precise timeline and usually is only 12-16 days from the day of ovulation.
This ultimately means that the day of ovulation will determine how long your cycle is.
This also means that outside factors like stress, illness, and disruption of normal routine can throw off your ovulation which then results in changing the time your period will come.
So the old thought that stress can affect your period is only partly true. Stress can affect your ovulation which ultimately determines when your period will come, but stress around the time of an expected period will not make it late—it was already determined when it would come 12-16 days earlier!
Fertility Awareness is one way to track when ovulation occurs, and it includes studying the changes in cervical mucus and using a basal thermometer.
Cervical fluid will change to a wet, slippery substance that resembles “egg whites” just before ovulation occurs and until ovulation is over. A basal thermometer helps track a body temperature rise, which signals that ovulation has just occurred.
Another way to track ovulation is through ovulation kits and fertility monitors. These can be Purchased Online safely and affordable.
Tracking ovulation can help a woman get a better idea of when pregnancy can and cannot occur during her monthly cycle.
Once ovulation has occurred, there is nothing you can do to increase your chances of pregnancy. Your next step is to begin watching for early pregnancy symptoms. View and print an Ovulation Calendar to better understand your menstruation cycle and ovulation.
From the Menstrual Period to Ovulation (the details you may not know!)
When your menstrual cycle begins, your estrogen levels are low. Your hypothalamus (which is in charge of maintaining your hormone levels) sends out a message to your pituitary gland which then sends out the follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). This FSH triggers a few of your follicles to develop into mature eggs.
One of these will develop into the dominant follicle, which will release a mature egg and the others will disintegrate.
As the follicles mature they send out another hormone, estrogen. The high levels of estrogen will tell the hypothalamus and pituitary gland that there is a mature egg.
A luteinizing hormone (LH) is then released, referred to as your LH surge. The LH surge causes the egg to burst through the ovary wall within 24-36 hours and begin its journey down the fallopian tube for fertilization.
Ovulation Predictor Kits (OPKs) work by detecting this LH surge.
The follicle from which the egg was released is called the corpus luteum, and it will release progesterone that helps thicken and prepare the uterine lining for implantation.
The corpus luteum will produce progesterone for about 12-16 days (the luteal phase of your cycle.) If an egg is fertilized, the corpus luteum will continue to produce progesterone for a developing pregnancy until the placenta takes over.
You can begin looking for pregnancy symptoms as early as a week after fertilization. You can also begin testing for pregnancy as early as 7-10 days past your ovulation date with an Early Detection Pregnancy Test.
If fertilization does not occur the egg dissolves after 24 hours. At this time your hormone levels will decrease and your uterine lining will begin to shed about 12-16 days from ovulation.
This is menstruation (menstrual period) and brings us back to day 1 of your cycle. The journey then begins all over again.
The timing of ovulation is one of the most important things a woman should understand about her body since it is the determining factor in getting pregnant and preventing pregnancy.
If you are trying to get pregnant, get the eBook guide that makes it quick and easy, the Essential Guide to Getting Pregnant.
The process can be confusing and somewhat overwhelming when trying to understand, but the book above makes it easy to understand and shows you what you need when trying to conceive.
The Association recommends using an ovulation kit or fertility monitor to maximize your chances and to confirm when your ovulation is occurring. There are many frequently asked questions about the ovulation process, and the Association has attempted to address those for you.
If you still have further questions regarding ovulation, we encourage you to either talk with your healthcare provider or contact the American Pregnancy Association for more information.
Being informed about what your body does can help you feel more in charge of your health. If you need assistance in tracking ovulation, you can order ovulation kits or ovulation monitors online here: Order an ovulation kit nowAlthough U.S. troops have gone to war many times since 1776, Congress has only declared war 11 times.
Tuesday is the anniversary of the first resolution, which declared war on Great Britain on June 17, 1812, just a couple of decades after the American Revolution. Unlike subsequent declarations, which were passed unanimously or nearly so, going to war against Great Britain was by no means assured. The Senate passed the resolution by a vote of 19-13 and the House passed it by a vote of 79-49, drawing much of the opposition from northeastern states, according to the House of Representatives Clerk’s Office. The war ended about two-and-a-half years later, on Dec. 24, 1814, with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.
Below are images of each of the declarations of war passed by Congress, available from the National Archives through the Senate website. Only three of the declarations did not involve countries associated with World War I or World War II.
Declaration of war with Great Britain (passed June 17, 1812)
Declaration of war with Mexico (passed May 12, 1846)
Declaration of war with Spain (passed April 25, 1898)
Declaration of war with Germany (passed April 6, 1917)
Declaration of war with Austria-Hungary (passed Dec. 7, 1917)
Declaration of war with Japan (passed Dec. 8, 1941)
Declaration of war with Germany (passed Dec. 11, 1941)
Declaration of war with Italy (passed Dec. 11, 1941)
Declaration of war with Bulgaria (passed June 4, 1942)
Declaration of war with Hungary (passed June 4, 1942)
Declaration of war with Rumania (now Romania; passed June 4, 1942)New regulations permit officers to use deadly force as a first option against Palestinians throwing stones or shooting fireworks.
Israeli police revealed primary sections of its updated open-fire regulations on 29 June 2016 in response to a court petition by Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel submitted in December 2015.
The regulations were updated and distributed to officers in December 2015 but remained classified and police refused to reveal them to the public until now.
The new regulations, vetted and authorized by Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, permit officers – as an initial option, preceding any earlier attempt to employ non-lethal weapons – to open fire with live ammunition on those throwing stones or firebombs, and on those shooting fireworks.
An Israeli police officer aims his weapon at Palestinians during a protest near Jerusalem. (Photo by Mati Milstein)
According to the new police regulations, "an officer is permitted to open fire [with live ammunition] directly on an individual who clearly appears to be throwing or is about to throw a firebomb, or who is shooting or is about to shoot fireworks, in order to prevent endangerment." It is further specified that, "stone throwing using a slingshot" is also an example of the sort of situation, which would justify the fatal use of live ammunition.
Despite releasing parts of its updated open-fire regulations to Adalah, the police still nevertheless refuse to reveal significant sections of the regulations. These censored sections likely deal with regulations concerning the use of the Ruger rifle and with the handling offenses categorized as security-related in nature.
Adalah stated that as long as the Israeli police do not reveal its open-fire regulations in their entirety, it would continue to demand a court hearing and decision on the matter.
Adalah Attorney Mohammad Bassam, who prepared the petition demanding that the police reveal its open-fire regulations, emphasized that, "The new regulations allow officers to act in an unchecked and criminal manner. The chances that actions such as stone throwing or shooting of fireworks would present a life-threatening danger are extremely slim and there is no doubt that it is possible to handle such situations using non-lethal means. Nevertheless, the new regulations relate to such actions as if they were acts of war and grant legitimacy to light-trigger fingers [among officers], thus posing a fatal danger to the lives of young Palestinians. The new regulations contradict existing general guidelines according to which the use of a deadly weapon by officers is permitted only when there is substantiated fear of danger to the life of an officer or other individual, and only if there is no other means by which this danger may be prevented. In addition, it is clear that the regulations do not refer to just any stone throwers but that they were written specifically regarding Palestinian youths."
On 10 December 2015, Adalah filed an administrative petition with the Lod District Court demanding that the Israeli police publicly reveal its updated open-fire regulations.
The court petition came in the wake of the police's earlier refusal to release to Adalah certain details of its open-fire regulations, including: regulations according to which officers operate when confronting demonstrations in East Jerusalem and the Naqab/Negev; regulations dealing with the use of live ammunition against minors; and regulations dealing with use of the Ruger rifle as a protest-dispersal weapon.
"Following the alteration of the open-fire regulations – and potentially as a result of such – there were a number of cases in which it is suspected that police personnel fired lethal weapons in situations that did not justify their use," Attorney Bassam wrote in the petition.
Case Citation: Administrative Petition 23001-12-15, Adalah v. Israel Police (case pending).
READ the new Israeli police open-fire regulations (Hebrew)The San Francisco 49ers agreed to terms today with Anquan Boldin on a new two-year contract that will keep the wide receiver in town through 2015. As is the case with notable contracts, the 49ers made Boldin available to the media on a conference call. And naturally, he was asked about the rumored Jim Harbaugh locker room issues.
Boldin said he normally doesn't pay much attention to sports media during the offseason, but he heard about the Harbaugh stuff yesterday. He said his initial reaction was to laugh at it. He said he does not think there is any rift, and he has not heard any griping in the locker room. He stated that there is an open door policy in the locker room that can allow for gripes to be heard. He said Harbaugh wanted to win, and the team was on board with his mentality.
While this will not shut down the naysayers, I do think it shows us that while there might be some complaining, it's not as bad as columnists would have us believe. Boldin is a well respected veteran who is not going to put up with crap from players getting in the way of winning a Super Bowl. A few players might have a problem, but I really don't think it's some toxic atmosphere that is going to tear apart the locker room.
This is not the end of this story, but it's nice getting some comments about it on the record. The Florios of the world will look for other sources for information, but I am plenty happy with what Boldin had to say. He is the kind of guy who will shut down a few complainers and try and keep the team focused on the big prize.69 SHARES Share Tweet
Estimated Reading Time | 3 Minutes
The Challenge:
Take a 5-minute cold shower in the morning, every day for 30 days.
Benefits Of Cold Showers:
Bulletproof your body (boost immune system, significant reduction in chance of sickness)
Happier
Tougher body (ability to climatize to cold conditions)
Wake up faster and feel fresher
Supercharge fat loss
Increased motivation
Become hard as nails!
Scroll down to the bottom and click on the ‘Start Challenge’ button to take the challenge or read on to find out my experience and how it can improve your life.
My Experience And Benefits Of Cold Showers
Forcing yourself into an ice cold shower every morning is pretty sadistic and most people I’ve spoken to about it have responded with an empirical “No chance!”.
However, if you can break through the initial brutality and survive the first week, there are some serious benefits of cold showers and you really can begin to bulletproof your body.
Here’s what happened to me.
Toughen Up
Being an Englishman, it’s so cold in the winter you’d thank someone for spilling a hot coffee on you.
So the notion of getting into a freezing shower is hardly appealing.
But get this.
Studies show that regular exposure to ice cold water actually increases the number of immune system cells in your body.
And it worked for me.
Usually, I get ill every winter. But after showering in cold water for 30 days (and I continue to do it to this day) there were times where I started to feel ill but the next day I was completely fine.
It’s like my immune system morphed into a formidable beast that couldn’t be messed with.
Now I feel more alert, healthier and my body truly has become a temple.
Wake Up
I’ve always been the sort that feels like they’ve been beaten round the head with a pickaxe every morning, not knowing where I am or what I’m doing.
But hitting a cold shower in the morning is the fastest way to throw your mind into gear and feel ready to smash the day.
The first one is painful, but push past the minute mark and the water will no longer feel as cold. It kind of eventually feels warm and dare I say it, pleasurable.
You’ll walk out feeling fresh and invigorated with much more motivation.
Cheer Up
Every time I got out of the shower I felt like a million dollars. I wanted to do naked cartwheels to the bedroom.
Why?
Because studies show exposure to cold water can increase your dopamine levels (the ‘love’ chemical found in your brain) by 500 percent.
This boosted my mood throughout the day.
Cut Up
Now for the simple science bit.
Research shows that cold showers stimulate brown fat, a type of fat that burns extra calories.
So by taking cold showers you are literally burning calories.
You’re getting ripped and tougher all in the space of five intense minutes.
I have noticed a small amount of fat loss since taking cold showers, however I think I’d need to consistently do this long-term while blending them with workouts to really see the results.
Conclusion
There you have it. There are a host of warrior benefits of cold showers. They bulletproof your body, make you happier and get you shredded.
So do you have the balls to start the 30 Day Cold Shower challenge?
Click the button below.FOUR people died becoming trapped in a submerged cave near the tourist Italian port of Palinuro at the weekend the coastguard revealed.
FOUR people died becoming trapped in a submerged cave near the tourist Italian port of Palinuro at the weekend the coastguard revealed.
Douglas Rizzo, who was born in London but had been living in Rome, is believed to have been the leader of a party of divers who lost their bearings after kicking up mud from the floor of the "Blood Grotto", a popular destination with amateur divers because of its red walls, caused by a bacterial growth.
According to Italian investigators the group missed the exit to the cave after becoming confused and instead entered a nearby tunnel which led to a chamber with a dead end.
An Italian magistrate has opened an inquiry into the accident at the seaside resort south of Naples. Authorities identified the victims as Rizzo, 41, who leaves a wife and six-month old son, Andrea Pedroni, 40, from Rome, Greek-born Panaiotis Telios, 23, from Reggio Calabria, and Susy Covaccini, 36, also from Rome.
Massimo Ruggiero, the coastguard commander in Palinuro, said: "The entrance to the cave is through a tunnel at a depth of 13 to 14 metres. The group should then have swum up to a higher tunnel and made their exit from the cave through that.
"Beneath this channel there is another tunnel that leads to a dead end in a chamber with a sandy floor. All the victims were found there."
Marco Sebastiani, one of four other divers who survived the tragedy said he realised something was wrong when he saw their guide showing signs of agitation, but at that point it was too late.
"We suddenly found ourselves in a blind tunnel. We couldn't see anything. At that point it was panic. The agitation of the least experienced took hold. Mud and sand came up from the bottom of the cave and visibility was gone," Mr Sebastiani told Il Messaggero newspaper.
"At a certain point I managed to find my way. I took as many people as I could with me and we swam towards the light, which grew bigger all the time. When I came up, I looked around to count us and I realised that Susy, Andrea, Douglas and Panos weren't there."
Roberto Navarra, the diving school owner who provided the group's equipment, confirmed yesterday (Sunday) that four of the group had swum into the wrong tunnel.
"It's an easy cave but there is a dangerous tunnel that people never use. Four people swam into that channel," Mr Navarra told reporters.
He said he had tried repeatedly to save the missing divers but "the visibility was terrible. You could see nothing".
Mr Navarra said the group was correctly equipped and carried torches. "Unfortunately there was not one, but an incredible series of negative circumstances. Now we are all shocked and saddened."
Valter Ciociano, an expert diver from nearby Marina di Camerota, said many of the 35 underwater caves that draw divers to the area have muddy bottoms. "Often when you go in, the water is clear and you don't notice that your flippers are muddying the water behind you, creating what seems an impenetrable wall. On these occasions it's panic that rules the day."
The underwater caves do sometimes contain small air pockets under the roof, but experts say they are no guarantee of safety. In many cases the air would not be breathable because of the presence of poisonous hydrogen sulphide fumes.
Telegraph.co.ukRoy Halladay and the Hall of Fame
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He never flinched. Roy Halladay had only faced two batters, yet was already trailing by a run. The less-than-ideal situation became even more so as the most feared slugger in the game strode to the plate. But the man standing on the bump for the Philadelphia Phillies that night was not just any pitcher.
On Friday, October 7, 2011, an overflow crowd gathered at Citizens Bank Park to watch the fifth and deciding game of the National League Division Series. What they were about to witness was the greatest pitcher’s duel in a generation.
We are just a couple days away from the announcement of the 2017 class of the baseball Hall of Fame. Halladay will be on the ballot in 2019. There seems to be a debate whether he is a Hall of Famer. Not only does he belong in Cooperstown, but on the first ballot. Let’s take a look back.
To truly appreciate the greatness of the pitcher, one must go back to the beginning of his professional career. The Toronto Blue Jays selected the lanky right-hander in the first round (17th overall pick) of the 1995 amateur draft. He made his major-league debut three years later. His second career start was a preview of future dominance.
Sunday, September 28, 1998, was the final game of the season. Halladay faced the Detroit Tigers on that warm, early-autumn afternoon. By the ninth inning, the Tigers were undoubtedly ready for their offseason to commence. From the very first pitch of the game, Halladay began mowing the Tigers down with laser-like precision.
As Halladay took the mound in the top of the ninth inning, the Tigers were still searching for their first base hit. The 21-year-old, baby-faced rookie was three outs away from history. All that stood in the way of a perfecto was a fifth inning error. Halladay made quick work of the first two batters in the ninth before pinch-hitter Bobby Higginson walked to the plate. One out away!
Higginson had other ideas – he lined an opposite-field home run. No-hitter and shutout gone with one swing of the bat. Halladay retired the next batter to complete the masterpiece. Eight strikeouts, no walks, and nary a hard hit ball. All in a tidy one hour and 45 minutes.
While the 1999 season began with great promise for the young right-hander, it ended with mixed results. Halladay spent most of the season shuttling between the starting rotation and the bullpen. While his numbers were respectable, they were unbecoming |
as high as is predicted, the emissions from commercial trucking alone will jeopardize the world’s chance of meeting key climate-stabilization targets,” according to the War Room report.
All this helps explain why, while past work has largely focused on getting particulates out of the air and people’s lungs, in recent years, the war on soot has shifted into one on greenhouse gases.
In 2011, the Obama administration rolled out the first ever fuel-efficiency rules for Class 8 trucks, the heaviest vehicles on the road. The rules require some of the heavy-duty vehicles to improve fuel efficiency 23% by 2018, and call for up to a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions from 2010 baselines by 2017. The administration claims the rules will save truck users $50bn in avoided fuel costs over the trucks’ lifetimes. Even tougher standards are expected to be finalized next year.
The standards are driving a market for new technologies, such as driverless trucks, speed-limiting engines and what’s called “automated manual” transmission, that could help make trucking more fuel-efficient.
Truckingefficiency.org, a product of NACFE and Carbon War Room, late last year listed roughly 70 technologies that could help reduce emissions and cut fuel consumption.
If 40 of those devices and driver strategies were employed together, it could cut a truck’s average annual fuel cost of $70,000 almost in half, said Mike Roeth, trucking operations lead at the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, which is partnering with Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room to make trucking more fuel efficient.
Google's'moonshots': should more companies embrace this bold business thinking? Read more
Just seven of the most significant technologies, used in concert, could prevent the release of 624m tons of CO2 emissions by 2022 – and save an average of $25,400 per truck per year, according to the War Room report.
Driverless trucks
Daimler AG unveiled a prototype driverless truck at last year’s International Commercial Vehicles show in Hannover, Germany, for example. With a sleek, extended tractor front and an array of LED lights that replace traditional headlights, Daimler claims its Future Truck 2025 could be the next generation in trucking – and could reduce fuel consumption and related emissions while improving safety.
The big rig bristles with communications technology: it navigates using its Highway Pilot system, enabled by a collection of cameras and radar sensors, while continuously transmitting its position to other drivers and traffic control centers. For times when it has a driver behind the wheel, the truck also has a Blind Spot Assist feature to help with lane changing and to alert drivers about other vehicles and stationary objects on the road.
From a technology standpoint, anyway, driverless trucks may not be far off: many cars on the road today already have collision and lane-changing assistance, and manufacturers are increasingly installing collision-avoidance systems to help stabilize trucks when they are at risk of rolling over – and to warn drivers when they are drifting out of their lanes.
For trucks already on the road, manufacturers are working to reduce idling time, which can eat up half a truck’s operational time and 8% of its fuel. Drivers often leave their truck engines idling in order to heat or cool their vehicles while they sleep, but some new engines automatically shut down when the weather isn’t hot or cold enough to warrant running the heating or air conditioning.
How Georgia became the biggest electric vehicle market in the US Read more
“It’s really small gains across the whole truck, a lot of small opportunities,” said Mike Roeth, trucking operations lead at the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, which partners with Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room to make trucking more fuel efficient.
Automated manual transmissions
By adopting many of these solutions, some fleets – notably Freightliner’s Cascadia Evolution – have managed to top nine miles per gallon, compared to the long-standing industry average of six mpg. A demonstration truck from Peterbuilt Motors has reached 10.7 mpg.
The Evolution line itself has evolved its efficiency features from 2007, when it first arrived on the scene. In 2014, it added what’s called “automated manual transmissions” to all of its trucks.
Unlike fully automatic transmissions, which use hydraulic pressure – and a torque converter – to change gears, automated manual transmissions transmit power through metal gears, which makes them more fuel efficient.
These transmissions, which – like automatic transmissions – take the responsibility for shifting gears away from drivers, are more expensive, but can vastly increase efficiency. TJ Reed, Freightliner’s director of product strategy, said that their widespread use has been a game changer for the company.
“We were fully ramped up in 2014 and it’s really amazing. The market is significantly switching from manuals,” Reed told the Guardian. “The concept of running at a lower RPM, that’s going to be a key driver of fuel economy in the future and the automated manual transmission is a technology that enables that.”
Shared shipping is slowly gaining ground between market rivals Read more
‘The human factor’
While Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz group expects its autonomous trucks to appear on roadways by 2025, others caution that it will take years before they enjoy a substantial presence. “We’re still going to have the human factor, at least for the foreseeable future,” said Yishai Horn, head of marketing for Green Road, a maker of trucking components for short- and long-haul companies.
Green Road works with companies to improve driver performance by providing real-time warnings about unsafe or inefficient driving and poor fuel efficiency resulting from high speeds and excessive idling. This sort of attention has led not only to better fuel economy and savings, but also to fewer collisions, Horn said.
These advances – particularly increased automation – could result in a major improvement in road safety. Sleepy truck drivers, bad brakes and the sheer size of tractor trailers contribute to thousands of deaths per year – 3,602 in 2013 – from truck crashes on US roadways, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
That’s down from 3,992 deaths in truck-related crashes in 1997 and more than 4,000 in 1979. According to Eric Teoh, a senior statistician at the IIHS, some of that reduction may be due to the growing use of speed limiting devices, which, he said, may become federally mandated in the near future.
“We haven’t studied [speed limiters] directly, but we know that as speed goes up so do the risk of crashing and the severity of crashes,” he said. A recent IIHS report concludes that the use of a combination of four crash avoidance features could prevent one of every five fatal crashes.
Are the robots taking over?
Behind all these gains stands automation, Roeth said. “You can spend a lot of time training a driver to shift at the right point, not accelerating so much, and [limiting] speed,” he said. “Or you can do an automated manual transmission, which will shift when it should. You can program the engine so it can’t speed over 65 miles an hour. And you can severely limit some of the actions the driver can take with regard to acceleration.”
“We’re moving from drivers having a lot of work to do, to less work to do, to basically nothing to do,” he said.
Well, not exactly nothing.
Driverless cars - the future of transport in cities? Read more
“The driver is the boss in the cab,” Uta Leitner, head of product communication for trucks at Daimler, said of Future Truck 2025. “It must always remain possible for the driver to resume manual control.”
Some jobs will remain purely manual affairs, she said, such as passing other vehicles and exiting the highway. “The driver can always decide freely whether to take personal control or leave things to the technology.”
Leitner offers an interesting vision of the meeting of man and machine. But if recent gains are any indication, the message is fairly clear: for more fuel savings, let the robot drive.
The technology and innovation hub is funded by BT. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled “brought to you by”. Find out more here.House conservatives who have stalled legislation to raise the national debt limit are angry that it includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants, which some compare to welfare.
Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly appropriate $9 billion for Pell Grants in 2012 and another $8 billion in 2013.
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This has shocked some conservative House freshmen who say they were elected to cut spending, not increase it. Some House Republicans think of it as being akin to welfare.“I really don’t understand why we’re increasing spending in a bill supposed to be cutting spending,” said Rep. Andy Harris, a freshman Republican from Maryland. “It was negotiated without the input of a lot of members.”Harris has indicated tothat he will vote no.House Republican leaders say they included concessions to Democrats in efforts to forge a compromise that could pass both chambers.“This is a compromise piece of legislation that was negotiated between the Speaker and the bipartisan leadership in the Senate,” House Majority Leader(R-Va.) told reporters Thursday afternoon.One major concession is the establishment of a select joint committee to assemble another deficit-reduction package later in the 112th Congress.“The joint select committee is something that came from the Democrats. We don’t have all the cuts we like in this bill but we’re willing to compromise,” Cantor said.The inclusion of the extra money for Pell Grants could cost Republican votes.Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) has compared Pell Grants to “welfare”."So you can go to college on Pell Grants — maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it’s turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century," Rehberg told Blog Talk Radio in April. "You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, Section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college.”Rehberg has not said how he will vote on’s bill.Rep.(R-Ariz.), who has not revealed his position, said the Pell Grants have “been part of the discussion” among conservatives who are debating whether to support the bill.
House GOP leaders postponed a vote on the plan Thursday evening because of opposition within their conference.
Funding Pell Grants has been a top priority for President Obama. In his 2012 budget blueprint, the president sought to preserve the maximum grant at nearly $5,550 a year.This week Iraq emerged from the recesses of American memory and became a hot topic of conversation. Alarming headlines about ISIS’s “takeover” of Mosul and their march towards Baghdad have elicited a number of reactions: The most conservative call for direct US military action against ISIS to ensure that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki remains stable in Baghdad. The most liberal lament the ongoing violence and divisions in Iraqi society caused by the US occupation; though they make no attempt distinguish between the violence of ISIS and the violence of the Maliki government.
This range of ideas and perspectives is fascinating, and it says much about American war culture, but mostly for the ideas and perspectives that are omitted from this debate. Entirely absent is the perspective of Iraqis and the issues that are important to them: accountability, independence, and resistance. Moreover, the real complexities of this issue have been lost in a number of the Western media’s favorite binaries: terrorism vs. counterterrorism, good vs. evil, and insurgency vs. stability.
If we dare to take Iraqi voices seriously and think outside of the dominant framework presented to us by the mainstream media, a very different picture of the violence in Iraq emerges and a whole new range of options open up for achieving peace and justice.
The Rise of ISIS
One year ago ISIS was concentrated in Syria, with almost no presence in Iraq. During this time, a nonviolent protest movement, which called itself the Iraqi Spring, was in full swing with widespread support in the Sunni provinces and significant support from the Shia provinces as well. This movement set up nonviolent protest camps in many cities throughout Iraq for nearly the entire year of 2013. They articulated a set of demands calling for an end to the marginalization of Sunnis within the new Iraqi democracy, reform of an anti-terrorism law that was being used label political dissent as terrorism, abolition of the death penalty, an end to corruption, and they positioned themselves against federalism and sectarianism too. <
Instead of making concessions to the protestors and defusing their rage, Prime Minister Maliki mocked their demands chose to use military force to attack them on numerous occasions. Over the course of a year, the protestors were assaulted, murdered, and their leaders were assassinated, but they remained true to their adopted tactic of nonviolence. That is, until Prime Minister Maliki sent security forces to clear the protest camps in Fallujah and Ramadi in December of 2013. At that point the protestors lost hope in the tactic of nonviolence and turned to armed resistance instead.
It is important to note that from the beginning it was the tribal militias who took the lead in the fight against the Iraqi government. ISIS arrived a day later to aid Fallujans in their fight, but also to piggy-back on the success of the tribal fighters in order to promote their own political goals.
A command structure was set up in Fallujah within the first weeks of fighting. It consisted primarily of tribal leaders and former army officials and went by the name of the General Military Council for Iraqi Revolutionaries. This council was led by Sheikh Abdullah Janabi, who also led the the Shura Council of Mujihadeen in Fallujah in 2004. After the 2nd US-led assault on Fallujah, Janabi fled to Syria, but returned to Iraq in 2011. His calls for cooperation between the various militant factions in Fallujah was a significant unifying factor.
Yet despite the glaring differences between the various militant groups in Fallujah, the Iraqi government insists on treating all fighters as terrorists. A government official said it clearly to Reuters, “if anyone insists on fighting our forces, he will be considered an [ISIS] militant whether he is or not.” The Iraqi government launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign that to date has killed 443 civilians and has wounded 1657 in Fallujah, and has displaced over 50,922 families from Anbar Province as a whole. The Fallujah hospital has been targeted numerous times, and residential neighborhoods have been bombed and shelled daily for six months. Struan Stevenson, President of European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq, wrote an open letter calling the Iraqi government’s operation “genocidal”.
Over the course of the months of fighting with the government, ISIS has grown in strength. Their access to funds and weapons has made them an attractive group to young Sunnis who see no future for themselves in Iraq as long as Maliki remains in power. Many of the recruits who have joined ISIS are the same men who were nonviolent protestors one year earlier. Many of them remain opposed to the ideas of federalism and sectarians—ideas which are central to ISIS’s political platform. What unites them and the hardcore ideologues within ISIS is their desperation to be rid of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who has left them with no choice but to operate outside of the political system in order to better their lives in Iraq.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts
Insurgency or Revolution?
This week the media buzzed with the news that ISIS had captured Mosul, the 2nd largest city in Iraq, and was prepared to march towards Baghdad. Two assumptions in these reports went unexamined: that ISIS had been a lone actor and that Mosul had been “captured” rather than liberated.
While the first assumption is a matter of fact, the latter is a matter of perspective. It was noted in the New York Times that ISIS had collaborated with several local militias in Mosul, including Baathist and Islamist groups; although the significance of such a fact went understated. If one further acknowledges that ISIS has cooperated and continues to cooperate with several militias in several Iraqi cities, it begins to appear that ISIS is not a lone actor in Iraq, attempting to capture territory for a future Islamic state. Rather, it appears that ISIS is just one faction in a larger popular rebellion against the government of Nouri al Maliki.
When 500,000 residents of Mosul fled their city earlier this week, they did not do so out of fear that ISIS would subject them to sharia courts. They did so out of fear of their government’s reprisal. Many have even expressed gratitude towards the fighters who kicked Maliki’s security forces out of their city.
This loose coalition of militias—from the tribal militias in Fallujah, to Baathist militias like Naqshabandi, and Islamist groups like ISIS—have come to embody the hopes and aspirations of Sunnis in Iraq to one day be free of Maliki’s oppression. For them there is no other option, no other future is imaginable, and there is no turning back.
A Path Forward
President Obama has announced that the US would not intervene in Iraq until the Iraqi government made concessions to the disenfranchised Sunni community within Iraq. However, the US has already increased its “intelligence and surveillance assistance” and has shown no sign of decreasing its supply of arms to the Iraqi government. While publicly criticizing the Maliki government’s sectarian policies, the US has been aiding and facilitating this “genocide” against the Sunni population for months.
The impunity of the Maliki government is never questioned in the debate raging within the US. It is simply unimaginable within the limits of this debate that Maliki might be held accountable for the war crimes his regime has committed against his own people. Equally unimaginable is the notion that his regime should fall and that Iraqis should be able to dismantle the constitution and the institutions that the US-led occupation imposed on them.
We must take seriously the legitimacy of Sunni resistance, while at the same time taking seriously the fear that a group like ISIS elicits in Shia Iraqis. These fractured communities within Iraq must decide their own future, without the interference of Washington or Tehran. Most importantly for us, as Americans, we must make an effort to analyze this issue outside of the paradigm of US political thought and try to see this issue through the eyes of those most affected by it. We must respect their ideas and values, their politics and culture, and their right to determine their own future, unimpeded by foreign interference.Share. Good luck getting one. Good luck getting one.
UPDATE: A spokesperson for Target reached out to IGN to clarify that the Jigglypuff amiibo, while being a Target exclusive, will be available both online and in Target stores on May 29. Pre-orders went up yesterday and quickly sold out. We reported erroneously that the amiibo was online-only in the original article below, but the item will still be available on release day at both Target stores and online.
Nintendo's Jigglypuff amiibo will be exclusive to Target's online store in North America.
According to a listing on the retailer's website, the NFC-enabled pink figurine can only be purchased through Target, and will not be sold in stores. You can put in your pre-order right now, with an expected ship date of "on or near" May 29.
Exit Theatre Mode
During last night's Nintendo Direct, the company announced that the next wave of Super Smash Bros. amiibo is coming in May. This upcoming batch includes Robin, Lucina, Wario, Pac-Man, Charizard, and Ness, who we discovered will be exclusive to GameStop.
For all of the news that came out of yesterday's Nintendo Direct, check out our comprehensive roundup.
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN and lover of all things Pokémon. You can follow him on Twitter @alexcosborn.Some people are fans of the New Orleans Saints. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New Orleans Saints. This 2012 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read the other Why Your Team Sucks 2012 previews here.
1. "Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?" Even though this is the Internet and even though column space on the Internet can scroll on forever, there STILL isn't enough room here to express how badly the Saints buttfucked their way through this entire offseason. It's one thing to have a super-top-secret bounty program in place for years and years and years (despite the fact that players come and go to other teams regularly and can blab about it at any time). It's another thing to put that program IN WRITING, to have your begunted nutjob of a defensive coordinator codify your bounty program into a series of slides that make the average Tripod site look current. How fucking stupid do you have to be to let this go on? Don't you know that the Ginger Hammer is just waiting to wipe his freckled scrotum all over anyone who dares cause the world to notice that football is a violent sport? IDIOTS.
And the best part about all this is that the Saints doubled down on the stupid and handed the interim head coaching job to a guy who is himself serving a six-game suspension. Then they got into a contract squabble with Drew Brees, who is only the most important player the franchise has ever had and probably will ever have. It's as if, in January, the Saints looked at themselves and were like, "Jesus, we've gotten wayyy too functional and successful. THAT'S NOT WHAT THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS ARE ALL ABOUT GUMBO ANDOUILLE SAUSAGE!" And then they spent next few weeks cramming in as many bad decisions as they could so that they could reclaim their identity as the most incompetent team in football. Unfuckingbelievable. This will be the most senseless 9-7 season in NFL history. Also, Drew Brees is going bald.
Drew Magary writes for Deadspin and Gawker. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at drew@deadspin.com.
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2. DURRR I'M A SAINTS FANS GUMBO GUMBO CRAWDAD GUMBO. I always like to goof on friends I know from NOLA for continually thrusting their Cajunness upon everyone, but they're not alone among New Orleans natives (and transplants for that matter) who spend every goddamn waking hour telling you how much more special their culture is than yours. Well, I have been in the crowd with Saints fans before, and I can tell you that they are SHIT. They're the worst fucking fans in football. They can't handle their booze. All of them are way too fucking loud. Teeth are optional among them. Most of them are virulently racist. And none of them knows a goddamn thing about football. You'll be standing there trying to watch a game like a normal person and some Saints fan 20 rows back will somehow yell loud enough to be heard over every other element around you, screaming, "BOY ITELLYA SEAN PAYTON HOOBOY BEST DEFENSIVE COACH EVER GUMBO KATRINA DIRTY RICE." One day, I'm gonna go to New Orleans and I'm gonna take photos of everything in that city that is wholly unremarkable. Some shitty gas station. A townhouse. Any bar that isn't outfitted like a fucking voodoo museum. A Gap. Then I'm gonna make a Tumblr site called "NEW ORLEANS: YOU FUCKERS AREN'T THAT SPECIAL." And it will make me happy. OTHER CITIES ALSO MAKE GOOD FRIED CHICKEN, YOU PROVINCIAL PUTZES.
3. Mark Ingram: Kinda shitty! Every carry Ingram got last season was more or less out of obligation, as if Sean Payton were saying: "Christ, we can't throw the ball and run Sproles every play, can we? We have to give the draft pick SOME carries." If you're expecting Ingram to suddenly become a beast this season, you are sorely mistaken. The Saints are the kind of team that throws four times after getting 1st-and-inches at the goal line, then finally converts on the fourth attempt. I can't tell you how annoying it is to own a running back in fantasy who is so clearly the token ninth option on a fantastic offense.
4. Holy shit, this defense. No Tracy Porter. No Jonathan Vilma for a year. No Will Smith for four games. Bear in mind that this is the same defense that allowed Alex Smith to throw for two touchdowns in the final 2:18 of last season's divisional playoff loss. And now it's somehow even worse. The season hasn't even started yet and Vernon Davis has already caught 500 yards worth of passes against it. GOOD THING MY MAWMAW MADE THIS HERE BLACKENED GUMBOLAYA HOOWEE SOMEBODY GIT ME A WASHBOARD AND A SPOON SO WE CAN HAVE A BOUCHERIE. Whatever. Eat shit.
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5. Hear it from Saints fans!
Sean:
We won the Super Bowl two seasons ago, we have a record-breaking offense that puts up points like a Tecmo Super Bowl team, we have Drew Brees (a truly likable guy-the Anti-Roethlisberger) as our franchise player, and we have one of the best home-field advantages in the league. So of all the teams in the NFL, you'd think the Saints would be a fun team to root for. They are not. Over the last two years our head coach has revealed himself to be a major asshole. And not just the run-of-the-mill football coach kind of asshole, but also the lowlife scumbag kind of asshole that you see playing video poker by himself at 4 am in Harrah's. First, there were the "allegations" that Payton and other coaches on the team were stealing vicodin from team doctors, which were almost certainly true. This was swept under the rug immediately by the organization, and no one wants to acknowledge that our coach's brilliant play-calling ability is probably the result of drugged-induced sideline hallucinations ("Look at all the colors!"). Second, there was the Bounty "scandal," which would've resulted in a few wrist slaps from Roger Goodell if Coach Nixon hadn't piled lies on top of lies in order to conceal the truth. (The truth, of course, is that Gregg Williams is the worst motivational speaker AND worst defensive coordinator to ever fall ass backwards into a Super Bowl.) Third, and finally, Payton divorced his wife of nearly twenty years this summer and was seen not a month later grinding on co-eds in the Bahamas. This is wrestling heel behavior, not Hall of Fame coach behavior. If you're going to repeatedly do shitty things like this, at least have the smarts not to get caught. I know Belichick got caught in Spygate, but he probably has bodies buried in the endzone at Gillette Stadium, only you'll never hear about them because the guy's an evil genius. Sean Payton might just be evil.
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Jessica:
I am in no way morally supportive of bounty programs of this nature. I still love my team and wish them well in this uphill season ahead with no bandwagon in sight. But for fuck's sake, when your omnipotent overlord of a league commissioner who has been very clear for his entire tenure that PLAYER SAFETY IS THE CORNERSTONE OF MY PUBLIC IMAGE AND I WILL PERSONALLY DESTROY ANYONE WHOSE ACTIONS SUGGEST THAT THIS IS AN INTENTIONALLY BRUTAL SPORT THAT COULD LEAD TO MORE LAWSUITS, you might want to do something about the bounty program he's known about for TWO YEARS. You might want to stop leaving your graph paper with cart off prices around the Superdome locker room and fire ol' "Renegade McGee" Gregg Williams before he has the opportunity to obliterate any chance of a Super Bowl repeat in 2012 against Alex Smith of allllllll people. And against the spectacularly inane 7-9 Seahawks the year before that. So help me God, at least I can finally look forward to the fact that I will never again have to be bamboozled into thinking that when Joe Buck or whoever utters "exotic blitz scheme" on the call, this means we will magically be worth a damn on defense.
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Joe:
The entire fan base is a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theroists.
Dylan:
Real Saints fans know one thing year after year, if the Saints go to the playoffs on the road, we will lose....to any fucking team in the NFC.
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Adam:
Roman Harper had the worst playoff game in history 2 years ago against Seattle. For that awful performance, he was rewarded with a substantial contract and lo and behold, he continues to fucking blow.
Hardell:
Our team is wholly dependent on one man. We have placed 100 Million Dollars on that man….then proceeded to spit in the face of the League itself and discover that as a club policy we considered injuries sound defensive strategy. To say I don't think Brees will escape injury free is an understatement. Frankly, Goodell may order the hit just to let New Orleans know he is not to be fucked with.
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Wanna be part of the Deadspin NFL previews? It's simple. Just email me and give me ample evidence of why your team sucks. I'll throw any good material into the post and give you proper credit. Next team up: THE BENGALS.Crock-Pot® 6-Quart Express Crock Multi-Cooker is rated 4.3 out of 5 by 240.
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Rated 2 out of 5 by Rick 46 from Dissapointing Purchase I bought this product in the fall. The results were great the first few time I used it. Then I began to have problems. The "Heat" light would not switch to the appropriate cooking time. Then it would not retain pressure. I called customer service and was told that the pot was working fine. The problems were due to operator error. In the first call, I was told that I hadn't used enough liquid, even though I used the amout specified in the Crock Pot recipes. I tried using only liquid to check the pressure and was told that the pot would not work unless there was food in with the liquid. It was obvious that the idea was to discourage replacing the pot. I have since replaced it with an Insta Pot tthat seems to actually work.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Workamper2019 from It is so fast and easy! I recently moved into a camper and have had to modify the way I cook. This has been such a great tool in my life and is making cooking so much fun! I started a fb page, "Kamper Cooking" to showcase how it works! People that watch my videos, are buying this product!
Rated 3 out of 5 by lucho from Just okay, not great compared to the InstantPot I bought this several months ago, and while it has served its purpose, there are a number of shortcomings worth pointing out. But first with the good: (1) The pot is non-stick and easily goes in the dishwasher. I have yet to have anything stick to it. That said, the non-stick coating doesn't play nicely with dishwasher and comes out with a white hazy film on it. (2) The pot is a good size and you can cook most things in it. The bad: (1) The non-stick coating is easily scratched. The steamer rack that comes with the unit scratched the inside of my cooking insert. Oops. (2) There's no manual cook function. The work around is that you use one of the other functions and fake it, but its hard to get a super short pressure cook time period. (3) Its very hard to go from brown/saute to pressure cook. The unit thinks its overheating and gives an error code. Do your self a favor and just buy an instantpot. The stainless steel cooking pot is leaps and bounds better than the non-stick version found on this one and doesnt require quite as delicate a touch.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Suzanne3469 from Love this appliance I’ve used this at least 6 times already! It’s such a time saver and food tastes great!
Rated 1 out of 5 by Chefyd from Broke I’ve hand this product for 25 days and it started to give me an E5 error. Now 35 days in and the only thing that works is the pressure cooker. Trying to slow cook or brown/sauté I get an E5 error every time. I would expect better quality grime this company since I have 3 slow cookers and never had a problem with any of them. I guess I should of bought an Instapot instead
Rated 5 out of 5 by dritz0220 from Awesome - it does everything that I need. I bought the 4 quart and two 6 quart Express Pots. The 4 quart is the perfect size for the meals for the wife and I. However, we have carry-ins at work and the 6 quart is the perfect size for that. At times I have need for two 6 quart Crock-Pots, hence the reason for owning two of them. I cook for the entire upcoming week during the weekend. So meal planning is essential. Multiple Crock's come in handy. LOVE the versatility and ease of use of these Express Crock's.Close to 266 million adults cannot read in India, while 12 million children do not go to schools, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)’s representative Shigeru Aoyagi said on Monday.
According to a Mint report, Aoyagi stated that if India can develop its current education scenario, the total global education scenario will improve.
Around 35 percent of the world’s illiterate population resides in India. “So the challenge is big,” the UNESCO official said.
Aoyagi said that the world had 13 years to achieve the sustainable development goals that were finalized at the United Nations in 2015. He said that all stakeholders, which included teachers, parents, and the government, needed to work together to achieve these goals by 2030.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with 150 world leaders, had agreed to achieve 17 goals promoting sustainable development and the standard of living of people worldwide. The summit was held in New York on September 2015.
The report suggests that India allocates 4 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) or 15 percent of its total government expenditure on education. The need for greater accountability was one of the key objectives.
The report warns that “disproportionate blame on any one actor—in most cases teachers—for systemic educational problems can have serious negative side effects, widening inequality and damaging learning.” It also calls for “better regulation of private tutoring” globally as well as in India.
Private tutoring is a factor for the widening education gap between the rich and the poor. It has a cascading effect on the potential opportunities that are availed by students coming from varied economic backgrounds.(Screenshot from Facebook)
Two Florida hunters said they bagged a nearly 800-pound alligator that had been feasting on their farm cattle.
Lee Lightsey, who owns the hunting business Outwest Farms in Okeechobee, spotted the nearly 15-foot alligator over the weekend in a cattle pond while on a gator hunt with his guide, Blake Godwin, according to news reports.
"Although this animal is huge, I was not that surprised it existed," Lightsey told BBC News. "We have come across lots over the last 20 years that have been only a little smaller.
"But what really drew our attention to this animal was the fact that it seems to have been feasting on the cattle on my farm, because mutilated body parts were found in the water. It was a monster which needed to be removed."
Godwin told a Fox affiliate that the giant gator came to the surface about 20 feet in front of them and Lightsey shot it.
The alligator was so enormous, Godwin said, the hunters had to use a farm tractor to pull it from the cattle pond.
[‘What a waste': Outrage swells after sport fishermen kill a 1,379-pound tiger shark]
Lightsey calls himself a lifetime hunter who has been in the business for more than 18 years. After Saturday's kill, the group posted a picture on Facebook, saying it was "the largest gator we have ever killed in the wild!"
Outwest Farms is an alligator hunting business in Lake Okeechobee, Fla., that specializes in hog and alligator hunting year-round. (8 Sun Studios/OutWest Farms)
As attention on the alligator hunt spread, the group appeared to take down the post.
Lightsey's Outwest Farms supervises hunts for alligators, wild boar and Osceola Turkeys, according to the company's website. Prices are listed between $350 for bass fishing and $1,800 for a three-day turkey hunt.
Outwest Farms alligator kills range from $550 for a four- to five-foot gator and $10,000 for one larger than 13 feet.
The American alligator population in the United States "reached all-time lows in the 1950s, primarily due to market-hunting and habitat loss," according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But in 1987, the alligator — a member of the crocodile family — "was pronounced fully recovered, making it one of the first endangered species success stories," according to the government.
Still, the American alligator is a federally protected species, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which notes:
Although the American alligator is secure, some related animals — such as several species of crocodiles and caimans — are still in trouble. For this reason, the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to protect the alligator under the ESA classification as “threatened due to similarity of appearance.” The Service thus regulates the harvest of alligators and legal trade in the animals, their skins, and products made from them, as part of efforts to prevent the illegal take and trafficking of endangered “look-alike” reptiles.
In Florida, the American alligator is listed as "a species of special concern," according to the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which notes that "state law prohibits killing, harassing or possessing alligators" — though the state does have three programs "for harvesting alligators from the wild."
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission says that though alligators fall under federal protections, state-approved management and control programs permit those |
drive out to the beach at nearby Pike Lake Provincial Park.
7. Saskatoon has one of the country’s best hiking trails.
"My favorite conversation today …. and not a word was spoken." – @pattisopatyk #ExploreSask Une photo publiée par Saskatchewan (@tourismsask) le 24 Nov. 2016 à 17h11 PST
Another great way to enjoy the city’s many sunshine-filled days is to hike, walk, jog or cycle the Meewasin Trail. Winding 80 kilometres along either side of the South Saskatchewan River, the Meewasin Trail passes through numerous parks, natural areas, and even downtown. Twenty kilometres of the trail forms part of the Trans Canada Trail, which when completed will be 22,000 kilometres long and cross the country from coast-to-coast.
8. Every summer, Shakespeare journeys from Stratford-upon-Avon to Saskatoon-upon-Saskatchewan.
Another summer stop along the Meewasin Trail is PotashCorp’s Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival held each year from June to August. Every year, local actors produce two of the Bard’s plays. Sometimes these productions are done in a traditional manner but other times they adopt a contemporary setting that truly reveals the timeless nature of the English playwright’s masterpieces.
9. Saskatoon has a thriving music scene.
#TrifectaCoffeeHouse Une photo publiée par Jon Chan (@athirdtime) le 14 Janv. 2017 à 16h04 PST
Saskatoon is a city that supports its singers, songwriters, and musicians. Hard-core rocker Reignwolf (aka Jordan Cook) is the latest Saskatoon musician to capture the attention of a national and even international audience. He follows the likes of Joni Mitchell, The Northern Pikes, The Sheepdogs, One Bad Son and The Deep Dark Woods. Many of these artists got their start playing in such local bars as Buds on Broadway, Louis’ Pub, and Amigos Cantina. Stop by any of these establishments and listen to the city’s up-and-coming musical talent.
10. The world’s largest snowball fight was held in Saskatoon.
Une photo publiée par Dean M. Johnson (@northernperspectivephoto) le 15 Janv. 2017 à 15h46 PST
Every winter, it snows in Saskatoon. The landscape turns white and, though the sun still shines, it can get very cold at times. However, this doesn’t stop the local people from going outside and having fun. Hockey is big in Saskatoon, the city where Gordie Howe (‘Mr. Hockey’) himself grew up. Indoor and outdoor rinks can be found throughout the city during the winter. There are also miles of cross-country ski trails to enjoy. In 2016, the largest snowball fight ever took place in Diefenbaker Park in Saskatoon with 7,681 people getting in on the action. So, don’t let some snow stop you from getting some exercise and enjoyment — the locals certainly don’t!An eminent atmospheric scientist says that natural cycles may be largely responsible for climate changes seen in recent decades.
In a new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Anastasios Tsonis, emeritus distinguished professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, describes new and cutting-edge research into natural climatic cycles, including the well known El Nino cycle and the less familiar North Atlantic Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
He shows how interactions between these ocean cycles have been shown to drive changes in the global climate on timescales of several decades.
Professor Tsonis says:
“We can show that at the start of the 20th century, the North Atlantic Oscillation pushed the global climate into a warming phase, and in 1940 it pushed it back into cooling mode. The famous “pause” in global warming at the start of the 21st century seems to have been instigated by the North Atlantic Oscillation too.”
In fact, most of the changes in the global climate over the period of the instrumental record seem to have their origins in the North Atlantic.
Tsonis’ insights have profound implications for the way we view calls for climate alarm.
It may be that another shift in the North Atlantic could bring about another phase shift in the global climate, leading to renewed cooling or warming for several decades to come.
These climatic cycles are entirely natural, and can tell us nothing about the effect of carbon dioxide emissions. But they should inspire caution over the slowing trajectory of global warming we have seen in recent decades.
As Tsonis puts it:
“While humans may play a role in climate change, other natural forces may play important roles too.”
Full paper: The Little Boy: El Niño and natural climate change (pdf)
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RedditBy Sylvia Kantor, College of Agricultural, Human & Natural Resource Sciences
PULLMAN, Wash. – Scientists at Washington State University have concluded that nondigestible compounds in apples – specifically, Granny Smith apples – may help prevent disorders associated with obesity. The study, thought to be the first to assess these compounds in apple cultivars grown in the Pacific Northwest, appears in October’s print edition of the journal Food Chemistry.
“We know that, in general, apples are a good source of these nondigestible compounds but there are differences in varieties,” said food scientist Giuliana Noratto, the study’s lead researcher. “Results from this study will help consumers to discriminate between apple varieties that can aid in the fight against obesity.”
The tart green Granny Smith apples benefit the growth of friendly bacteria in the colon due to their high content of non-digestible compounds, including dietary fiber and polyphenols, and low content of available carbohydrates. Despite being subjected to chewing, stomach acid and digestive enzymes, these compounds remain intact when they reach the colon. Once there, they are fermented by bacteria in the colon, which benefits the growth of friendly bacteria in the gut.
The study showed that Granny Smith apples surpass Braeburn, Fuji, Gala, Golden Delicious, McIntosh and Red Delicious in the amount of nondigestible compounds they contain.
“The nondigestible compounds in the Granny Smith apples actually changed the proportions of fecal bacteria from obese mice to be similar to that of lean mice,” Noratto said.
The discovery could help prevent some of the disorders associated with obesity such as low-grade, chronic inflammation that can lead to diabetes. The balance of bacterial communities in the colon of obese people is disturbed. This results in microbial byproducts that lead to inflammation and influence metabolic disorders associated with obesity, Noratto said.
“What determines the balance of bacteria in our colon is the food we consume,” she said.
Re-establishing a healthy balance of bacteria in the colon stabilizes metabolic processes that influence inflammation and the sensation of feeling satisfied, or satiety, she said.
The study was funded with an Emerging Research Issues Internal Competitive Grant from the Agricultural Research Center at Washington State University’s College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences.
Contacts:
Giuliana Noratto, WSU Department of Food Sciences, 509-3355-0382, giuliana.noratto@wsu.edu
Sylvia Kantor, WSU CAHNRS Communications, 206-770-6063, kantors@wsu.eduAny number of old sayings might apply to what happened Monday in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County: Practice makes perfect. Stick to what you know. And, of course, banks are where the money is.
All are suggested by the FBI’s report that the man who robbed the TD Bank in the 6600 block of Richmond Highway on Monday is believed to be the same man who robbed the same branch four times before.
The procedure has been the same in all the robberies, which began in March 2010, the FBI said.
The robber demands money and brings his own bag. Three times he implied that he had a weapon. After he got the money, the man fled on foot, apparently turning right on each occasion.
In photos released by the FBI, the man wore a hat and glasses each time. Twice it was a baseball-style hat and twice a construction worker’s hard hat.
The robber has been described as black, in his 30s, 5 feet 9 inches to 6 feet tall, with a muscular build, the FBI said.As organizers prepare for a day of nation-wide demonstrations against Bill C-51 on Saturday, the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) urged Canadians to march in protest against the legislation.
The CBA is a national professional organization representing all Canadian lawyers. Spokesperson Eric Gottardi outlined the CBA's strong condemnation of the bill, saying, "We would encourage Canadians to continue to march, to protest and to write letters and emails to their MPs voicing their concerns."
Mr. Gottardi has appeared before both Senate and House of Commons committees in recent months to strongly contest aspects of the bill the CBA deems "problematic" or just "flat out unconstitutional." The CBA issued a public statement concerning Bill C-51, which has now gone to the Senate for final approval.
The BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) has also objected to the legislation. Carmen Cheung, BCCLA Senior Counsel called the legislation "fundamentally flawed."
Says Cheung, "our over-arching concern is that it creates a situation for outright violations of human rights abuses without any provision by the government about why these things are necessary."
Bill C-51 was passed in Parliament by the Harper Conservatives and Trudeau’s Liberals. It was rejected by the federal NDP, the Green Party and the Bloc Quebecois. There is enormous resistance to the legislation by the Canadian public, constitutional experts, and former CSIS agents among others. Organizers nation-wide have an ongoing campaign (call, write or email) to urge senators to vote against the bill. A final vote is expected next week.
Protests are planned for Vancouver, Victoria, Vernon, Calgary, Edmonton, Guelph, Halifax, Lethbridge, London, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Sarnia, Sudbury and Thunder Bay,
The Vancouver protest takes place at the Vancouver Art Gallery on Saturday, May 30th at 1pm.UPDATE: 3 p.m., Aug. 19, 2013--The University of Delaware has concluded its investigation into the July data security breach. The investigation determined that more than 74,000 individuals were affected, among them fewer than 2,000 not in the initial group of current and past employees. The second group includes individuals who have received some payment from the University. They were sent notification letters on August 16 offering the same credit-monitoring and protection services as the initial group.
9:30 a.m., July 30, 2013--The University of Delaware is notifying the campus community that it has experienced a cyberattack in which files were taken that included confidential personal information of current and past employees, including student employees. A criminal attack on one of the University’s systems took advantage of a vulnerability in software acquired from a vendor.
The University sent notification letters dated July 29, 2013, to more than 72,000 affected persons and offered them free credit monitoring. Approximately one-third have active UD email accounts and will have received an email notification as well.
The confidential personal information includes names, addresses, UD IDs (employee identification numbers) and Social Security numbers.
Individuals with UDelNet IDs and passwords can check to see they are affected by this incident by using the IT Security Verification application on a special IT Security Response website.
The University took immediate corrective actions and is working closely with Federal Bureau of Investigation officials and Mandiant, a leading private computer security firm, on the issue. The University continues to investigate the scope of the attack. While this forensic investigation is underway, the University is taking steps to protect itself from future cyberattacks.
The University has retained the services of Kroll Advisory Solutions, a global leader in risk mitigation and response that will provide free credit monitoring services to the employees whose information was compromised. Affected individuals who want to take advantage of the services will receive instructions on how to do so in their notification letter.
Some email messages from Kroll Advisory Solutions were diverted into recipients' spam, junk or trash folders, and persons who think they might be affected should check there. Kroll's licensed investigators are available from 9 a.m.-8 p.m., Monday through Friday, through Aug. 30. After Aug. 30, telephone hours are 9 a.m.-6 p.m., Monday through Friday. Those affected are reminded that the coverage extends three years from the date of notification and that they have six months to enroll in the free service. To contact Kroll Advisory Solutions, call 1-877-309-0016.
UD’s IT Security Response website provides information on the situation and answers to frequently asked questions. It will be updated as more information becomes available.7 years ago
(CNN) - Donald Trump did not back down Tuesday from his questioning of President Barack Obama's birthplace, instead arguing heatedly with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "a lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate," though he declined to offer names of experts who agree with him.
The issue of Obama's birth - litigated in the 2008 presidential campaign, then settled when the Obama White House released the longform version of the certificate in April 2011 - is being brought to the fore in no small part by Trump, who is also set to fundraise alongside presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney Tuesday evening.
- Follow the Ticker on Twitter: @PoliticalTicker
On CNN's "The Situation Room" Tuesday, Trump maintained that Obama's birthplace is a matter of opinion, rather than fact.
"Everybody's entitled to your opinion," he said. "You know my opinion and you know his opinion and that's fine. We're entitled - as he said yesterday in the airplane - we're all entitled to our opinions and he's entitled to have his opinion. I don't happen to share that opinion, it's wonderful."
Blitzer presented Trump with newspaper announcements of Obama's birth from 1961.
Trump interrupted, "Can you stop defending Obama?"
"Donald, you're beginning to sound a little ridiculous, I have to tell you," Blitzer replied.
"You are, Wolf," Trump fired back. "Let me tell you something, I think you sound ridiculous."
Trump then alleged that the practice of filing U.S. birth announcements for an overseas birth was commonplace, though he offered no evidence.
"Many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefits of being so-called born in this country," Trump said. "Many people did it."
Obama's longform birth certificate showed he was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961 and was acknowledged as authentic by state officials. Natural born American citizenship is one of the Constitutional requirements for the presidency.
"Is it the most important thing?" Trump asked in an interview earlier on Tuesday. "In a way it is. You're not allowed to be the president if you're not born in the country."
Trump finds himself at odds with GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whose spokeswoman pointed out in an email statement that "Governor Romney has said repeatedly that he believes President Obama was born in the United States."
But Romney made no effort to distance himself from the comments, even when presented with the opportunity by reporters on Monday.
"You know, I don't agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don't all agree with everything I believe in," Romney said when asked about the issue. "But I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people."
Trump said he has not spoken about the birther issue with Romney
"I haven't talked to Mitt Romney about it," he said. "What I speak to Mitt Romney about is jobs. What I speak to Mitt Romney about is China, because he's got a great view on China and how they're taking our jobs and taking our product and manipulating their currency so it makes it almost impossible for our companies to compete."
Trump spoke by phone with Blitzer in the interview from Las Vegas, where he and Romney will fundraise with former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.
Obama's campaign released a web video on Tuesday that said the 2008 GOP nominee "John McCain stood up to the voices of extremism in his party… Why won't Mitt Romney do the same?" In the video, McCain is seen addressing a woman who called Obama an "Arab," saying, "He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with."
The president's deputy campaign manager suggested Romney's alliance with Trump in light of the tycoon's statements calls into question how he would serve as president.
"Mitt Romney's continued embrace of Donald Trump and refusal to condemn his disgraceful conspiracy theories demonstrates his complete lack of moral leadership," Stephanie Cutter said in a Tuesday afternoon statement. "If Mitt Romney lacks the backbone to stand up to a charlatan like Donald Trump because he's so concerned about lining his campaign's pockets, what does that say about the kind of President he would be?"
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday the White House was forced to address the issue last year, "but not because we chose to, but because it was such a ridiculous distraction from the important business that we should be doing here that the president is committed to doing and Congress should be doing to help the economy grow and help it create jobs."
"We can revisit that but I think the American people are pretty fed up with this kind of nonsense," he said.
As evidence of his claims, Trump pointed to a biographical note published in the 1990s by Obama's literary agent, which said Obama was born in Kenya.
The literary agent recently apologized for the mistake.
Also see:
Romney likely to hit'magic number' on Tuesday
Texas gears up for Lone Star primary
Romney doesn't back away from 'birther' TrumpAccording to a report published by Bitsandchips.it, Nvidia’s upcoming Pascal architecture will not be significantly better at Async Compute than its predecessor (Maxwell). Needless to say, this one is 100% a rumor and should be taken with a grain of salt. Pascal architecture will be landing sometime later this year and improves upon Maxwell with far better FP64 support amongst a plethora of other things. The report further mentions that Nvidia is hoping to win this round by raw performance numbers alone.
Pascal architecture allegedly facing difficulty with asynchronous compute
Asynchronous compute has been a deal sweetener for Radeon buyers ever since the DirectX 12 API hit the stage. AMD currently leads in Hitman and AOTS which utilize their Asynchronous shader technology developed around DirectX 12 API. Interestingly, Nvidia GPUs perform much better without ASync turned on. This is probably due to the fact that Nvidia has disabled ASync from their driver suite due to the fact that its GPUs cannot process ASync concurrently on the hardware level, rather they need context switching which is expensive in terms of frame rate. Geforce GPUs instead rely on a technique called pre-emption. Which is why you see frame rates actually being unpredictable when ASync is forced.
On the other hand, Maxwell remains the only architecture on the discrete GPU market right now which supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1 (Radeon cards only extend up to Feature Level 12_0). This will allow existing Geforce cards to use advanced rendering techniques made available by Direct3D 12 that will not be available to AMD users. VXGI/VXAO and Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows are examples of such a feature. So on both sides of the fence, whether you are in the red camp or in the green camp, there is an upside and a down side. Pascal and Polaris however, were supposed to bridge this gap and unify full compatibility of DirectX 12. Before we let that train of thought run away however, there is one thing we must keep in mind, the entire point of features like ASync is to maximize the use of a GPU’s resources to allow the maximum possible performance.
One reason that we think that this rumor might be true is the fact that chip design isn’t something that happens overnight. In fact, it takes an architecture many years to go from the drawing board to hit the shelves. Asynchronous Compute was hyped and became a major point of interest in the last year, which is most definitely not enough time for Nvidia to do anything about it. If Asynchronous Compute wasn’t something that was a focus when the Pascal chips were initially designed – then there is nothing Nvidia can do about it at this late in the game. The report further mentions that Nvidia also recently pushed its entire GameWorks SDK into the public domain via GitHub which could be seen as a move to make sure that all games that utilize its technology are fully optimized to leverage Nvidai GPU capabilities (No ASync + Bad Game Optimization = Bad Combo).
What we do know for a fact is that Nvidia has been focusing on its FP64 or double precision performance – which was completely culled in Maxwell to offer superior value to gamers (which are mostly single precision). So whether or not lack of ASync support in Pascal translates into a real world loss depends on how the raw performance of Pascal’s Graphic Cards compares to ASync enabled Pascal graphic cards. Even if this report is true Nvidia could still win the next round by focusing on raw gaming performance of its Pascal GPUs (Techniques like ASync can only help utilize the maximum potential of all its resource, not actually add more power out of nowhere.)The biggest waste of wars lies in the loss of human lives, not to mention the trauma that war inflicts on those who have to live through it. But in addition, wars also waste immense amounts of money that could have been so much better used to improve the lives of the people in those countries made their lives so much better. Instead, wars destroy what infrastructure they have so the people in war-torn countries are harmed in multiple ways.
Jonathan Turley writes that even winding down a war involves a massive waster of equipment. He points to the case of Afghanistan where the US military is deliberately destroying valuable equipment because it would cost more to bring it all back to America.
Some 20 percent of our equipment in Afghanistan will be destroyed or abandoned rather than ship it home. Much of the equipment will be shredded to make pennies for Afghans. By the way, some of the trashed equipment will be the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles that were built at huge expensive starting in 2007. Now a few year later, the Pentagon says that it really does not see the use for about 12,300 of its 25,500 MRAPs. These vehicles cost $1 million each and will now be turned into pennies or scrap.
So if you are keeping score that is over $12 billion worth of expensive, sophisticated vehicles deliberately destroyed.
The Washington Post reports on yet more waste such as a massive 64,000 square foot, $34 million military headquarters that was constructed in the Helmand region of Afghanistan despite the commanders there saying they did not want or need it. It seems like no expense was spared in building it.
The building’s amenities also have prompted alarm among senior officers. A two-star Marine general who has toured the facility called it “better appointed than any Marine headquarters anywhere in the world.” A two-star Army general said the operations center is as large as those at the U.S. Central Command or the supreme allied headquarters in Europe. “What the hell were they thinking?” the Army general said. “There was never any justification to build something this fancy.”
It is now facing the prospect of being torn down without having ever been used. So why not give it to the Afghans when the US leaves, since at least they might benefit from it?
Although the handoff sounds appealing, U.S. officials doubt the Afghans will be able to sustain the structure. It has complex heating and air-conditioning systems that demand significant amounts of electricity, which, in turn, require costly fuel purchases for generators. The building is wired for 110-volt appliances, not the 220-volt equipment used by Afghans. And, the officials note, the U.S. military recently built a new headquarters building on the Afghan base that adjoins Leatherneck. [My italics-MS]
It is the mismatched electrical system that really gets me, suggesting that the builders knew from the start that this had of no long-term value and yet they made it fancy anyway. And all this to what end? As Turley says:
Even accepting this cost-benefit analysis, we are still left with the insane cost of these wars. Few people in government are willing to admit how little we have accomplished in these wars. China is moving into Iraq and taking oil rights and other benefits. Iraq has moved under the sphere of influence of Iran. The Taliban is on the rise in Afghanistan and we continue to be hated in many areas.
There is of course a reason for this colossal waste for no apparent return. Wars do not serve just political or military purposes. They are also a means by which governments can give public money to private companies to provide equipment and services with o questions asked. It would be hard for the government to make the case that the public should simply give giant corporations like General Electric huge sums of money. But say that GE is building a massive system to ‘protect us from terrorist attacks’ and the public happily accepts handing out huge checks.
Wars should really be seen as a welfare program for the high-tech and construction industries.Via LSJ:
Michael Bryant hadn’t suited up for a basketball game over the last two seasons since he became a part of the Grand Ledge varsity boys basketball program as a team manager.
But Bryant figured Friday he would bring his basketball shoes just in case.
The Grand Ledge senior who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a child and is cognitively impaired has been hoping the last two seasons for an opportunity to get on the court.
“I dreamed about going on the court and shooting 3-pointers,” Bryant said.
It finally happened Friday.
And it turned out to be a night to remember.
Grand Ledge coach Scott Lewis informed his team of his plans to dress Bryant for Friday’s home regular-season finale against rival Holt. And he then challenged them to gain control of the game so Bryant would have an opportunity to get on the court in the final minutes.
Grand Ledge took care of its business and had control of the game in the closing minutes. Once Bryant got in the game, Holt coach Darren Zwick and his players made sure Bryant would have a chance to shoot.
Bryant made two of his three 3-point attempts in the game’s late stages as the rival schools came together for the special moment.
“(Our players) were super motivated and got after it the whole game,” Lewis said. Coach Zwick – awesome guy. I can’t say enough about him. After that game, I was like it’s hard for us to be rivals with Holt after that. With two minutes to go he called the timeout and told his guys kind of about the situation. He pulled the plug on the game.
“Michael came in and (Zwick’s) guys let him shoot a 3. He missed the first one and made the second one. I don’t know who was cheering more – Holt’s bench and Holt’s coaches, or our bench or the crowd. It was amazing, man. It was the whole community, rather it be Holt, rather it be Grand Ledge – everyone in the gym was cheering for the kid. Then he came down and hit another one and banked it in. It was a really cool moment.”
Martha Bryant – Michael’s mother – appreciated the moment for her son, who has defied the odds throughout his life. He almost died when he was born and wasn’t supposed to be able to walk or talk..
Keep reading…UPDATED July 11, 4 p.m. PT: George R.R Martin weighed in on the project on his blog, saying that while he is an executive producer on the project, that is the limit of his involvement. “
“As usual, however, the internet is blowing this story all out of proportion, at least in regards to my own participation,” he wrote. “I will be an Executive Producer on WHO FEARS DEATH but I will not be the Executive Produce, i.e. the showrunner. That’s an important distinction. Should we move forward, there will be a number of Executive Producers, and probably some Co-Executive Producers and Supervising Producers and Producers as well. This is television.”
PREVIOUSLY:
HBO is in early development on a series adaptation of the novel “Who Fears Death” with “Game of Thrones” scribe George R.R. Martin attached as an executive producer, according to “Who Fears Death” author Nnedi Okorafor.
The author announced the news on Twitter on Monday saying, “My novel WHO FEARS DEATH has been optioned by @HBO & is now in early development as a TV series with George RR Martin as executive producer.” Sources say the deal is not officially closed. HBO declined to comment.
Related 'Watchmen' Pilot Cast Revealed, Regina King in Lead Role HBO Renews Docu-Series 'Axios' for Season 2
The novel takes place in post-apocalyptic Africa in which the Nuru tribe has enslave the Okeke people and now look to eradicate them for good. An Okeke woman who was raped by a Nuru man gives birth to a daughter that she names Onyesonwu, which means “Who fears death?” As the child grows, she develops magical powers, ultimately discovering that she is being targeted by a powerful force that wants her dead.
Martin is best known for his work on the “Song of Ice and Fire” book series, which serves as the basis for “Game of Thrones.” He is also involved in the planned “Game of Thrones” spinoffs currently in development at HBO. Most recently, Syfy ordered a pilot based on Martin’s novella “Nightflyers,” which follows eight maverick scientists and a powerful telepath who embark on an expedition to the edge of our solar system in the hopes of contacting alien life.A dummy tank, usually inflatable or wooden, is a type of decoy that either is intended to be mistaken by an enemy for a real tank or used for training purposes. Dummy tanks emerged soon after the introduction of real tanks in World War I, but were not widely used until World War II.
World War I [ edit ]
During World War I, Allied forces made use of dummy versions of the British heavy tanks. These were constructed from a wooden framework and covered with painted Hessian cloth.[1] The tracks were non-functional so some were fitted with concealed wheels underneath and were towed from place to place by a pair of horses.[2] Dummy tanks, representing Allied models, were also found to have been constructed by the Germans,[3] even though they deployed only a small number of real tanks. It is possible they were used in training, rather than for military deception.
World War II [ edit ]
Dummy tanks, mounted on trucks, going to the forward areas in the Western Desert, 13 February 1942
Dummy tanks saw significantly more use during World War II by both the Allies and the Axis. German forces utilized mock tanks prior to the start of the war for practice and training exercises.[4][5] Their use in military deception was pioneered by British forces, who termed them "spoofs."[6]
One of the first uses of dummy tanks during the Second World War was in the North African Campaign. The Royal Engineers stationed there constructed two per day; between April and June 1941, they were able to build three dummy Royal Tank Regiments, and another in November that same year. These were foldable, and thus portable; and the Royal Engineers improved them further. Jeeps were used to make the "spoofs" more mobile: a steel frame covered with canvas was placed on them, making a self-propelled dummy tank. The Jeep did not realistically simulate the noise or movement of a tank, but allowed the dummy to be deployed quickly.[7] Meanwhile, the reverse was also done, to make tanks look like trucks. A further device was put into use that both created simulated tank tracks and erased real ones.[8]
Inflatable dummies consisted of a fabric covering supported by a network of pressurized rubber tubes that formed a kind of "pneumatic skeleton". These were generally preferred in the field, despite their tendency to rapidly deflate if punctured by accident or shellfire. In one operation in September 1944, the British deployed 148 inflatable tanks close to the front line and around half were "destroyed" by fragments from German mortar and artillery fire, and by Allied bombs falling short.[9]
Dummy tanks were used in Operation Fortitude prior to the landings at the Normandy Beaches. During this operation, they were used to confuse German intelligence in two ways: first, by making it seem that the Allies had more tanks than they did; and second, to hide and downplay the importance of the location of their real tanks in order to make it seem that the invasion would occur at the Pas-de-Calais rather than at Normandy.[10] However, dummy vehicles played only a small part of the overall deception plan as, at that stage of the war, the Germans were unable to fly reconnaissance planes over England and such effort would have been wasted. Dummy landing craft were stationed at ports in eastern and southeastern England where they might be observed by the Germans[11][12] but the Fortitude deception was largely carried out using double agents and false radio traffic.
A dummy Sherman tank under construction by 6 Field Park Company, Royal Engineers, in the Anzio bridgehead, 29 April 1944.
During Operation Shingle at Anzio, Italy, inflatable Sherman tanks were deployed when the real tanks were elsewhere.[13] In the Pacific Theater of Operations, the Japanese also utilized decoys; one recorded instance was during the Battle of Iwo Jima. A "tank" was surrounded by American infantry, which had been under artillery bombardment: they found it was not real, but merely a sculpture carved out of volcanic ash.[6]
The Red Army employed dummy tanks to increase their apparent numbers and mask their true movements.[14]
Modern era [ edit ]
During the Kosovo War, the Yugoslav Army regularly placed dummy tanks in Kosovo which misled NATO forces into thinking that they were destroying far more real tanks than actually occurred.[15]
The United States Army has developed a modern dummy tank. It imitates the M1 Abrams tank not only in appearance, but also in its heat signature, in order to appear real to infrared detectors. One of these decoys can take fire from the enemy and still appear to be operational, thus delaying the enemy by as much as an hour, as they are forced to destroy the decoy. These M1 decoys cost only $3,300,[16] compared to $4.35 million for a real M1.[17] The decoy is also practical: when disassembled, it weighs only fifty pounds, and is roughly the same size as a duffel bag. Its generator—about the size of a 12 inch television—facilitates inflation, so that two people can erect the decoy in a few minutes.[16] Occasionally, real tanks carry a dummy on board, to deploy when needed.[18]
During the assault on Mosul, the Islamic state constructed and deployed wooden mockups of various vehicles in order to distract Coalition airstrikes.[citation needed]
See also [ edit ]This article is over 2 years old
Maggie, a black and tan kelpie was thought to be the oldest dog in the world, although her owners had no papers to prove it
A kelpie thought to be the world’s oldest dog has died at home on a dairy farm in the Australian state of Victoria.
Maggie, a black-and-tan kelpie, was thought to be 30 years old.
Woolsthorpe dairy farmer Brian McLaren confirmed the death of his “great mate” on Wednesday morning.
“She was still going along nicely last week, she was walking from the dairy to the office and growling at the cats and all that sort of thing,” McLaren told the Weekly Times.
“She just went downhill in two days and I said yesterday morning when I went home for lunch... ‘She hasn’t got long now’.
“I’m sad, but I’m pleased she went the way she went.”
McLaren collected Maggie as an eight-week-old puppy with his then four-year-old son, 30 years ago.
She received national media attention in November last year after McLaren said she was the world’s oldest dog – but he’d lost her ownership papers and any proof she was a record-breaker.
The Guinness Book of World Records recognises Bluey, an Australian cattle dog that died in 1939 at the age of 29, as the record holder.
Maggie has been buried in a marked grave under a pine tree.Beltran, 36, is fluent in English, but when he arrived in the United States from Puerto Rico 20 years ago, he could understand only Spanish. As a minor leaguer for the Kansas City Royals, he made sure to stand at the end of the line for every drill so he could observe others and mimic them. The next season, Beltran befriended an American teammate who wanted to learn Spanish, and they helped each other learn a second language.
Esmil Rogers, 29, a Yankees pitcher from the Dominican Republic, told a similar story about when he was coming up with the Colorado Rockies. He had an American roommate for three seasons in the minor leagues, after which each could converse in two languages. But when Rogers came up as a rookie in 2009, he did not feel comfortable conducting interviews in English. Sometimes he asked for help from anyone around who could translate.
“If you come from a Latin country, it’s always good to learn the language — it will open the door for you,” Beltran said. “But at the same time, I also believe every team should have a Spanish-speaking P.R. guy that can help these guys, especially in a city like New York.”
Beltran continued: “After a game, when something blows up, all you guys want to talk to that player. At the end of the day, you guys want to know what happened, and at the same time he might not know how to express it.”
Beltran said having an interpreter would not only help a player make his point, but also allow the news media to grasp it. “There’s no misunderstanding, no guessing, no interpretation,” he said.
Last season, the Yankees’ three Japanese players — Masahiro Tanaka, Hiroki Kuroda and Ichiro Suzuki — had interpreters because it was written into their contracts, said Brian Cashman, the team’s general manager. Typically, such accommodations are made for players in whom teams have large financial investments: major-league-ready talent, which often comes from Japan, South Korea and Cuba.
Tanaka, asked through his interpreter, Shingo Horie, if he could manage without Horie, smiled and shook his head.Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday criticized Republicans for distancing themselves from Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore, while saying that Moore was a Democrat at the time he allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct with teenage girls.
“Did you know that before 1992, when a lot of this was going on, |
's pretty tough herself.I don't think a lot of people dug for what actually happened. I think once it got out that they fired one of Detroit's more beloved and long standing entities in the scene, people reacted to that more than anything else. I don't think they cared about the story behind it.Here's the thing: You've got techno which is like Detroit's baby. Then you've got Carl Craig, who everybody loves. Then you've got the white lady, from nobody knows where, nobody gives a shit. Then they hear there's fighting, people are going to take sides. And who's going to win? Carl. He's techno, he's a hometown boy. And nobody knows who the fuck this white lady is, so she's the devil. I'm not sticking up for either. But right then, you knew she was dead. People were not going to take her side for fuck all. People were carrying banners, and "We hate Carol Marvin" shirts. It was like something out of a movie. It was crazy. It put a dampener on the whole thing. Why waste your energy with that shit?Myself, Carol, Bridget everybody who was in the core group of people in that office, we were in that damn office almost nightly at this point until 3, 4 or 5 in the morning. That's what really pisses me off about how it all came down. We were framed as the villains. Had Carol been a weaker producer, that festival might have been ruined, that festival might never have happened that year.I reacted the way that I knew how. We mobilized a group of friends and protested. We printed pink stickers, we made giant banners and we let our voice be heard. If you signed a petition that was delivered to the Mayor's office, you got a sticker that said "I support Carl Craig." We were gathering signatures all three days. There were a lot of angry people on the ground. You had that conviction, we were all willing to get arrested and go to jail for it. Because we felt that what she did was just not right. To this day, I still believe it wasn't right.Rob and I spearheaded the protests at the second festival. It was probably something I shouldn't have done, you know, being involved with the documentary of the first festival but I thought: "OK, I'm gonna separate myself, this has nothing to do with the other thing, this is just me, being me." So we created this kind of larger-than-life banner that took like eight or ten people to actually carry through the festival.I remember Rob coming up to me, saying, "We're going to meet at the top of the bowl before so-and-so goes on."We marched through Hart Plaza on Saturday night. It was something that Rob made, it was literally 30 feet long and 10 feet tall.There were buttons saying "I support Carl Craig."Everybody was wearing those buttons. I wore one too.The only thing I remember at the time was being so angry, not knowing what was next. Not knowing if we were even going to be allowed on the grounds after we had booked the festival.I ended up going to each day of the festival. There were issues where I didn't want to come, and I wasn't wanted. But it became a reality that I needed to be there in order to a) make sure that everything went correctly with the artists that I booked and b) that it didn't look right to the people that I asked to come that I wouldn't be there.Carl invited me over for the second year. It was a strange time, because I landed and immediately there was all this politics going on in the background that I wasn't aware of.That was the start of four or five years of backstage drama, something that sadly came to define the festival.It was a pretty great festival though. Carl's influence was there the whole time.Carl has such a deep understanding of music. He'd always pull in a couple of things that you weren't aware of.What I loved about the first few festivals was stuff that was brought in to represent "techno" or electronic music the way people think of it. I remember seeing Tortoise live. That was Carl just having a sense of how to program things.I thought about the line-up as a three year plan, instead of as a one year thing. We have so many interesting and talented artists in Detroit that it wasn't something that I felt I could do in just one year line-up-wise, both for my idea of the festival, and in terms of getting people to come out to see it. I wanted to spread it out.I was shocked that nobody got that.should have been writing a feature on this. It's not often you see those kind of ideas represented on a stage in America.Autechre, the second year, was a highlight. I was working at the Record Time booth, and I told my boss that I would work a lot of the weekend but I will not work when Autechre is playing. But when Autechre went on, he wasn't in the booth, and Diane Himes didn't know about the deal, so she said, "You can't leave now. If you go, you're going to lose your job." So I essentially quit at that moment, and went down to see Autechre. I came back afterwards, and I think she cooled off by that point.I purposely put big DJs like Terrence Parker and John Acquaviva on in the afternoon in the second year because I wanted to see if we could get people to come out earlier on in the day to see great DJs.Jeremy Ellis, AKA Ayro, was doing a live set and he brought out his MPC, but they put him on a stage that didn't have any covering. We set it all up, and right as he started the rain started to come down. We found a tarp, and lifted it up over his stuff during his entire set so that he could perform.It was important to me to present this music in a way that it wasn't pigeonholed as only Detroit or only techno. If you do something like that, then the hip-hop guys say, "Oh, that's some techno shit." And other people will say it's this or that. I wanted to sustain a vision over time.Nobody gave him the license to be artistic. They only want to hear "Throw." They wanted the same people to play that had played the year before.My thought was that if you want to play every year, you have to bring something new to the table every year. So Kevin Saunderson played again, but he did with Inner City live. That was the first time they'd played together in a long time.It was threatening to rain while we were playing. We were blasting and singing "Good Life" in the rain. "No more rainy days, the sun will chase the clouds away." And it kind of did that for us for a while, but it didn't last completely.There was a controversy about who was going to close between me and Derrick. I was booked to close, but Derrick said he wouldn't play unless he closed. So I played after Kevin, and the funny thing is that it rained during the middle of my set, and I actually couldn't finish the whole set.People were standing in the rain, but they didn't give a shit. They wanted to see Juan and Derrick, but it got so bad, they had to shut it down for electrical reasons.It was scary. It was such a big burst of rain, lightning and thunder, very dramatic. They stopped the stages, literally unplugged everything. I remember people huddled down in the Underground Stage area. They were waiting and waiting for Derrick to come on and play, and eventually he came on the PA and announced that he could not play, he might get electrocuted. Everybody was crestfallen.I remember I was downstairs watching Slam, because it was like "Wow, Slam's finally playing in Detroit! No one would ever bring Slam to Detroit otherwise." And the music stopped. We were like, "Why did the music stop?" "Well, the entire festival shut down because it's hailing upstairs."It was rough, Ium sure, on Derrick but he would never admit it. He keeps his cards close when it comes to shit like that, but it was an act of God and there was nothing you could do.I remember Kevin was doing an afterparty at The Works. Somewhere around 4 or 5 in the morning Derrick May showed up and played easily one of the best techno sets I've ever heard. It had all the drama. This is the set that God [had] stopped with the hail. It was so dramatic. Looking back it's like, "Wow, we were way too self-involved." At the time, it was the most important thing in the world.In 2002, they had an artistic board that helped with the booking of the festival. The Magnificent Seven.Huck, K-Hand, Oldham, Mike Grant, DJ Bone, Juan, Eddie Fowlkes.We thought it was really important to engage with a lot of different people with different ideas.There were two or three people on that committee who had an axe to grind with Carl. A personal axe to grind. Carol saw that, capitalized on it and said we're going to have a real Detroit voice on this one, a real Detroit party.Carol said more or less, "We'd like you to be a part of this." Unfortunately, it created a strain on my relationship with Carl. I wish that it hadn't. But looking at it, I didn't want to see the festival fail. Because that means we here in the city were failing.I was on the board for the DEMF with six other members. The only female, of course I had to be on the board to make sure for the girls that we had everything going correctly. And I'm the first lady of techno, so why not be there?!I'm glad Huckaby was on there. Huck paid his way a million times over. He's an amazing producer, a great house DJ.To be honest, I didn't know what I had gotten myself into. I was completely unaware of a lot of the stuff around it.I was still living in Vegas at the time, and was coming in for the meetings. I really wanted Devo, personally, but I got outvoted. I just wanted to see something different. All of the cats that we grew up seeing were playing Devo, along with Eurythmics and Run DMC. I knew that would've brought all the old heads.I remember when I contacted Dave Clarke about playing, he said something along the lines of, "Sure, I've stolen enough of the music. It'll be great to give something back." Art Payne and Keith Martin also were two guys that we wanted to get in. To pay tribute to what they had done.I remember Alan Oldham asked me what I thought of the line-up, and I told him, "It looked like you went down the addresses in your cell phones." I don't think we've talked since then. I wasn't saying that as a diss. Carl Craig is just a different type of musician. He looks at things in a different way.Carl was just one guy, his vision was too Eurocentric, bla bla bla. And it ended up being the absolute opposite of that. It was just a kick drum rave, that third year. That's how I remember it.Just compare the line-up in 2001 and the 2002 line-up. Nothing against those people, but their taste turned the Detroit Electronic Music Festival into a rave. It was all techno and house music. I'm a fan of techno and house music, but it was too much.
The Detroit media covers the controversy of the festival.
"It shows how much can be done when
you scratch a couple of pennies together."
Derrick May soliciting donations, 2004.
Everybody was in a trance.
"We got to do the festival."
They weren't asking,
"Should we do the festival?"
Carl Craig: "Whenever I can help my brothers, I'm there."
Booth battles
Delano Smith: When the festival was free, they had a lot of different vendors that would set up their sound systems. When you first walked into Hart Plaza, there's this aisle that you walk through to get to the main area. We call it the "Aisle of Hell."
Brian Gillespie: I had a record store that I was running. We had our own little area with a small stage. There was a time when you could have little DJ booths all over the festival, nobody cared about that.
Delano Smith: There was all different types of DJs in all different styles of music. They all brought their sound systems in and their generators, and they'd all set up. It was about an eighth of a mile long. It was cool in a way, but in a way it was messy, you'd hear booty over here, drum & bass over there, all on crappy sound systems. Everybody would try and make their sound system louder than the other guy.
Brendan Gillen: It was terrible when they allowed those booths to have soundsystems. They might have been selling electronic music, but it wasn't on the level of what the festival was putting on. You'd have a massive soundsystem in a booth playing trance.
Kevin Reynolds: Every other booth would have a sound system and it was kind of nuts. It was funny in the beginning but after a while you want to hear the music that is playing on the actual stage instead of some guy promoting his latest shitmix or bootymix or whatever. It was hilarious in the beginning, but I donut like that idea a whole lot.
Brendan Gillen: It was like what you hear in the headphones before you correct the beat.
When the festival was free, they had a lot of different vendors that would set up their sound systems. When you first walked into Hart Plaza, there's this aisle that you walk through to get to the main area. We call it the "Aisle of Hell."I had a record store that I was running. We had our own little area with a small stage. There was a time when you could have little DJ booths all over the festival, nobody cared about that.There was all different types of DJs in all different styles of music. They all brought their sound systems in and their generators, and they'd all set up. It was about an eighth of a mile long. It was cool in a way, but in a way it was messy, you'd hear booty over here, drum & bass over there, all on crappy sound systems. Everybody would try and make their sound system louder than the other guy.It was terrible when they allowed those booths to have soundsystems. They might have been selling electronic music, but it wasn't on the level of what the festival was putting on. You'd have a massive soundsystem in a booth playing trance.Every other booth would have a sound system and it was kind of nuts. It was funny in the beginning but after a while you want to hear the music that is playing on the actual stage instead of some guy promoting his latest shitmix or bootymix or whatever. It was hilarious in the beginning, but I donut like that idea a whole lot.It was like what you hear in the headphones before you correct the beat.
The "well-oiled machine" gears up for their biggest event yet.
The festival in 2002 seemed to be lacking something. I couldn't really put my finger on it. That said, George Clinton was a highlight.We met everyday around a table right around January, and discussed who we thought should play that year. The first day we all said: "George Clinton."George is an icon for me, he's one of the reasons I got into making music.It makes all the sense in the world because the definition of techno has always been George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator together.George Clinton's performance seemed like the most significant of all the performances in the festival's history. It wasn't just for the young kids. It was for all ages. It was three generations coming together.I'm pretty sure that was the biggest crowd I have seen at the Main Stage. That name and Detroit. I mean, God bless techno and everything, but that name and Detroit is gigantic. I couldn't get anywhere close enough to see what was going on, or even hear it well. The crowd was so thick that I couldn't even navigate to where I could enjoy it.I retired before 2003, but I can say that the city never wanted to get in the business of funding a major event. We wanted to act as a catalyst, and once it was shown to be a viable activity, then we were going to let the free market come in and have them help support the festival financially.How do you justify asking the city of Detroit to pay a festival when it can't turn on the lights of the streets in all its neighborhoods?Carol Marvin's company, Pop Culture Media, had a contract for three years. When it ended, they did not renew it immediately, so there were several companies who submitted their proposal to produce it.The city had the option to sign a new contract, but given the resources of the city... They decided to let the event walk on its own like all of the other festivals going on in Detroit.At Transmat, we were pretty worried whether the festival would even happen in 2003. So myself, Derrick and a couple of other guys put together a proposal in 2002, and we presented it to the city. The general consensus was that [because of the contract running out] it was fairly up in the air. There seemed to be a general discontent about whether the festival would go ahead or not. There were a lot of people that were making claims about money that hadn't been paid, some people were saying that Carol Marvin was insolvent. I can't comment on whether that was valid or not, but it was definitely something that was in the papers on a regular basis. The contract was up for renewal, and the big question was, "If they're not going to give it to her, where's it going to go?"We had already secured the date and the venue for the fourth year, and we were at the opening of the Detroit techno exhibit at the Detroit Historical Museum, which we had helped curate. We went there with Derrick and that's when he made the announcement [that he was doing the festival]. We were stunned.I remember asking Carol, "Are you sure you've got the festival?" And she was like, "Why would you ask that?" "Because Derrick's saying he's got it." And then at that press conference, they announced that Derrick had it. We had a line-up all ready to go.This is the way I see it: Kwame Kilpatrick, who was the new Mayor, gave our dates and our venue to Derrick. He didn't hand over the DEMF, it wasn't his festival, he couldn't hand over the DEMF, what he did was give our dates and our venue to another event producer who wanted to produce an electronic music festival.Of course the city didn't make a decision until two or three months beforehand, again not giving anyone time to do anything. You couldn't find a sponsorship deal, you couldn't work on stuff, you couldn't book people until you knew you had it. They gave it to Derrick at the 11th hour.The contract was given to us in February or March, at which point it was too late to really get any sponsorship money. The budgets had been set for all the major companies. If Derrick hadn't agreed to back it financially that year, I don't think it would still be running today.The unofficial title of the new mayor [Kwame Kilpatrick] was the hip-hop mayor, whereas the previous mayor [Dennis Archer] was at least a little bit receptive to the idea of a techno festival. The city provided Carol with some funds to put on the festival, but that wasn't part of any deal in subsequent years.I really didn't know if it was going to continue after that third year. Derrick really came to the plate and made it happen, but because he didn't have the funding from the city and the sponsorship wasn't there, it was definitely questionable as to how it would happen.After we got the contract, it was an absolute run to the line to get the doors open.The first Movement was like the first DEMF, because everyone rallied together and wanted to see it survive.We just wanted to make it happen because we knew how important it was.I remember those guys working their asses off. But you need so much lead time to plan something like the festival.It was pretty much all volunteers, everybody was busting their ass, working sunup to sundown, trying to make it happen. I think it burnt a lot of people out, but it also shows how much can be done when you scratch a couple of pennies together.The line-ups were announced just a few weeks before the festival. If you're trying to plan a trip from Europe, it was kind of hard.Sharif Zawideh did a bunch of the booking for the festivals that Derrick had. He was huge in making sure that it was an eclectic event in those years.Booking-wise, 2003 had a very Hi-Tek Soul flavor to it. Carl Craig and the Detroit Experiment, Amp Fiddler.Wolf Eyes played at the festival.I played as The Detroit Experiment in 2003. We had Al Turner, Ron Otis, Amp Fiddler, Marcus Belgrave and Al Barnes all up on stage.The first year that Derrick did the festival, it seemed like he kept the behind-the-scenes stuff under wraps, but it spilled out onto the festival grounds in 2004. There were operations contractors that were threatening to cut the power. It was a bit of a frantic scramble for Derrick and his crew to rustle up some cash.You could tell that a lot of the accessories were missing. There weren't as many stages, the stages weren't as elaborate as they are now. Things didn't look as polished. No disrespect to Derrick, it was just a bad situation.I remember Derrick riding around in a go-kart with a girl, asking for donations.Derrick was on the main stage with a microphone and a bucket. Derrick May, one of the lions of this movement, onstage begging for money in his hometown. I found it very poignant and sad. It shouldn't be like that. It was around that time that we started advocating for it to become a paid festival.Derrick sunk a lot of his personal money into the festival.He probably still owes a lot of money now.It's pretty obvious that you can't have a festival on that magnitude and have it be artist-run and managed. It's pretty much an impossibility. There's too many other types of skills and expertise you need to make it happen.In order to conceptualize and execute a festival, you're basically magnifying a regular event by 100,000. Sound, staging, lighting, security, things of that nature. And because it's a festival environment, you have a huge pile of other things, like Porta Johns, VIP bathrooms, decor for the VIP, permitting and licensing through the city, dealing with the fire department, the police department, a huge security board, liquor licenses, meeting the artists riders, dealing with what they want regarding production levels.Derrick said he couldn't do the festival anymore. A lot of people were criticizing Derrick, but I'd check them. This is a guy who busted his behind to put this thing on for you, me and the city of Detroit.I got involved at the end of the festival in 2004. There were definitely a lot of money issues. The festival didn't make enough money to clear out of its debt despite the resources I brought in. The city was a problem too. The city had issues with Derrick, Derrick had issues with the city. So the city approached me in September or maybe the middle of summer, and asked me if I'd be interested in taking it over. I said I would consider it, but that you have to get back with me, we got to talk dates and there's some timelines that I need to hear from you. Did you think that happened? Not at all. So I was like, "I don't have to worry about that, I'm not going to be involved with the festival."Kevin wasn't going to do it, but the city was like, "Please, you need to do this!" They realized how much revenue the festival was bringing in to the city.The city approached me in February 2005 and asked me again. I was like, "I've told you my guidelines, there's no way I can make this happen in this short amount of time." They kind of pleaded with me, told me they were going to support it, bring in some funding which was needed, which was a bunch of bull, so I said OK, I'll talk to a team of people.Me and Mike Banks were on a plane on our way to Japan. He had mentioned before that Kevin wanted me to be festival director. I didn't really want to get involved, given the history of the event. He said, "No man, Kevin is talking about paying you a good piece of coin. Because they have a good chance to make it a ticketed, gated event." I still didn't want to do it, but Mike pushed me. So I told Kevin to send me everything while I was on the plane, and I'd look at it when I was in Japan. [Kevin] actually had some of Derrick May's financial information, so I took it from there. I looked at some of the things being done, and I thought, "OK, maybe this is something I could do."I worked with Ade' that year, he was the director of the festival. But we weren't experienced in putting together a festival of this magnitude. I mean, people go to school to learn how to do that. We'd played at them before, so we knew how it should be set up, but we didn't have the behind-the-scenes experience. Insurance, city ordinances.I didn't realize how fragmented the administration was. A lot of the city departments all had their fiefdoms. The mayor's office was one thing, the city council was something else, you had to talk to this guy, but you need to talk to that guy.I told the city "I'm going to have to charge, because there's not enough time to deal with sponsorship and I'm not going to be asking investors to just put out their money at this last minute, it's just not fair."Nobody really understood how much it cost to produce that event in the fashion they were used to it being produced. And have it compete with other world class festivals.People thought because we were charging money to come in that we were going to make millions of dollars.They absolutely had to charge, no question. And it was five dollars. Only five bucks each day! It was literally to try and cover the costs.There was grumbling, but I think everyone understood it had to be done.It was an unsustainable model.You get a very specific crowd when you start charging money. It's people who are more inclined or pre-selected to be interested in electronic music. It was a little sad, because that was what was so wonderful about the first two years especially. It was both a celebration of Detroit music, and an introduction of the music to new audiences.I didn't agree with it. I was concerned with the amount of people that would come from Detroit to see the festival. But wherever I'm needed, whenever I feel like I can help my brothers, I'm there. He asked me to perform, so I performed.Attendance went down because people couldn't pay. It's still a good deal, it's great value if you're into this music. You can see a lot of things for a reasonable amount. I never had a problem with it. I'll still stand up for that. We were some of the first advocates in print to say it needs to be paid. It's worth paying for.People have a hard time appreciating something in Detroit if they have to pay for it. There could be 70 acts, and you can ask for $5, and they'll actually ask you who is playing.I understand, but I still hope that they make it free on Mondays for people with Detroit on their driver's licenses if they show up before a certain time.When it was a free festival, people drifted in and out of it out of curiosity. They came, hung out for a while and left. How do you measure that? It's very hard to gauge how many people are at a festival. I think those numbers at the beginning were just guesses.From the eyeball point-of-view, the festival wasn't too much smaller in 2005. It just proved that the previous estimates had been way off.[Because of the previous estimates] I think the city had a better idea about how many people actually came to the festival than I did. I really didn't have a clue. I told myself that if we can get 75,000 at the festival, then we should be able to break even. We didn't want to charge crazy money, we wanted to make it reasonable. We tried to estimate how many people we could pull. I found out later that you couldn't get more than 30,000 in that whole place at capacity. We fell short by about $150,000 or $200,000.Everybody was in a trance. "We got to do the festival." They weren't asking, "should we do the festival?"The whole backlash against Carol Marvin was very personal. She was very demonized. But if you talk to people now, people have come around a little bit. I think that largely comes from people seeing what happened when she left. A lot of those problems continued on with the finances. It's just intrinsic to this event, and any kind of thing of this size.When I go to a ball game, I don't think of the mechanics of how they're able to pay for the ball game. I just want to go there, eat a hot dog and drink a beer. So I can understand that too.I really should have stuck to my guns, I should have just waited till the next year. The festival probably wouldn't have happened at all then, though, and that's the reason I did do it. If I'd waited, it would have allowed time for planning. The city was so unpredictable, though. If you want to call them corrupt, selfish, unfair... I can think of a lot of names to say, but it really boils down to politics. They didn't care how it happened. They just wanted it to happen.One of the things I remember saying in the programming meetings was "Who hasn't played the festival that needs to play it?" Those were the people who got to the top of the list. Of course I wanted to highlight our artists, groups like Galaxy 2 Galaxy had never played the festival, Model 500 had never played the festival.Red Planet played live that year, which was a first. We also brought in Mos Def to make sure that an inner-city person had a reason to come down. Those who might not be familiar with electronic music.After it became a gated event, Kevin decided we needed some headliners. So I went and got him a big headliner: Mos Def.When we walked off the stage after the Galaxy 2 Galaxy show, we passed by Mos Def and he said, "How in the hell am I going to follow that?"The first year that I played officially was in 2005. Ade from Electrofunk, from Submerge took over. That's the only reason I got to play, because I was working there. And I'd just started getting a little bit of a name, my stuff was coming out. I remember playing during the day, it was sunny, I was playing by the riverfront. All my friends were there, we were drinking, having a nice time. I turned the record player off, let the record wind down. And I went to turn the record player back on, and the dial kept spinning, it wasn't catching. The on-off button was broken, the pin had fallen down. They didn't have another turntable, so I ended up playing a one-turntable set for thirty minutes.We also contracted Paxahau to do a stage. I wasn't really familiar with their work, and I wasn't into the rave thing that much so I didn't know them. I didn't have any idea of what they did. Jason [Huvaere] had to explain it to me.We were not invited to do anything on a very serious level until 2005, which is when we did our first stage.Paxahau didn't need much assistance from us. They'd been doing parties for years.I think I played a couple of their events, I knew they were doing stuff in Detroit, and that was what was more important. We were traveling and coming back to try to do a festival. It's better to try to do a party where you have somebody who's just focusing on that. It was somebody who understood and came from our music world, compared to your typical production team who might come in, bring some speakers and not promote.It was the biggest thing by far that we'd been asked to do. It felt like a culmination, we were able to utilize all the relationships that we'd developed over the years, and try to put together a package that would help Kevin to make the thing happen. It was an honour, really.They programmed it right, they promoted it right, the trains ran on time.Like a well-oiled machine.That crisp, Paxahau feel.The events Paxahau had been putting on leading up to this were the best in Detroit. There was nothing that came close.We had the underground stage, which is the one we wanted. We did the production right, we had the signs up so everybody knew who was playing. We had a little green room at the back of the DJ booth where the DJs had a place to decompress and have something to drink. We really tried to make it our own little universe down there because we knew it was our first and only opportunity. We wanted it to be perfect. We had Mutek, Tronic Treatment and on the last day we had Luciano, Daniel Bell and Richie. [On that last day,] by 4 PM it was getting crazy, by 6 PM it was getting almost too crazy, by 8 PM we had to hold on and get everybody to manage the thing. But by the time Rich went on, it was absolute controlled chaos for 90 straight minutes.People were packed like sardines. I feared that somebody was going to get crushed. I thought that it could end up being one of those The Who in Cincinnati things. Too many people in a small space, hypnotized by the great Richie Hawtin.You couldn't move, people were standing on each other's shoulders just to see it. Security guards were literally going arm in arm, holding people back because the pressure of people trying to get to that area was so strong, they had to make a human wall to hold them back.The core Paxahau team was made up of guys that were either dancing in front of the speakers at Plastikman shows or were partners in putting them up. Anything I built, was built with them as well. It was like a Plastikman party at the festival, half-underground, half-Fuse-In.I remember Rich played a couple of minutes long, and the city charged the festival $100 for every minute. So here I am in charge of cutting the power, and Rich was saying, "I don't care, I'll pay it!" The crowd was going crazy.Kevin needed some time to think about doing the festival after 2005. I offered him in December the opportunity to have us come on as director-producer, and he opted out in February of the next year, he just wanted to resign. He'd had enough, he'd tried as hard as he could. He just wanted to concentrate on his career. So we ended up entering into heavy negotiations with the city of Detroit; it was about eight weeks of negotiations. And after the negotiations, we reached our critical point, where we told them our deadline was right before Miami, because we needed to be able to go to WMC and tell people one thing or the other. At 1 AM the night before we flew, we got the call that we had been selected to be that year's producers. We opened up a bottle of wine, and from that point forward, the work never stopped.A lot of people said the first couple of years that the Paxahau guys didn't represent Detroit DJs. But they're trying to bring a more international flavour to it. And I respect that. Just like the WMC in Miami. A lot of the focus there is on New York still. I appreciate what they're trying to do in making it an international event.They booked a very specific kind of music in their events prior. So I was a little bit concerned that it was going to be that on a larger scale, and that it would miss some of the diversity. On the other hand, the quality of their productions were unmatched in the city.We had a lot of names in the chute that first year.2006 was the first year that I ever booked any talent for Paxahau. I knew that we needed to book Rob Hood. And we booked Collabs with Speedy J and Chris Liebing because that was super new at the time. We had Richie, Nitzer Ebb, Derrick May, Neil Landstrumm who was a huge inspiration of mine in the techno scene. Basically, we booked a lot of our friends, and people that we knew. We also did the J Dilla tribute, which had over ten rappers and hip-hop artists and DJs and MCs. We donated $5000 to the J Dilla Foundation in that year. It was a big deal. We really wanted to pay our respects.In the background of our negotiations with the city of Detroit in 2006, we were reaching out to all of the artists, the agents, the production guys, sound, lighting, staging. We were talking to people who were involved with the festival's history, people who knew every single thing about the previous five years. We built a foundation that could basically be activated or not activated when we got the news. So when we got the green light, all we really did was pull the trigger on something that we had been loading up for a number of weeks.
Top: RJD2 on the Red Bull stage. Bottom: Punisher on the Underground stage.
Benny Benassi: The most controversial Paxahau booking ever?
The inglorious bastards
Mike Huckaby: Electro-tech.
Brian Gillespie: My crew: Godfather, DJ Dick, the Twilight 76 Databass crew. We were always looked upon as the dirty bastards, the inglorious bastards of techno.
Brendan Gillen: The thing is, when Godfather plays two copies of "Hoes take off your clothes"... it happens.
Brian Gillespie: We sold more techno records in Detroit than these guys combined. You can quote me on that, I know it for sure. We weren't techno, we did street music. We combined techno and electro, and made our own form of music. We were killing it. But no one noticed.
Mike Huckaby: A lot of those DJs have never gotten the chance to play.
Brian Gillespie: I didn't |
picked up a total of $2.8M (combined from Lionsgate and Warner Bros.) in 57 markets this weekend. It opened in Germany with a very soft $571K. The total cume to date internationally is $83.6M and worldwide it is $111.8M. The next two markets it will hit will be Italy and Brazil this week.
SISTERS
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler picked up $1.2M in 22 territories in the session. The worldwide cume is nearing $100M ($13.7M overseas/$84.9M domestic). In week three, Australia held strongly with a cume to date of $6.5M. Brazil and Colombia were new to the party with $26K at 40 dates and $33K at 25 dates, respectively. There are 25 more territories to release over the next few months including Germany on February 11.
ROOM
Universal is handling Room in 20 territories which it acquired during the Cannes Film Festival last May. The Oscar nominated drama opened its doors in Argentina, Ecuador and Peru this weekend at an estimated $170K. Argentina bowed in a limited release of 56 dates and grossed $130K. It placed No. 6 with the 4th best screen average in the market. In comps, it’s +7% on Joy; +46% over Philomena; and +72% atop Dallas Buyers Club. Studiocanal is releasing in the UK where the 2nd week was worth $947K, up 13% on last weekend. The total there is now $2.58M. The total international weekend was about $1.5M; the cume to date is $3.04M.
BRIDGE OF SPIES
Steven Spielberg’s drama eyed another $1.1M in 13 markets for a cume of $89.3M internationally. Spain is seeing a strong continuation on the Fox release with $9.23M to date after a drop of just 23% this frame.
SPECTRE
James Bond spied another $786K this weekend from over 900 screens in 41 total markets for Sony and MGM. The international cume now stands at $678.3M.
LOCAL-LANGUAGE
Only one Chinese film made the Top 10 chart this week, the holdover of animated Boonie Bears III with $6M. That takes its cume to $31M after two weeks. The high end of the international roster has been slightly light on Middle Kingdom fare in the past couple frames, but that will change with the arrival of Kung Fu Panda 3 this week and the subsequent onslaught of Lunar New Year titles. Elsewhere, Italy‘s hit Quo Vado? has inched up on Avatar’s all-time record in the country with local reports on Sunday putting it at 61.64M euros through Saturday. That leaves it about 4M euros to go to take the crown. In Germany, Bibi & Tina – Mädchen Gegen Jungs (Girls Against Boys), led the pack. The kids comedy is the third in a series about a teenage witch and the adventures she gets up to with her best friend. Selling about 370K tickets, it’s the best start to the franchise. Korea‘s sentimental newcomer, A Melody To Remember, grossed about $3.3M through Sunday and was the No. 2 movie in the market behind The Revenant. The pic centers on a grieving platoon leader during the Korean War who forms a choir with a group of orphans.G.N.A. Podcast, when you want the truths of life who are you going to turn to? Unsolved Mysteries? No, you turn to the folks at the G.N.A. Podcast. They WILL let you know how it is. From hazing due to lack of drunkenness to vaginal herb balls we cover it all, or, at least we would if we hadn’t already sold out to the Chinese, sowwy! Can you eat poop and lose weight? Let’s find out! Finally gives me a reason for the poop tag I use every week. Finally, from space flowers, to North Koreans curing virtually everything, to one of the hottest new theme parks around, we leave no stone unturned on this week’s episode of Truthca- I mean the G.N.A. Podcast. Like the show? E-mail us at gna@ninjapancake.com or gnapodcast@gnainyourdna.one. Go canary this week by tweeting us @gnapodcast or using the #gnapodcast on twitter. Stop by our store to score some sweet sweet shirts, maybe some Sweet Scoped shirts, lul. Music by Azureflux. #UnsolvedGNA
Download (1:37:50) | RSS | Subscribe on iTunes | YourListen
Starring: DJ, Mog, Krewel, Herndon
Drinks:
DJ – Water
Mog – Shitty (non)table wine
Krewel – Evil 8 degrees
Herndon – Smirnoff 100
Links:
Nintend NX Why you no 4k?
Durn kids and their Minecraft.
Iron Maiden Mobile.
The Prospekt of Half Life.
Doom 20 years later.
The poop weight loss.
ISS Flower.
Space X
Frozen Liquor
North Korea cures all.
You’re favorite new theme park.
Astronomy with GNA.
Herb balls.
Games 2016.Harvard University has announced a $150 million gift from alumnus Kenneth Griffin ('89), founder and chief executive officer of multi-strategy hedge fund and asset management firm Citadel.
The largest gift in the history of Harvard College will provide undergraduate scholarships to two hundred Griffin Scholars a year as well as matching funds through a new challenge fund in support of an additional six hundred scholarships. The gift also includes $10 million to establish a Griffin Professorship of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
"Ken Griffin's extraordinary philanthropy is opening Harvard's gates wider to the most talented students in the world, no matter their economic circumstances," said Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, who noted that the gift from Griffin will ensure the continuation of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, which was launched ten years ago to make the cost of a Harvard undergraduate education more affordable to outstanding students around the world. "Harvard is more accessible than ever before, and, with an increased focus on teaching, learning, and research across the university, we are better prepared to educate young scholars in all areas of academic inquiry."
Griffin previously established a scholarship at Harvard named in honor of his grandfather, Wayne R. Gratz, and served on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Financial Aid Task Force, which approved a new financial aid case statement for the college and focused on raising additional support from alumni.
"It is extremely important that students of all backgrounds have the opportunity to challenge themselves, learn to solve complex problems, and ultimately better our world," said Griffin. "My goal with this gift is to help ensure that Harvard’s need-blind admission policy continues, and that our nation’s best and brightest have continued access to this outstanding institution."National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center
The Arecibo Observatory has captured one of the most fleeting, mysterious and rare deep-space events – a so-called “fast radio burst” (FRB) that lasted a mere three one-thousandths of a second. Cornell, McGill University and other astronomers report this peculiar event today (July 10) in the Astrophysical Journal.
Until now, the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, had discovered all five previously known FRBs. This breakneck burst was found Nov. 2, 2012, and not formally reported until this paper, as astronomers needed to verify its authenticity and to rule out cosmic noise.
“It was a single pulse – additional observations of the same direction on the sky have shown nothing,” said James Cordes, Cornell professor of astronomy and an author on the paper. “The nature of these bursts had been in doubt until recently, and the discovery at Arecibo cements the case that they are astrophysical, rather than some unique form of radio interference at Parkes.”
Like a gigantic ear attentive to the heavens, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is Earth’s largest single-aperture radio telescope, tuned to find pulsars, galaxies, objects in the solar system and even the Earth's ionosphere. It’s so large that the height of the Empire State Building fits in its diameter, and the Washington Monument fits in the dish’s focal point.
The PALFA (Pulsar Arecibo L-Band Feed Array) survey, which searches for pulsars useful for understand gravitational physics and condensed matter, collects about 20 terabytes of data annually.
Laura Spitler, M.S. ’10, Ph.D. ’13, discovered this burst as she sifted through 2012 data as a doctoral student. (She now works as a post-doctoral researcher for the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.)
The processing software searches the large amount of data for astrophysical pulses. The algorithms also pick up a lot of man-made signals, so Spitler searched the output by eye to find the rare, real pulse. “Once I saw the characteristic signature of an astrophysical burst, I immediately looked at the data in various ways to convince myself – and everyone else – that it was real,” Spitler said. “The process is not glamorous.”
This pulse seems to have traveled from beyond the Milky Way galaxy, the scientists say.
“We really have no handle on what they are,” Spitler explained. “Scientists are highly skeptical of such discoveries … [that] all of the bursts up until now had been discovered by the Parkes telescope was a cause of concern. Now, with the discovery of a burst from Arecibo, we are more confident that FRBs are astrophysical phenomena, and discovering and classifying them should be a priority of radio astronomical observatories in the future.”
Other Cornell authors on the paper, “Fast Radio Burst Discovered in the Arecibo Pulsar ALFA Survey,” include Shami Chatterjee, research associate in astronomy, and Robert Wharton, graduate student in the field of astronomy. Victoria Kaspi, McGill University astrophysics professor, is principal investigator on the pulsar-survey project. The Cornell Center for Advanced Computing provided critical data storage and database support. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as Canadian and European sources.Just days after announcing that it was for sale, Rolling Stone learned that it still faces litigation over its retracted article about a purported gang rape at the University of Virginia, news that may complicate the magazine’s efforts to find a buyer.
On Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan ruled that a lower court had erred in dismissing a defamation lawsuit filed by three former members of the fraternity at the center of the 2014 article. In the earlier decision, a judge ruled that the three men — George Elias IV, Ross Fowler and Stephen Hadford — had not shown that the article was “of and concerning” them personally, apart from the fraternity. The article was written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who was named as a defendant, along with Rolling Stone and its parent company, Wenner Media.
But in their decision, a panel of appellate judges wrote that “while it is a close call,” the district judge was incorrect when it came to two of the men, Mr. Elias and Mr. Fowler, and sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings. While none of the men were named in the article, details like the setting of the rape in a room at the top of a staircase and the description of one man as an avid swimmer could have led a reader familiar with the fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, to identify those men, according to the lawsuit.
Image The Rolling Stone article about a purported gang rape at the University of Virginia was the subject of a highly critical review of its lapses by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
The judges upheld the district court’s dismissal in the case of Mr. Hadford, whose only identifying feature seemed to be that he liked to ride his bike around campus.Wakey is a new free application for Android which allows you to manage the time-out time of your device’s display in a quick and simple manner.
Wakey is exactly the sort of application I have been looking for a long time now. I usually have my screen display time set to 15 seconds, as it means I can be sure I haven’t accidentally left my phone screen on in my pocket, saving my battery life. However there are certain times where I want the screen to stay on longer. Usually, this is when I am showing a photo on my screen to a group of friends of family members. Normally, by the time the photo has fully loaded and is passed onto the next person, the screen has turned off.
Wakey is the perfect solution to the problem this problem. The idea is simple. When you want the screen to stay on, simply open the app and tap the light bulb. When you are done, open the app again and turn off the bulb, or deactivate it from the notification bar if you are using Jelly Bean. Once deactivated, power is restored to your system’s time-out time.
Oh yeah, we’re also partnered with the guy behind the application, so by downloading the app you are also helping us out! It’s free on the Google Play Store right now so I highly recommend you give it a shot.INPEX: What will happen to Darwin after the last of Australia's natural gas giants has been built?
Updated
For the last few years Darwin has repeated on a grand scale an experiment that is being conducted throughout Australia: what happens to a town when it becomes the site of a mega infrastructure project?
In the next few years the outcome of this experiment will start to become clear.
In 2012 the Japanese company INPEX announced it would go ahead with an ambitious and massively expensive plan to extract "hydrocarbon liquids" (mostly natural gas) from an underwater basin north of Western Australia and then process the gas largely in Darwin.
INPEX at a glance Up to 50 wells will be drilled into the Browse Basin coast of WA
A semi-submersible platform called the CPF will extract the hydrocarbon liquids
The floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel stores the natural gas condensate and compresses the remainder
Condensate shipped directly to buyers from the FPSO
Compressed gas sent to Bladin Point via the 889km subsea pipeline
Bladin Point processes gas to make liquefied natural gas (LNG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), also known as propane and butane
Gas shipped to Japanese and Taiwanese utility companies from Bladin Point
The Ichthys project, as it was officially named, would cost $US34 billion.
At least a third of that money would be spent on the Bladin Point gas processing facility on a peninsula in Darwin harbour.
The chief minister at the time, Paul Henderson, described it as a "game changer" that would "underpin our economy for the next 40 to 50 years".
But others were more wary, warning of the risk of an economic collapse after construction had been completed and the transient workers had gone to jobs elsewhere.
Bladin Point is now less than two years away from completion.
Economists fear a looming bust.
"A huge construction cliff is quickly approaching for the Territory," the Deloitte business outlook report for March 2015 said.
"The likelihood that a matchingly large project gets the go-ahead to help continue to drive growth once construction on Ichthys begins to wind down is now much less."
3,500-bed workers camp could be dismantled
Last week, in a rare event, INPEX conducted a tour of the Bladin Point construction site for the media, as well as senior management including Louis Bon, the project's Perth-based Managing Director.
"It's probably one of the biggest projects in progress at the world at the moment," he said.
"This project is three or four projects. We have the LNG plant here, the pipeline, and then you have the offshore portion.
"And with the offshore portion we have a huge platform - the Central Processing Facility (CPF) - and a huge Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) facility.
"Each of them could be a project by itself in some areas of the world."
We can't stand back and allow companies to come in, plunder our natural resources and leave nothing behind. Thomas Mayor, Maritime Union of Australia
The massive infrastructure, however, translates to only a few hundred long-term jobs.
Up to 8,000 will be employed at Bladin Point by September, but this figure will be radically cut to 300 once the project shifts form the five-year "construction phase" to the 40-year "operations phase".
INPEX's Perth-based general manager of external affairs, Bill Townsend, who also took part on the tour, described this as a "logical transition".
"The construction jobs are relatively short-term," he said. "A different skill set is required to operate the plant."
"These construction jobs will finish and then we'll have the operations jobs. For the longer term there's opportunities in maintenance support for the project."
INPEX, he said, had tried to be sensitive to its "social footprint".
But it was clear the transition to the "operations phase" would involve great upheaval.
He said the almost brand new 3,500-bed Darwin camp built for INPEX workers would revert to the NT Government.
"In the most extreme scenarios," he said, "we would dismantle the site and rehabilitate it."
Meanwhile, for the length of the operations phase lasting 40 years, four carriers per week will export the processed gas to overseas buyers.
All the gas the project is estimated to produce in these 40 years — about 8.4 million tonnes per annum — has already been sold to Taiwanese and Japanese utilities.
INPEX the last of the Australian gas giants
Among other records, the Ichthys project (which in Darwin is often simply referred to as INPEX) includes the largest semi-submersible platform in the world, represents the largest ever Japanese overseas investment, the largest ever project financing ($20bn), and the longest subsea pipeline in the southern hemisphere (889km).
In a sign of the times, INPEX has been largely eclipsed by the Gorgon project of Western Australia's north-west shelf, which has a higher capital expenditure, as well as the series of LNG projects near Gladstone in Queensland which combined are worth more than INPEX.
Record-breaking facts and statistics The FPSO has the heaviest anchor chain in the world - each link is one metre tall.
Trucks carrying quarry rubble to Bladin Point have travelled 12mn km - or 15 times to the moon and back.
Longest subsea pipeline in the southern hemisphere (889km)
CPF is the world's largest semi-submersible platform
Browse Basin gas reservoirs were the largest discovery of hydrocarbon liquids in Australia in 40 years
Largest ever Japanese overseas investment
Largest ever project financing ($20 billion)
Offshore and onshore facilities built to withstand a 10,000 year storm without significant damage.
INPEX estimates it will create tax revenue of $100 bn for the Federal Government
From the centre of Darwin, the Bladin Point gas plant under construction appears as a distant gleam — its presence is felt more through the injection of wealth into local business (INPEX estimates it will spend US$8bn with NT businesses during the construction phase), the tall apartment buildings that have sprung up in the city centre, and the high-vis workers who wait on street corners for private buses to the site.
But at the site this perspective is reversed, and the Northern Territory capital appears dwarfed by the 90m diameter LNG storage silos, the pre-fabricated modules built at fabrication yards in China, the Philippines and Thailand that were shipped to the site in four parts each weighing 5,500 tonnes.
The Bladin Point power plant could power a town three times the size of Darwin.
In addition, as Mr Bon noted, there are also the offshore facilities — the CPF semi-submersible platform currently being built by 6,000 workers in South Korea, the pipe-laying barge of 700 people, the gigantic FPSO that will displace seven times more water than the Titanic.
The fall in global LNG prices — which hit six-year lows in January — has meant large offshore gas projects with massive upfront capital outlays are less viable and more of an investment risk.
After a massive natural gas construction boom in Queensland and Western Australia, there are few new major gas projects in the pipeline.
Unions NT organiser Paul Kirby said he was receiving several calls a week from Gladstone workers in Queensland who were looking to pick up work in the NT as their own projects wound down.
'We need to plan to avoid a boom and bust cycle'
According to INPEX, construction is on schedule, and according to the unions, this has been achieved with "industrial harmony" — without the major industrial action of projects such as Gorgon.
"Some projects in Australia are struggling to be on time," said Mr Bon.
"We want to be the one that will succeed."
As the construction phase nears completion, unions have shifted their focus to securing the "operations phase" jobs for local workers and smoothing out the coming downturn.
"This is a $34-billion project. The Giles and Abbott governments need to plan to avoid a boom and bust cycle," Maritime Union of Australia NT Branch Secretary Thomas Mayor said.
"If this is done properly, Darwin will be set up for a generation of prosperity.
"But we can't stand back and allow companies to come in, plunder our natural resources and leave nothing behind.
"These natural resources belong to everyone and that's why we'll continue to be front and centre of the public debate and protect the best interests of all Territorians."
But given the scale of job cuts on the horizon, it is not clear what any government may do to avoid the bust.
"INPEX and their contractors have a lot of ground to make up in local employment outcomes, both now during construction and in a few years in the post construction operational phase," Mr Mayor said.
Around the world the Ichthys project employs about 30,000 people.
Within two years it will employ about 700 — the positions will all be in Australia, either in Perth, Darwin or on the Browse Basin rig.
Mr Townsend said about 400 of these 700 positions had already been recruited and "395 of these are Australians" but he would not be drawn on how many of these workers were from Darwin, or how much INPEX would spend in Darwin after construction.
"I've been coming here for last seven years on the project to see how Darwin has been transformed in that time," he said.
"I get off the plane and there's a real vibe about Darwin.
"This is a place where things are happening."
Topics: oil-and-gas, community-and-society, government-and-politics, darwin-0800, gladstone-4680, perth-6000, broome-6725, korea-republic-of, japan
First posted“It’s time for pro-lifers to go on the offense.”
Rand Paul has managed to do something no Republican before him has done. In a series of recent comments and media appearances, the Kentucky senator has turned the abortion debate around, calling on Democrats and their media allies to defend their position on late-term abortion.
Paul’s position is summarized perfectly in this clip from Katie Yoders of News Busters:
Rand Paul: Ask the Other Side ‘When Does Life Begin?’ It’s time for pro-lifers to go on the offense, or so Sen. Rand Paul suggests. On April 16, Sen. Paul (R-Ky.) addressed the pro-life movement at the Susan B. Anthony Campaign for Life Summit in Washington, D.C. Referencing his back-and-forth with DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the 2016 presidential candidate stressed that the pro-life movement must ask the other side, “When does life begin?” That question, he suggested, will keep the media from placing pro-lifers “neatly” in a “box.”
Here’s the video:
Paul has repeatedly called on DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to respond. Her efforts have been clumsy and evasive at best.
Last week she appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show where she struggled to put Paul back on defense.
Schultz then went on CNN where Wolf Blitzer was unable to get a clear answer from her.
I find it fascinating that the chair of the DNC suddenly wants the government out of health care decisions.
Rand Paul has definitely touched a nerve here. Let’s hope he keeps it up.Over the course of 12 hours on May 9, the Poloniex digital asset exchange was intermittently inaccessible to users, causing quite a stir for traders and the greater community. According to their official Twitter account, the cause was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the exchange, preventing users from logging on or making any trades. Exacerbating the issue was the fact that as the attacks occurred, a majority of the exchange’s assets fell dramatically, some taking overwhelming losses of up to 45 percent.
Big Losses In Digital Assets on Poloniex March 9th, During One of Several DDOS Attacks
While the cause for such losses remains unclear, a sharp rise in the price of bitcoin may take some of the blame, as assets on the exchange trade in an asset:bitcoin ratio. At the time bitcoin rose to a reach a brand new all time high, above $1700, but the reaction in assets seemed extreme against a 9 percent rise in bitcoin.
It should be noted that digital assets have risen steeply in the last 30 days, adding $25 billion in value to the overall booming market. And while a correction may have been necessary, the cause of the broadbased fall led by Poloniex remains unclear.
Poloniex is the among world’s largest digital asset exchanges, with millions of dollars in assets traded on May 9 alone. But the volatility seen on that date is not unique to this popular platform. Values on Poloniex also rise at breakneck speed, often causing traders to invest in overvalued assets. Over the years, this has raised concerns about the exchange and the validity of its trades, so that the questions have to be asked: Do the owners of Poloniex move these markets with intent? And if they have that power, do they move them with the intention of profiting for themselves?
Recently there have been warnings about Poloniex by respected members of the community. Just one day before the May 9th incident, Charlie Shrem, a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation, spoke to an audience in Toronto, saying, “Poloniex is one of the biggest dangers to our ecosystem today.” And in lieu of the recent activity on the exchange, a California law firm has begun an investigation. In a May 10th press release, Berns Weiss LLP stated:
“Due to users’ inability to access their accounts because of the attacks, both Kraken and Poloniex exercised their discretion to liquidate users’ margin accounts. This action has led users to assert that they may have been the victims of market manipulation and possible insider trading. If the exchanges or individuals associated with the exchanges violated the law, then users who suffered losses as a result of those violations may bring a lawsuit to recover money damages.”
This was not the first time that Poloniex has had connectivity issues. In fact, DDoS attacks happen on the exchange regularly. On their official Twitter account, we can see seven tweets apologizing for downtime already this year.
Most likely, Poloniex will not compensate its users for their losses, as they have not done so in the past. And they are not the only player in these volatile markets. Chinese exchanges have long been accused of manipulating bitcoin, and in the end, China’s government stepped in to prevent malicious tactics. As a community, we have to take a look at this environment and ask: Why are we letting private exchanges dictate the value of assets? In an industry calling for decentralization of governments, media, and banks, why have we yet to see the rise of decentralized exchanges?Built around the Elmore Leonard character of Raylan Givens—seen in Leonard’s short story “Fire In The Hole,” and bits of the novels Pronto and Riding The Rap—the FX crime show Justified has been such a success that Leonard wrote a novel about Givens (titled simply Raylan) that was released the day the first episode of the latest season aired. [Spoilers ahead, throughout the rest of this piece.] The third season begins with Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) still recovering from wounds sustained at the end of season two; he can’t shoot straight, which causes problems as new forces try to take over the crime business in Harlan, Kentucky. Chief among them is Robert Quarles (Neal McDonough), a sadistic Detroit enforcer who wants to set up shop as an OxyContin dealer. There’s also perennial wrench in the works Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), whose romance alliance with Ava (Joelle Carter) has provided the core for their own operation, which stands in direct conflict with Quarles’. On the sidelines is another new character, Ellstin Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson), a powerful, mysterious player from the black enclave of Noble’s Holler who works behind the scenes to protect his turf. And as usual, there are many great character actors in recurring roles and one-offs, including Desmond Harrington, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Carla Gugino, and Michael Ironside. Creator Graham Yost recently sat down with The A.V. Club with a detailed postmortem on the latest season. In part one of four, he discusses the first three episodes, beginning with “The Gunfighter” and concluding with “Harlan Roulette.”
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“The Gunfighter” (January 17, 2012)
With the Bennett clan out of the picture and the drug business in Harlan up for grabs, several players step in to fill the power vacuum. Enter season three’s chief villain, sadistic Detroit enforcer Robert Quarles. Before setting up shop, he has to get around the Dixie Mafia and its chief henchman, Fletcher Nix (Desmond Harrington), a killer of the game-playing Anton Chigurh variety.
The A.V. Club: With Mags Bennett gone and Dickie in jail, you entered season three with a power vacuum, both in terms of Harlan’s criminal business and with the show itself. What conversations did you have in the writers’ room about what you wanted to accomplish for season three?
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Graham Yost: The bar was set kind of high by season two with the work that Margo [Martindale, as Mags] did, and all the cast we got: all the Bennett boys; of course, Jeremy Davies as Dickie, and Joe Lyle Taylor as Doyle, and Brad Henke as Coover. And then, the girl [Loretta] was a real find, Kaitlyn Dever. So we’d had this big season that just sort of materialized. There was a certain amount of planning, but you also adapt and improvise, because we ended up with such a great cast and interesting characters. So choosing for Mags to die, making that choice, was not an easy one, because we loved Margo, but we also felt that the Mags Bennett story had run its course, and I didn’t want to just keep her around because she was great. It felt like that was a good season. So that was in the back of our minds: “Well, what are we gonna do now?” And an early choice was, “Well, let’s not just have another criminal matriarch,” as simple as that.
We didn’t want to try and re-do what we had just done, and so we started to cast around for characters and storylines, and there were two things that emerged: One was, I was struck by the idea of having what we called “the carpetbagger,” someone coming from the North who thinks he’ll show these hillbillies how to really run crime, and is kind of a slick guy, and we’ll see how well that goes for him. And so we came up with that character, and that became Robert Quarles. And almost the minute we thought of that character, I thought of Neal McDonough—I worked with him on Boomtown and Band Of Brothers—and he was available, so that was good.
The other area of interest for us was [that] we felt that we hadn’t really explored African-American life in Kentucky. We’d had some black bad guys, and we’ve got an African-American woman as a deputy—Erica Tazel playing Rachel—but what was going on down in Harlan? What kind of life is that? And so we did some research and came upon a few stories that intrigued us. One was about this enclave, Coe Ridge, that had been predominately African-American. And we knew there still were little townlets in the area, little hamlets in Harlan that were predominately black. Coe Ridge intrigued us. It doesn’t really exist anymore, but it did survive from the Civil War and Emancipation, up until about the ’60s, and the stories we heard about that were pretty intriguing.
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And then, we also came upon this thing: One of the stories about Mags Bailey—who was a very loose inspiration for Mags Bennett, and she’d been a criminal matriarch in Harlan—was that she had stored her money under a black church. So those two things sort of came together, and we created the character of [Ellstin] Limehouse. And again, like Quarles and Neal McDonough, the first thought was, “Could we get Mykelti [Williamson] to do it?” And that set off the season. So now, we roughly knew who the bad guys were gonna be, although we don’t necessarily think of Limehouse as a bad guy. He’s certainly a criminal, but he’s not as dark a character as Quarles is. But it gave us a rough arena, or a couple of arenas, that we wanted to explore. And so we felt that that would mix it up, and that we would give the audience something that they might not have expected, something a little different, and yet it’s still within our world.
AVC: Do you go on missions to the areas when you’re doing research? Are you going off to Kentucky, or are you more looking through local histories?
GY: Well, a group of us went down between the first and second season and met with marshals in Lexington, and then went down to Harlan and hung out with state troopers and various local luminaries and just heard stories, and that was very helpful. And that’s what got us going into the whole Mags Bennett thing in the second. In between the second and third season, too, the new writers, Ingrid Escajeda and Ryan Farley, just off on their own, went down to Kentucky and spent even more time, and met people and got stories, and some of those appeared in the season. And a lot of it is also just contacts, people that we’ve met, now over the years, that we can reach out to and say, “What about this? Is there anything along these lines?” We’d just hear a little thing. Like we’d hear again and again how prevalent OxyContin was, and what a scourge that was, and continues to be in that part of Kentucky. That gave the story some focus. And I think we heard something from someone about this sort of Fogle-like character [the pawn-shop owner from “Harlan Roulette”] who would give people a list of things to go steal; they would go steal this stuff, and then he would pay them in Oxy. And that became sort of the anchor for our third episode. And Elmore [Leonard] was working on his book throughout the second season, and was done between the second and third season—this book, Raylan and his stories in that. And we had poached some of that for season two; there were little bits here and there, definitely the first episode. And then, there was still stuff we hadn’t used yet, so there were chunks that we pulled for the third season. So it was a mixture of research, sheer room-work imagination, and figuring out what we could do that we hadn’t done, and then there was Elmore’s book to pull from.
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AVC: Along with “Watching The Detectives,” “The Gunfighter” is one of two episodes this season where you’re one of the credited writers. What does a writer’s credit mean on Justified, and how heavy a hand do you have in shaping the other scripts as well?
GY: I would say less heavy than I did on Boomtown, but still, I’m involved in all the planning of the story, the breaking of the story, sometimes the outlining, and then notes and a certain amount of rewriting. We have developed a fairly seasoned staff, now. We’ve got a group of senior writers who have now been on it for a couple of years. Some, Ben Cavell, right from the very beginning. Dave Andron freelanced the first year, but has been on staff since then. So we’ve got a group that really knows the show, so they take a lot of responsibility. What does a writing credit mean? Well, I mean, in the case of “The Gunfighter,” I wrote that with Fred [Golan], and we just sort of divvied that up. I think I did the teaser and then act three and act four, and he wrote act one and act two. I think. Something like that. And we sort of passed it back and forth.
But that really represents who wrote that episode. If it says just “Written by Ben Cavell,” that’s a Ben Cavell episode. That doesn’t mean I didn’t rewrite a bunch of scenes, or that Fred didn’t get in there, or even sometimes another writer will have an idea. We’re very free with all of that, but a Ben Cavell episode is a Ben Cavell episode. Similarly, a Taylor Elmore or Dave Andron. We also brought a bunch of new writers on last year and paired them up, at least in production, so the episode that Jon Worley wrote with Cavell [“Thick As Mud”], Jon would do the first couple of drafts, then the senior writer came in and did a lot of work on it. So it represents the both of them.
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In the past, it had always been my thing on Boomtown and then the first two seasons of Justified that whoever writes the first draft gets the sole credit. Which is fine if I’m doing all of the rewriting, because I figure I get this big-ass credit saying Executive Producer and Developed By, so I don’t need to put my name on scripts even if I’m doing work on it. But it felt different if it’s another writer who’s working on it. So the credits pretty clearly reflect who was involved. I could go through an episode and say “Fred wrote that bit,” or “Taylor wrote this.” With something like “ |
night where a roomful of beautiful women competed with one another for the love of a man. I watched the drama as they quarreled, manipulated, flirted, cried and triumphed, but all I could think about was you. I saw your fresh face smiling at your baby brother, heard your silly giggle as you told Daddy a joke and felt the weight of your head as you laid it sleepily on my shoulder.
I know your two-year-old mind dismissed everything I told you that night so I wanted to write it down for you. Because someday, Lord willing, you will be old enough to listen and you will be wading through all the confusion that the world will toss at you about these things. Things like beauty, strength and love.
So, my precious girl, here are the things I desperately want you to know.
1. The most beautiful women in the world look ugly when they are mean.
Beauty is complex. It involves your hair and skin and eyes, but all of those things are just a shell. That shell is transparent and I promise you that whatever you fill it with will be perfectly clear for the world to see.
Your eyes will always be beautiful when they look kindly at someone. You will have lovely lips whenever they smile a genuine smile. And your nose? Well, noses are tough. You either have a good one or you don’t. Luckily for you, yours is adorable.
If you cultivate goodness and kindness and wisdom and strength then not only will that beauty shine out of you but you’ll find that you breathe joy and beauty into the lives of those around you.
But if the most beautiful woman on earth lets herself be filled with jealousy and hatred, she will look like a troll.
2. No one, in the history of the world, has done anything out of jealousy and made it look good.
You’ll be jealous a lot, sweetheart. Trust me. You’ll be jealous of other girls shoes or hair or elbows. You’ll be jealous of their friends, their boyfriends, their poise, their intelligence, their humor. (Maybe even of their mother, just don’t tell me about it if you are.) You’ll be jealous of people you’ve never met and people you love dearly.
When you focus on that thing that some other person has you stop caring about them at all and only care about the thing. Jealousy will make you act like a child because it is an utterly selfish feeling. Trust me, whatever you do or say when you are driven by jealousy will make you look like an idiot.
So be on your guard against it. When you see jealousy sneaking around (and you will) take a little time to be grateful for the things you do have. And if you can’t come up with anything, call me. Because I can see that you have so much beauty and strength and wonder in you that it makes my heart ache and I’d be happy to tell you all about it.
3. Don’t confuse SELFISHNESS with STRENGTH
Some of these women said terrible things to each other then defended themselves by tossing their pretty hair and saying, “I’m just being honest. I have to say what I feel.”
Well here’s a little nugget of wisdom for you, sweetie. Not everything you feel is worth saying. There will be plenty of times when you will have emotions tumbling around inside of you like a litter of puppies on crack. Some of them will be worthwhile but some will be stupid and you should do your best to send them packing.
You’ll meet plenty of girls who don’t agree with me. They’ll claim it is strength of character to blurt out any thought that crosses their mind regardless of who will be devastated by it. But honey, a woman of strong character has the wisdom to shut her mouth until she’s thought for a moment about what she’s feeling to decide whether it’s an emotion that she wants to own, an emotion that makes her into the woman she wants to be or one of those emotions that she should look square in the eye and say, “Yer outta here. You and the hormonal horse you rode in on.”
4. Love
This one is a bit complicated, honey. You’ll spend a lot of time looking for it and thinking about it and being jealous of it. It doesn’t come in the same way all the time and it often ends up looking different than you thought it would.
But I will tell you one thing. If your hunt for love begins with manipulation, jealousy and games, it’s going to have a very hard time finding its way to a happy ending. Real love will start when you find someone, get to know him, and you guys spend time being kind to each other.
And if you do it the right way, with the right kind of boy, it will involve a lot less drama than Hollywood says it should and a lot more happiness.
Oh, and one more thing the show made me want to tell you: If there is ever a boy who you are – I was going to say “kissing” but the thought of you kissing boys will probably give your dad a stroke, so lets go with – rollerskating with and he is openly rollerskating with several other girls. Like six…or seven…dozen…other girls, STOP ROLLERSKATING WITH HIM.
This is not the type of boy that makes a good skating partner. Someone who’s really fun to rollerskate with will like you because he sees what an amazing girl you are. He’ll never ask you to prove to him that he should pick you over a dozen other girls. He’ll be smart enough to know you’re the greatest thing he’ll ever find.
The only reason you should ever even go near the guy again is to point him out to your big brother so he can kick his #**. No, forget getting your big brother. You do it yourself. Go straight for his…ankles. Those two-timin’ rollerskatin’ ankles.
I love you, my darling girl. Go back to playing with your trains. We’ll chat again about all this in a decade or so.
Love, Mommy
Reposted with permission from Whimsy-Ma-BlogGermans Reflect On Legacy Of Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl
NPR's Ari Shapiro interviews Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit, about the legacy of Helmut Kohl, former chancellor of Germany, who died on Friday.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The German chancellor who was known as the father of reunification has died. Helmut Kohl was 87. He led Germany for 16 years during the 1980s and '90s. He presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall when East and West Germany merged to form a single country. Josef Joffe is editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit and joins us now via Skype. Welcome.
JOSEF JOFFE: Hello, welcome.
SHAPIRO: It seems that in many ways Kohl is responsible for the Germany that we know today not only by unifying the country, but also by embracing the euro currency and bringing Germany closer to the European Union.
JOFFE: Yes, absolutely. You know, he had a lot on his plate back in 1989 when the wall fell, especially the suspicion and the fears of his closest neighbors - the Italians, the Brits and the French. The way he managed to juggle all of this and unify Germany, satisfying, dispelling the worries of the other Europeans, and keeping unified Germany in NATO was quite a feat which assures him a place in the history books.
SHAPIRO: Do you think he became such a consequential leader largely because of the times in which he lived or more because of his unique abilities?
JOFFE: Oh, well, that's the oldest question in the world.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
JOFFE: How do we know whether Churchill would have been Churchill without World War II or Charles de Gaulle would not have - would been the de Gaulle Charles, as they called him, without World War Two and his leading France out of defeat? So, you know, historians will debate this forever and ever. I don't really care. I mean, he was in the right place at the right time, and he grabbed the mantle of history. And I thought he did extremely well given the difficulties he faced pulling it off.
SHAPIRO: Paint a picture of him for us. In his prime he was an imposing figure physically, but maybe not the most charismatic leader.
JOFFE: Was he ever. I mean, he weighed about 300 pounds and he towered over the rest at 6.4 feet. Apparently, for greatness you need size and, in his case, weight. He was, you know, kind of roly-poly, a kind of gentle giant who hid his, you know, kind of core of steel and sense of power behind his friendly, jocular demeanor. And it helped him well, by the way, in convincing leaders of Europe and the United States and helped him well in maintaining power.
SHAPIRO: He oversaw a period of borders and walls coming down. Alliances grew stronger during his leadership. We now live in a period when the opposite is happening. The European Union is weakening. How did he assess this moment in world history?
JOFFE: That's a very good question. But the problem is we don't really have an answer because he has been basically out of the game, in and out of comas. He was very frail. He was jealously protected from journalists and others by his second wife. And so I honestly cannot tell you what he was thinking and what he would be saying. But obviously, if he was in a way the high point of European integration, the high point of the Atlantic U.S.-European alliance, then obviously, if I had to speculate, I would say he would be mighty flustered and saddened by what you've just described.
SHAPIRO: Josef Joffe of Die Zeit newspaper speaking with us from Hamburg, Germany, about the death of Helmut Kohl. Thanks very much.
JOFFE: It was a pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAC SONG, "NEW THEORY - RAC MIX"
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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) objections to an extension of controversial provisions of the Patriot Act on Sunday night angered many of his Republican colleagues, but more Americans side with him than with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a strong proponent of extending the programs.
A new poll conducted by Morning Consult shows 27 percent of Americans want provisions allowing the National Security Agency to collect Americans’ cell phone data to expire, more than twice the number — 12 percent — who say they want the provisions extended without modification.
Those provisions expired just after midnight on Sunday after Paul blocked action on both McConnell’s bid to extend the programs without alteration and another measure that would have made modifications.
Younger voters and self-described Tea Party supporters, two constituencies upon whom Paul has relied for support, are more likely to favor allowing the provisions to expire. One-third of those between the ages of 18-29 say they favor an end to the programs, while just 8 percent want them to continue unaltered; 31 percent of Tea Party backers favor expiration, versus just 13 percent who back continuity.
But a plurality of Americans agree that the provisions should be extended, with at least some modifications. The Senate voted Sunday by a 77-17 margin to advance the House-passed USA Freedom Act, backed by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), that would end the bulk collection of records under some authorities first established by the Patriot Act, handing control of meta-data to telecommunications companies.
[visualizer id=”12702″]
Forty-two percent of registered voters said they favor extending the programs with some modifications, including 50 percent of self-identified Republican men, 41 percent of Tea Party backers and 40 percent of those between 18-29.
The poll, conducted May 29-31 among 2,173 registered voters, carries a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.
The White House backs the USA Freedom Act. In a statement Sunday, press secretary Josh Earnest applauded the Senate for taking “an important — if late — step forward” on the bill.
The Senate will take at least until Tuesday to take a final vote on the new bill. On Monday, McConnell urged fellow senators to adopt amendments that would allow several months for development and testing of the new system before it replaces the existing program.
“Last night, the Senate voted to advance the House-passed FISA bill. We’ll have a vote on that legislation as soon as we can,” McConnell said in a statement. “On our way there, we should take some common-sense steps to ensure the new system envisioned by that legislation — a system we would soon have to rely upon to keep our country safe — will, in fact, work.”
But amending the existing bill would require new House action, a prospect leaders in that chamber do not relish. Meeting with reporters on Monday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he wanted the Senate to pass the bill without amendments, so it could be sent quickly to President Obama’s desk.
“I think the best thing for the Senate to do is just take up the House bill and pass it to the President, send it to the President,” McCarthy said.
The clash between McConnell and Paul, which turned heated at times on Sunday as both men indirectly accused each other of demagoguery, highlights a divide between two unusual allies. McConnell, who once endorsed Paul’s primary opponent, eagerly courted his junior colleague’s support during his own re-election bid in 2014.
In exchange, McConnell endorsed Paul’s presidential campaign, and his allies have worked behind the scenes to change Kentucky Republican Party rules in a way that would allow Paul to run both for president and for re-election to the Senate.
— Will Dobbs-Allsopp contributed to this report.By Wonderwall
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The world is a biased place. That's a fact Sandra Bullock isn't sugar-coating when she explains it her son, Louis. In her new cover story for Glamour, Sandra says she "absolutely" discusses racism with her son, whom she adopted in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. "It's an open conversation we have. He fully understands what that means. He doesn't understand why people judge each other based on color of their skin, but he knows they do," she says, according to Celebitchy. "He also knows there's sexism, he knows that there's homophobia. He knows a lot for a 5 and 3/4 year old, but I think if you don't start the conversation very early on you're doing them a disservice. I've said it before I can't ride in a bubble with him. I want him to know the truth but I also want him to know the good in the world as well but those are hard conversations to have."Bears Mon Dec 05 2011
Caleb Hanie must have broken a mirror or walked under a ladder, because every break went against him and the Bears in Sunday's 10-3 home loss to Kansas City.
Here is a full list of the bad luck that plagued the young quarterback in his second career start:
• He lost his best offensive teammate, Matt Forte, early in the first quarter. Forte sprained his right knee and did not return to the game.
• His line failed to protect him, giving up seven sacks and forcing him to roll out on what felt like every pass play.
• On the one drive where the blocking was perfect, he made several nice throws to get the Bears into Kansas City territory, but Roy Williams couldn't hold onto a pass that would have brought Chicago near the goal line. And not only that, but the ball was bobbled around and intercepted.
• In the second quarter, he threw a touchdown pass to a wide open Marion Barber - except Barber wasn't lined up on the line of scrimmage, and the Bears were flagged for illegal formation. They had to settle for a field goal.
• He drove the offense down to the Kansas City 7-yard line late in the third quarter, but two sacks brought them out to the 23. Then, Robbie Gould, who is normally automatic on kicks under 50 yards, missed a 41-yarder.
• Devin Hester had only one good punt return, mostly just waving for fair catches.
• The worst break for Hanie and the Bears? The Chiefs got their only touchdown on a Hail Mary pass before halftime. Tyler Palko chucked it toward the end zone, and Brian Urlacher and Chris Conte batted it down... right into the hands of Dexter McCluster.
Of course, teams create their own luck to an extent.
Kansas City was able to move the chains on the ground (113 rushing yards) by running through some pretty big holes. The Chiefs were able to get any short pass they wanted, and Palko finished with 157 yards passing. Kansas City outgained Chicago 252 to 181, and controlled the ball for a little over 32 minutes.
Dustin Colquitt, the Chiefs' punter, didn't outkick his coverage and got plenty of hangtime on his punts, killing the chances of a Hester return. Hester only really returned one punt, and got 44 yards on it.
Hanie had a few overthrows, including a ball to Earl Bennett that would have been a touchdown in the second quarter. His one real interception (not counting the Roy Williams bobble and a last-ditch Hail Mary at the end of the game) was underthrown, and Chiefs safety Brandon Carr fought off Johnny Knox for the ball.
As for the running game, the Bears struggled to get anything going, as Barber rushed for only 44 yards (3.1 yards per carry).
Matt Forte's injury, a Grade 2 MCL sprain, may keep him out two to six weeks. All of a sudden, the Bears offense is devoid of playmakers, with Cutler and Forte out. Hanie and Barber will expect increased roles for the next few weeks.
Chicago, however, was fortunate this week in one regard: their competition didn't make any advances in the standings. Atlanta, Detroit and New York all lost, keeping the Bears in the front of the chase for an NFC wild card spot. The Bears now sit at 7-5, with a game against Tim Tebow at Denver next week.Ben Bishop down, so who is Andrei Vasilevskiy? May 14, 2016, 12:58 AM ET [24 Comments] Erik Erlendsson
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Watching a goaltender leave the ice on a stretcher might send shock waves through a hockey team. When that goaltender happens to be a Vezina Trophy finalist, those shock waves may reverberate over and over.
Seeing Ben Bishop leave the ice early in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals had that feel. He's been so good all season, a viable MVP candidate that helped carry Tampa Bay through some early season inconsistencies.
In a word, Bishop has been sensational.
But here's the thing with the Lightning and their goaltending situation - they have one of the top prospects in the game serving as Bishop's backup in Andrei Vasilevskiy.
So if Tampa Bay has to turn to Vasilevskiy, depending on the severity of the injury to Bishop, there is a certain sense of confidence in the 21-year-old Russian goaltender to step in perform.
"Whenever you have a goalie that can come in, a backup that you have a
lot of confidence in, it helps the team for sure,'' said Alex Killorn, who opened the scoring for Tampa Bay in a 3-1 series opening victory. " I think he's one of the hardest workers on our team, a guy that comes in every day and works hard.''
He certainly showed that, stepping in cold early on Friday only to turn aside 25-of-26 shots he faced in relief, including all 16 he faced in the third period to pick up the victory. Vasilevskiy became the first goaltender since Olie Kolzig (1995 and 1996) to have both of their first two playoff victories come in relief. Vasilevskiy also came in relief of Bishop in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final last year to earn the victory.
It really shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Vasilevskiy was the first goaltender selected in the 2012 draft, selected 19th overall by Tampa Bay. He's been projected as a potential superstar in the making since being drafted. As a 19-year-old, playing in the Kontinental Hockey League, Vasilevskiy led Ufa to the league semifinals before being bounced from the playoffs. That same year he made the roster for Russia at the World Championships.
Vasilevskiy, who was named to the Russian roster for the World Cup of Hockey, is now in his second year in North America. While he his ascension to the NHL came a bit quicker than planned after Evgeni Nabokov did not work out, robbing the young goaltender of some valuable playing time in the American Hockey League.
"Talk about pushing somebody a little bit down the learning curve a little faster than we wanted to,'' Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said after Game 1. "But there's cliches thrown around all the time, guys who are first in the rink and last to leave and all those types of things, but with that kid, it's actually true. If there's one thing that Vasilevskiy will never be knocked for, it's for preparation and work ethic. That's in his DNA.''
That's a big reason his growth hasn't been stunted to this point. He was sidelined by a blood clot situation before training camp - the same situation that has Lightning captain Steven Stamkos sidelined in the playoffs - before he returned to the ice in late October. Then during the season he was shuttled up and down between the NHL and AHL for the middle part of the season to ensure he was getting playing time helped Vasilevskiy stay sharp.
So when Bishop went down in the early stages of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, it was like replacing the No. 1 goalie with a 1A.
"You never want to lose Bishop, but nobody on the bench was sitting there thinking, oh, we're nervous Vasilevskiy's going in,'' Cooper said. We've kind of run with this tandem all year, and he's a rock, and he was that for us tonight.''
If Bishop is going to miss any time - Cooper said x-rays showed no structural damage in Bishop's left leg - the Lightning are going to need Vasilevskiy to be more solid than the rock he was on Friday.James Baylis - AMA/Getty Images
Arsene Wenger is reportedly planning to rest Mesut Ozil during the busy Christmas period in an attempt to preserve his long-term fitness during the second half of the season.
Arsenal are in the midst of an injury crisis, which has seen key trio Alexis Sanchez, Santi Cazorla and Francis Coquelin all sidelined.
Ozil is unquestionably another of the Gunners' vital players, and after he felt a slight tightness in his calf following Dec. 9's 3-0 victory over Olympiakos, Wenger has decided to rest him in the upcoming weeks, per James Olley in the Evening Standard.
The report added that, barring injury, the German international will not sit out Monday's key Premier League clash against Manchester City, but he will be sidelined for one of Arsenal's following fixtures against Southampton (Dec. 26), Bournemouth (Dec. 28) and Newcastle United (Jan. 2).
Ozil has been in excellent form of late and is enjoying undoubtedly his best season at Arsenal playing in the No. 10 role, per Opta:
He has started all but one of Arsenal's 16 Premier League clashes this season and is a key reason why the north London outfit sit just two points off the top in the English top flight, per WhoScored.com.
Ozil's continued form and fitness will be vital if Arsenal are to make a genuine title tilt this season.
Per Bleacher Report's Sam Tighe, Manchester City remain the title favourites and Arsenal's current injury issues could cause them significant problems in their attempts to win the Premier League:
A long-term injury to Ozil would make winning the league a huge, perhaps insurmountable, task.
Such has been the World Cup winner's influence this season that he has also brought the best out of striker Olivier Giroud, who has netted five times in his last three appearances, per WhoScored.
Remove Ozil from the equation for a lengthy spell and Arsenal's attack would likely be far less effective, thus he must be fielded with great caution, especially with the games coming thick and fast in December and January.
Although Wenger will be loath to leave him out at all over the crucial Christmas schedule, it is surely a sensible idea in the long run.Many of the world's largest economies may be weathering the toughest recessionary storms in living memory, but for those at the top there has rarely been an easier time to join the billionaires' club.
Some 210 multi-millionaires were propelled into the premier league of extreme wealth in the last 12 months as they achieved 10-figure fortunes and the world now plays host to a record 1,426 dollar billionaires, according to Forbes magazine's study.
This super-rich set together sit on wealth estimated at $5.4tn (£3.6tn) – equal to more than a third of the annual output of the US, the world's largest economy. Last year the billionaires' club held a combined wealth of $4.6tn.
At the top of the billionaire tree, once again, is the Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim, with an estimated worth of $73bn, followed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has a fortune of $67bn. The success of the company behind Zara, the world's biggest rag‑trade operation, saw the retired Spanish entrepreneur Amancio Ortega – who still owns 60% of the business – climb into third place in the rankings. His fortune is put at $57bn.
Despite Spain being locked in one of Europe's most crippling recessions, with 55% youth unemployment, Ortega was estimated to have seen the biggest rise in wealth of any billionaire, adding $19.5bn to his pot. As a result, he has leapfrogged Warren Buffett, the investment tycoon known as the Sage of Omaha, who last month swallowed up the Heinz food empire for $28bn.
Buffett's wealth is put at $55.5bn. It is the first time in 13 years that he has not featured in Forbes' top three. Despite this slip, the rankings at the very top echelons of the billionaires' club remained remarkably static, dominated by wise heads that have weathered many recessions in the past. Of Forbes' top 10, eight are aged 70 or older.
Trade union leaders, economists and anti-poverty campaigners said the swelling fortunes of the fast-expanding billlionaire set signalled that levels of wealth inequality were fast approaching crisis levels.
The TUC general secretary, Frances O'Grady, said: "These latest findings from Forbes make for very disturbing reading. Trickle-down economists may love having a growing super-elite, but seem to forget the fact that rising pay inequality was a major cause of the financial crash.
"Faced with flat wages, many people borrowed to maintain their living standards whilst the very wealthy put their cash into ever more risky investments to squeeze out returns. Unless wealth is spread more broadly, we will be unable to build a sustainable recovery, as consumer spending will continue to flat-line."
Other senior figures to raise concerns over spiralling inequality include Angel Gurría, OECD secretary general, who said "widening disparities weaken the structures that hold our society together", while Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, recently warned business leaders in Davos that "the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long."
Among the young turks to join the billionaires club in recent years are the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 28, and his former collaborators Eduardo Saverin, 30, and Dustin Moskovitz, 28. Despite a fortune estimated at $3.8bn, Moskovitz is said to bike to work, shun business class flights and, according to Forbes, "pitches his own tent at [Nevada desert counter-culture festival] Burning Man". The Twitter co-founder and punk music fan Jack Dorsey also scrapes on to the list, with a fortune put at $1.1bn.
Women were well represented among newcomers to the Forbes list, though they still only account for 138 of the world's billionaires, albeit up from 104 last year. The world's richest woman is the 90-year-old French cosmetics heiress Liliane Bettencourt, who is the ninth-richest person internationally. Her L'Oréal empire is best known for its "because I'm worth it" television advertising slogan.
The US is home to 442 billionaires, according to Forbes, with 366 in Europe, 129 elsewhere in the Americas and 103 in the Middle East and Africa.
Despite turbulent times for many of the largest economies in the world, 210 new billionaires were minted in the last 12 months – three times the number of individuals who fell off the list. This concentration of wealth took place despite a strengthening in the dollar against many major currencies.
Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank that specialises in catering to super-rich clients, estimated last autumn that the world's richest 1% – that is, those with wealth of $710,000 and greater – control 46% of global assets. In its annual Global Wealth report, the bank estimated that the number of individuals with fortunes in excess of $50m around the world had reached 84,500. "Notwithstanding the credit crisis and the more recent setbacks, the past decade has been especially conducive to the establishment of large fortunes," Credit Suisse concludes.
The tax campaigner James Henry, a former economist with the global consultancy firm McKinsey, has estimated that between $21tn and $32tn of the world's wealth had been stashed, tax-free, in offshore investments – with about half of this sum controlled by the world's richest 91,000 people. "Almost all of it has managed to avoid all income and estate taxes, either by the countries where it has been invested and or where it comes from," his study found.
The highest-ranking British billionaire on Forbes' list is the Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor. His Grosvenor Group owns large tracts of land in Mayfair and Belgravia and can trace its roots back to 1677, is worth $11.4bn. Fourth on the UK rankings was his fellow land-owning aristocrat Lord Cadogan, whose Cadogan Estates includes a lot of real estate in Chelsea.
Foreign billionaires who have made London their home and who feature in many UK rich lists were not classed as British by Forbes. Those not qualifying as British billionaires included the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, the Russian mining and investment tycoon Alisher Usmanov and the Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich.Slackware is the most stripped down and UNIX-like of Linux distributions and is designed to be a workhorse for developers or sysadmins, who do not want "to be met with GUI greeters, setup wizards, beginner-oriented defaults, and enabled-by-default automatic updates."
What you get from Slackware is a clean system that expects more of the user, at the command line and in the configuration process. There are virtues to this approach. As Patrick Volkerding, the guiding light of Slackware, sees it: "I think the more you try to second guess the user, the more you put up barriers. So we like to keep things uncomplicated as much as possible."
Slackware isn't for everyone, and will never win the race for the Linux desktop, where fancy gizmos, music players, office suites and games are at a premium, but works for users who want "a system that makes a good server - where you aren't even required to install X if you don't want it - or a good desktop workstation if you do a full installation with KDE" or Xfce or Fvwm or Windowmaker or Fluxbox.
The masters of Slack
Slackware doesn't have a picturesque, simple-choice, resource-hogging GUI installer, but for all that, many would argue that Slackware is just as easy to install, that the installer has more clarity than most, is more flexible, and that it is easier to customise a Slackware installation for the precise requirements of more advanced users and system administrators.
The Slackware user would claim that other distributions will install superfluous packages and tools that have to be removed after the installation is complete. Slackware, more than most Linux distributions, has a feel that is similar to a commercial Unix, and feels like home to the experienced Unix user, in installation and in practice.
The asset most valued by the Slack user, and most often claimed for Slackware Linux, is system stability. If you install Slackware on a backroom server you expect it to stay there, and be unnoticed.
Slackware is for developers and sysadmins, for those who want to become masters of their own domain, and those who want to understand how their system works. As the anonymous coward once said "if you use Ubuntu, you'll learn Ubuntu. If you use Slackware, you'll learn Linux," and there are Slackware derivatives, Vector Linux or Zenwalk, for other kinds of users.
The stripped-down cleanliness and utilitarian straightforwardness of Slackware Linux may explain why there is still an extensive user base of loyal and trusting Slack users, despite its lack of apparent commercial appeal.
Other distributions may come with a greater range of options but Slackware comes with all the tools that are essential to run a clean system in a production environment, as a server or as a development platform. You don't need the latest and greatest music software to run Apache or Samba. In the world of Slackware less is often more.
Soft landings for Linux users
Slackware has been around since the early nineties, before the Linux kernel reached its first point release, when Patrick Volkerding, the one and only maintainer of Slackware Linux, cleaned up a version of SLS, (SoftLanding Linux Systems) for his professor at MSU (Michigan State University) to use in teaching LISP.
SLS was the earliest popular distribution of Linux, but had its problems. In the Debian Manifesto, Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, was moved to say of SLS: "It is quite possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux distribution available; unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the most popular."
SLS was a compilation of the latest software available, but wasn't always usable straight out of the box. Slackware went some way to addressing this problem, by ensuring that the packages included in a distribution were not just the latest and greatest, but the best available, and "adding a feature that installed important packages like the shared libraries and the kernel image automatically."
The first release of Volkerding's reworking of SLS was distributed on ftp and announced with a post entitled "Anyone want an SLS-like 0.99pl11A system?", and Slackware rapidly gained a reputation that has stayed with it, for stability and lack of bloat.
The good names were taken
Slackware owed its self-deprecating name to Volkerding's obsessions. The name wasn't chosen to win over the buyers and sellers of hardware systems. Volkerding was a fan of the satirical Church of the Subgenious and a Deadhead, a follower of the Grateful Dead, who had an ethos not unlike the hacker cultures of that gave rise to Linux and free software, allowed and encouraged their fans to record and share tapes of their concerts, and eschewed the trappings of commercial success.
Deadheads formed one of the earliest net communities around the bulletin boards of Stewart Brand's well.com in the 1980s.
John Perry Barlow, one of the Grateful Dead songwriters, went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and wrote an essay called The Economy of Ideas, subtitled "a framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age", which could be seen as an early manifesto for the culture of sharing ideas, software and music across the Web, a culture which the nascent Linux and hacker communities were fully plugged into.
Slackware took its name from the mythical J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the charismatic leader and figurehead of the Church of the Subgenius, whose message to the peoples of America was to "Get Slack".
This was a time when Linux and free software was still the work of mainly young unpaid enthusiasts and volunteers, who were in it, in the phrase of Linus Torvalds, "just for fun". Whatever the serious ambitions of Linux and Slackware, Slackware was also meant to be fun, and so was Volkerding's choice of moniker. Linux developers weren't looking for commercial approval, but the approval of their peers.
"Yeah, okay, I'll admit that it was SubGenius inspired," Volkerding later conceded. "In fact, back in the 2.0 through 3.0 days we used to print a dobbshead on each CD... I've been trying to put an ease-of-use spin on it, but it doesn't quite work. I think I'll just start telling people all the good names were taken to get them off the subject."
The hegemony of Slack
At this time Linux was still the preserve of educated users, and an odd mix of rebellious youth, technofreaks, and frustrated hackers who were attracted by the ideals of free software and the opportunity to disassemble and learn from their computer systems - but was also attracting the attention of academics and sysadmins on the lookout for cheap Unix-like systems that could be run on commodity hardware.
And this is where Slackware came into its own. Slack was the original under-the-radar Linux, downloaded or purchased from Walnut Creek, and put into service by frustrated sysadmins behind the backs of managers - and during the early to mid-nineties was by far the best known and popular version of Linux among computer professionals and nerds, running print and file and web services on countless backroom servers.
The hegemony of Slack lasted well into the late nineties, before it was overtaken by the |
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Heavy Metal
733C
732
733
The tanking was real. Too bad I already had Liquid Metal.
733P
TL;DR
HGN's next quirk pass — A new hope
The HGN runs hot. They need heat dissipation/reduction quirks. This can be done individually for weapons or just by a flat heat dissipation quirk (like the Awesome's old quirk). I recommend a general 15% more heat dissipation quirk for them. On a 12xDHS HGN, this would make the heat dissipation equal to 14.5xDHS and on a 20xDHS build it would be equal to 23.6xDHS. It's not much, but it definitely will allow it to stay cooler. I liked the P purely because it can actually run cooler than the others.
They need heat dissipation/reduction quirks. This can be done individually for weapons or just by a flat heat dissipation quirk (like the Awesome's old quirk). I recommend a general 15% more heat dissipation quirk for them. On a 12xDHS HGN, this would make the heat dissipation equal to 14.5xDHS and on a 20xDHS build it would be equal to 23.6xDHS. It's not much, but it definitely will allow it to stay cooler. I liked the P purely because it can actually run cooler than the others. The HGN is sluggish. I think an engine cap increase is out of the question. Therefore I'd give the HGN a torso twist rate bonus to compensate. Maybe something in the order of 10% like the old 733C quirk. A minor acceleration/deceleration bonus and a turning radius quirk (a la the Summoner) can be considered to make it a more responsive.
I think an engine cap increase is out of the question. Therefore I'd give the HGN a torso twist rate bonus to compensate. Maybe something in the order of 10% like the old 733C quirk. A minor acceleration/deceleration bonus and a turning radius quirk (a la the Summoner) can be considered to make it a more responsive. I'm positive that the next patch will bring more interesting quirks and JJ quirks will probably be one of them. I know PGI is probably hesitant in accidentally reviving the HGN poptart beast (it's still there waiting for its chance) but something has to be done. What I'd love to see is an initial impulse bonus. Let the HGN boost off the ground faster with each JJ. This would also encourage pilots to bring more JJs and justify their tonnage. The ridiculous recharge time can stay to keep poptarting in check. A JJ heat reduction quirk would also be in order to help keep it cool.
will probably be one of them. I know PGI is probably hesitant in accidentally reviving the HGN poptart beast (it's still there waiting for its chance) but something has to be done. What I'd love to see is an initial impulse bonus. Let the HGN boost off the ground faster with each JJ. This would also encourage pilots to bring more JJs and justify their tonnage. The ridiculous recharge time can stay to keep poptarting in check. A JJ heat reduction quirk would also be in order to help keep it cool. More focused individual quirks. 733C should be the ballistic brute with quirks to reflect that (Let's say 15% ballistic cooldown). 733 should be an SRM boomer (20% SRM cooldown), 732 should focus on long range (Gauss cooldown+energy cooldown+energy range quirks), 733P should retain its current quirks as an energy brute. The Heavy Metal should be considered Tier 5 and get quirks accordingly. Increase its general quirks to 15% range or give it the Zeus/Grasshopper treatment with additional armor to emphasize its brawly layout.
In closing
With some tinkering the HGN can indeed be made useful. Its tankiness coupled with its ability to bring heavy weaponry gives it a niche in the Assault category no matter how horrible their JJs are. Still, the HGN definitely feels underwhelming and characterless compared to the beasts such as the BNC, AS, KGC, BLR (laser vomits) and even VTR.
I keep amazing myself with how much I can write about stompy 'Mechs each time. This post was especially long because of my love for the HGN and its sad situation. I hope this post can raise some awareness for the HGNs.
About Rak I'm an engineer who likes to write extremely long articles about games that border simulation and mainstream.
RELATED POSTS
If I had to describe what happened to the Highlander, I would make a simple analogy with a very successful rock star that ruined his life and career after becoming a drug addict. Once upon a time, the Highlander sat at the absolute top of the food chain in MWO. When HGN was released, poptarting was already getting popular with the CTF-3D and it wasn't something new. Though it'd be safe to say that HGN took that poptart concept to the extreme. CTF isn't a particularly tanky 'Mech and it does require some sacrifices to fit the essential poptart ingredients. On the contrary the HGN is extremely tanky, it could jump high and also comfortably mount the weaponry and equipment required to be a nightmare for the other team. The JJs were so good that its inherent sluggishes on the ground (due to low engine cap) was neutered by them. As Paul Inouye said on a recent podcast, these things were great at "punching holes through 'Mechs" and people did their best to abuse the hell out of that aspect.Just like the rock star, the HGN's reign had a late, but tragic ending. After about 1 year of being mostly ignored by PGI, things got worse for them when the Clan pack release neared. It's not clear whether they finally decided to listen to the hundreds of QQ threads on the forums or they just didn't want Clan 'Mechs to be obliterated right out of the gate by the poptarting VTR/HGN masses; but PGI nerfed both of these 'Mechs and JJs in a rapid fashion. I won't go into details, but the result was that these two 'Mechs could not poptart like they used to before. The poptart craze finally took its toll on the HGN. Victor kind of got away because Class II JJs still offer decent mobility and the VTR is also an excellent XL skirmisher chassis, but the HGN was heavily hit.Ever since, the HGN is mostly forgotten and has consequently become one of the rarest battlemechs on the battlefield. It's absurd that I see more Pretty Babies compared to the Highlanders. I personally do not blame the community. Without its JJ assisted beast-mode, this 'Mech is rather underwhelming. With poptarting out of the picture, brawling with the Highlander presents itself as the second best choice. The combination of very favorable hardpoints (a good mix of B, M and E hardpoints), excellent hitboxes and jump jets makes this an impressive brawler builds on paper. In reality, I tried really hard to make the HGN work as a brawler over the past couple of months, but I kept being disappointed. I can list several reasons as to why:HM is an interesting take on the HGN formula. It shuffles the hardpoints a bit by removing E hardpoints from RT and placing them on LA while keeping the missiles in LT and ballistics in RA. In a way, it becomes a Victor 9K with an additional B hardpoint. Unfortunately, this also means your main firepower sources are now on the LA/RA instead of RA/RT. This immediately creates problems with firepower utilization as you have to expose yourself fully to use both LA/RA at the same time. Unfortunately the HGN is also a wide 'Mech, so this issue quickly becomes frustration.HM has general energy/ballistic/missiles cooldown quirks in the 10% area, which is nothing special. Gauss+3xLPL LL is one of the first builds I tried, which proved to be underwhelming because of the reasons above. The situations where you can use both weapons without being torn to pieces is very rare. You simply can't trade well at medium/long range. Then I tried to make it a conventional brawler with 2xAC5+2xASRM6+3xML build, but then again the sluggishness made it a pain to play with.In my opinion, the HM is currently the worst HGN overall. Its hardpoint distribution is not favorable and its 5xJJ+330 engine limit is hard to take advantage of.The HGN that can mount an AC20/Dual UAC5. Because of this, the 733C is a tier higher than the other HGNs, so it gets very mild ballistic quirks. Nothing special. modified the old 2xUAC5+2xPPC meta build by swapping the PPC for LPLs, a STD300 engine and a single JJ for going over that occasional pebble. The results were quite satisfying and this 'Mech proved to be a deadly corner peeker with a completely disposable left side. The heat is pretty much non-existent with 15 DHS, but at 59.4 KPH this thing is really slow and unresponsive. UAC5 jams also hurt a lot, as 2xLPL doesn't isn't a particularly hard-hitting weapon in situations where you need constant firepower (when the enemy pushes, fight or die situations).The one with three torso energy hardpoints and very mild ballistic/energy cooldown quirks in 7.5% range. Obviously the first thing I tried was to make a Gauss+3xLPL 'Mech and it actually did well with this setup. Afterwards I exchanged the Gauss for an UAC5 for better responsiveness and (potentially) more DPS, and it actually did better.The missile one. I didn't play much with this one as it's the HGN that you either SRM brawl with or mutilate with LRMs. I quickly slapped in 4xSRM6+Gauss and went brawling. The single round I played turned out to be an epic game where I tanked down to 4% while getting 4 kills and 960 damage. This is when the tanking capabilities of the HGN "clicked" with me again.Bingo. This is the HGN where I realized I had a "winner" in my hands. Unlike the other HGNs, the P gets a 10% energy heat reduction quirk. It also gets a 20% PPC speed increase and a 10% laser duration reduction. Looking at the quirks, I quickly made a 2xLPL(arm)+2xPPC build with the 325 engine and 20DHS. Very impressive numbers for a HGN.The results are very satisfying. The LPL+PPC combo hits hard for 42 damage without ghost heat and the heat is really easy to manage. It quickly became my favorite and I had truly awesome matches in both group and solo queue in all kinds of situations. Just like the 733C, this thing is a side-peeker with a completely disposable shield side.I'm still getting used to the aiming aspect of the PPCs (it's been a while since I played with PPC builds!), but I think the 733P with this build is right up there with the BNC-3M/3E/BLR-3S/KGC in terms of effectiveness. I also tried swapping 2xPPC for another two 2xLPL but I felt the increase in damage potential didn't justify the loss of long range effectiveness.The HGN can only hover, but when it became the poptart King, that wasn't the only thing going for it. The synergy of the RA/RT hardpoints and the ability to have a shield side still makes it a viable side-peeker. A single JJ also provides enough thrust to overcome most obstacles other assaults have to go around. If you're nostalgic about your HGN, I encourage you let go of your prejudice and to check them out again (especially the P).I'd also like to touch upon the question of "Why would I pick this over a Misery?". The Misery can indeed do similar builds and can have a similar shield side. Though the difference is in the form of these 'Mechs. The HGN arms tend to block a lot of damage, while the Stalker tends to tank with its torso only. So you gain an additional 90 (60 armor+30 structure) potential damage buffer over the Misery. Also the Misery/Stalker has a limited torso twist while the HGN enjoys a full 90° twist with actuated arms. Lastly, the HGN has a semi-broken jumping animation that helps with survivability. The Misery wins in peeking/hillhumping department because of its hardpoint placement and it can trade better.It was revealed that HGN is one of those 'Mechs getting a quirk pass in the March 17th patch. As their quirks were already altered one time already, I'm expecting this to be the last chance to make HGN's better in the foreseeable future. I think the HGN has a lot of potential to beassault brawler on the IS side, with viable secondary support roles like the ones I presented above. In order to achieve that, PGI just needs to realize that this chassis is seriously underpowered. I wouldn't put any HGN higher than Tier 4 in PGI's quirk list in their current form.Well, what does the HGN need then? I have some suggestions:WASHINGTON, DC, May 23, 2016 -- The view that the rich are highly mobile has gained much political traction in recent years and has become a central argument in debates about whether there should be "millionaire taxes" on top-income earners. But a new study dispels the common myth about the propensity of millionaires in the United States to move from high to low tax states.
"The most striking finding in our study is how little elites seem willing to move to exploit tax advantages across state lines," said Cristobal Young, an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University and the lead author of the study. "Millionaire tax flight is occurring, but only at the margins of significance."
In any given year, Young and his fellow researchers found that roughly 500,000 individuals file tax returns reporting incomes of $1 million or more (constant 2005 dollars). From this population, only about 12,000 millionaires change their state each year. The annual millionaire migration rate is 2.4 percent, which is lower than the migration rate of the general population (2.9 percent). The highest rates of migration are seen among low-income tax filers: migration is 4.5 percent among people who earn around $10,000 a year.
"There is a widely held perception that elites are extremely mobile -- that they are more attached to money than to place, and with money you can live anywhere you want," said Young, who noted that millionaires are no less likely to live in states with high income taxes (e.g., New Jersey or California) than in states with low or zero income taxes (e.g., Texas or Florida). "We tend to think of migration as a form of freedom and one of the privileges enjoyed by the rich. In practice, migration comes with high social and economic costs -- uprooting one's family, breaking away from one's social networks, and restarting in a new place."
The study finds that family responsibilities are a key factor that limit migration among top-income earners. "Very affluent people are much more likely to be married and to have school-age children, which makes moving more difficult," Young said.
Young also noted that most millionaires today are "the working rich" and do not live off inherited wealth, but instead rely on earnings from employment. "They work as lawyers, doctors, managers, and financial executives," he said. "They are at the peak of their careers and typically earn million-dollar incomes only for several years. People avoid potentially disruptive moves when they are performing at the very top of their game."
Titled, "Millionaire Migration and Taxation of the Elite: Evidence from Administrative Data," the study, which appears in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, relies on federal income tax returns from all U.S. tax filers who earned $1 million or more in any year between 1999 and 2011. This resulted in a dataset of 45 million tax records from 3.7 million unique tax filers over 13 years. For comparison, Young and his co-authors, Charles Varner, a sociologist and an associate director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, and Ithai Z. Lurie and Richard Prisinzano, both financial economists at the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Department of Treasury, also drew a 1 percent sample of the total population of tax filers, giving them an additional 24 million tax records from 2.6 million unique filers across the income distribution. The researchers tracked the income and residency of all of the filers over the entire study period.
"Previous studies on elite tax flight have struggled with data limitations either by using narrow segments of the millionaire population, such as professional athletes, or by analyzing limited geographic regions, such as one or two states," Young said. "This study includes every tax record filed by every U.S. millionaire over more than a decade."
According to the study, in the average state, which has an annual population of more than 9,000 individual millionaires, a one percent tax increase on this population would result in an expected loss of 23 of these economic elites. "Yes, a handful of top earners would leave," Young said. "But, more notably, virtually all of the millionaire population would stay."
While millionaire migration is extremely limited, there is a grain of truth in the worries about millionaire tax flight, the study finds. "When millionaires do migrate, they are more likely to move to a state with a lower tax rate, and that state is almost always Florida," Young said.
There are nine states without a state income tax, but only Florida disproportionally attracts millionaires from higher tax states, Young said. The other states, such as Texas, Nevada, and New Hampshire, do not.
"My guess is that if Florida established a'millionaire tax,' elites would still find Florida appealing because of its climate and geography -- and patterns of elite migration wouldn't really change," Young said.
In fact, the millionaire migration that does occur has so little to do with tax differences that Young and his co-researchers estimate that if all states had the same tax rate -- so there were no tax incentives to move -- there would only be approximately 2.2 percent or about 250 fewer millionaire migrations between states each year.
The study also looked at the millionaire population along the borders between states with different tax rates. "In these narrow geographic regions, you would expect millionaires to cluster on the low tax side of the border, but we see very weak evidence of this," Young said.
As for policy implications, Young said "millionaire taxes" result in minimal tax flight among millionaires and help states raise revenue to improve education, infrastructure, and public services, while reducing inequality.
"Our research indicates that'millionaire taxes' raise a lot of revenue and have very little downside," Young said.
###
About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review
The American Sociological Association, founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA's flagship journal.
The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA Media Relations Manager, at 202-527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.Background
Bill
The Bill, passed on March 23, 2018 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018,[11] ends American aid to the Palestinian Authority unless the Authority ceases to pay stipends to the terrorists and their families, including the families of successful suicide bombers.[12][13] Democrats, initially reluctant to support the Bill on the grounds that the payments were necessary to keep the West Bank from political upheaval, became more inclined to support the bill in 2017.[14][15]
Discussion
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal endorsed the bill on the grounds that it would force the government of Mahmoud Abbas to end a policy of "rewarding terrorism."[2] Legal scholar Thane Rosenbaum described the stipends the Act moves to end as "lavish incentives to commit violence."[16] The Palestinian Authority argues that if it ceases to make such payments families will suffer from poverty; others refute this assertion by pointing out that American foreign aid could be distributed on the basis of need, instead of as a reward for murder and attempted murder. The PA also argues that if it stops rewarding terrorists and their families, Hamas will step in to make such payments and gain power in the West Bank.[17]Want to see something awesome, something that reaffirms your love in college basketball -- not in the game itself, so much, but in what it means to its most dedicated fans? Of course you do.
Here's what you do: Type "youtube.com" into your web browser. Enter the search term "I believe that we will win." Click on the second video. Watch:
Yes, that's "I believe that we will win," the Utah State student section's pregame chant. I've seen it before, but never in such high video quality, not until the tremendous MileHighMids passed it along on Twitter. It's everything a basketball chant should be: Organized, direct, supportive, intimidating and not the least bit hokey. It's not cocky, either; when I hear "believe," I hear less expectation than faith. That's what sports fandom is. It's a form of faith.
To be honest, I think our English neighbors tend to outdo us when it comes to chants and songs; we yell "DE-FENSE," they sing "You'll Never Walk Alone." But I'm not sure I've heard a chant this good in the last five years. I'm all goosebumps. I could watch it 10 times. (Correction: I have watched it 10 times. I could watch it 10 more.)
Tipster Mids was curious: Is this chant spreading, "Zombie Nation"-like, across the country? Thus far, the YouTube evidence is slim. The majority of the videos on YouTube are of Utah State's student section; some are higher quality than others, but all of them are impressive. There are a few clips of San Diego State's "The Show" student section organizing the chant last year. There is one clip of Harvard students doing the same -- be sure to wait for the guy dancing at the :19 second mark. And New York Red Bulls fans -- come on you, Red Bulls! -- have given it a decided football flair. (It does sound soccer-y, doesn't it?)
Utah State has been doing this chant for years, so I assumed they invented it. Turns out, that's not the case. According to a Dec. 6, 2003 story in the Washington Post, the chant originated at a Navy football game, when Navy -- in one of their first promising seasons in decades -- was trailing No. 25-ranked Air Force 28-25 in the final minutes:
In October, the Midshipmen were in the last minutes of a 28-25 win over Air Force, then ranked No. 25. Navy hadn't beaten a ranked opponent in 18 years -- longer than some Mids had been alive. Yet some in the Brigade, which stands throughout every game, began jumping up and down at FedEx Field. "I," they chanted softly, then louder, "I believe..." Sources say a group of Navy lacrosse players started the ruckus, though you can't be sure because urban legends are quickly springing up around Johnson's 7-4 team. "I believe that," they yelled as more joined in. "I believe that we..." Until finally, the whole Brigade, more than 2,000 strong, was bounding up and down, screaming, "I believe that we will.... I believe that we will win!"
Just when you think this chant can't possibly get any cooler, you go and learn something like this. It's been eight years in the making -- maybe longer, but the first T-shirt sale reference at Navy came in 2003, too -- but "I believe that we will win" finally seems to be entering the college basketball mainstream.
It may do so solely as a mid-major rallying cry: The Mid Majority's Kyle Whelliston added the words to his masthead this season to commemorate the start of a new, collectively driven era of coverage at the site. (Whelliston is on sabbatical, but his readers are attempting to travel to 800 games as a group, and the early results have produced some fantastic writing).
Or maybe "I believe that we will win" will really sweep the nation the way Zombie Nation once did, infecting student sections at schools both large and small. As much as fans from Navy or Utah State may want to preserve the unique nature of the chant -- and as much as the chant feels like it should be reserved for the underdog -- I... I believe... I believe that... I believe that I wouldn't have any problem with that. Would you?Jourdan Lewis now knows his fate.
The trial involving the Dallas Cowboys' third-round pick for allegations of domestic violence got underway in Ann Arbor, MI just as the team fired up training camp halfway across the country in Oxnard, CA.
According to the initial police report, Lewis' girlfriend told law enforcement he "dragged her across the living room floor and stated that Lewis grabbed her by the neck and held her on the floor 'for about three seconds", charges he vehemently denies. For his part, Lewis insisted he was innocent -- stating he only grabbed her because he was "trying to get her off of him" in an attempt to leave during a heated argument.
Well, the verdict is in and Lewis is not guilty.
NOT GUILTY: Jury dismisses charges against CB Jourdan Lewis.
Cowboys finally get some good news. — Bobby Belt (@BobbyBeltTX) July 25, 2017
The Cowboys are gearing up for a run at Super Bowl 52! Don’t miss any breaking news, take a second to sign up for our FREE Cowboys newsletter!
Speaking earlier in the offseason just after the NFL Draft, EVP Stephen Jones was confident Lewis would be exonerated.
"Well, this guy's an outstanding guy," said Jones to SiriusXM NFL Radio hosts Jim Miller and Pat Kirwan, via The Dallas Morning News.
"At the end of the day, we did a lot of research. No need to rehash all that. At the end of the day we go what kind of guy is this overall? And whether it's on the field, off the field, this guy is a solid individual. Of course we did all our investigations, we did all our diligence and we decided, hey, he's not coming off our board.
"And we feel good about it. Obviously that will have to play out. We feel good about how that's going to play out. We have a lot of confidence in him. We just said, hell, we need some corners here. I think he can step in and... I think he's going to make a big difference."
The team took a risk and pulled the trigger on Lewis with the 92nd overall pick, which could easily prove to be the biggest steal of their entire draft haul.
"I'm elated," said Lewis after hearing the verdict, via ESPN reporter Michael Rothstein.
That's likely an understatement.
Follow @VoiceOfTheStar on Twitter for up-to-the-second news and analysis!Are there still people out there who think that Ivanka Trump is a moderating influence on her father? If you believe that – that the Donald Trump currently Big-Wheeling all over the Middle East is the toned-down version – can I just ask, respectfully: what exactly do you think Donald would be doing to the country if he wasn’t under the supposedly soothing spell of Ivanka? Outlawing renewable energy in favour of whale oil? Replacing the constitution with the lyrics to Ted Nugent’s Free for All? Just straight-up cannibalism?
That’s like saying that fur is a moderating influence on a wolf. (It’s so soft!)
Ivanka is not simply tolerant of her father’s blathering radicalism, let alone nobly embattled by it; she is an active proponent and beneficiary of the outrageous robbery her family is perpetrating against those they purportedly serve. Come on. She loves it. You can tell because she continues to be a beaming member of the administration instead of an estranged daughter who cries every day in her nest of shame.
The Guardian reported this week on the shocking brutality of the president’s budget proposal:
“Cuts to Medicaid over the next decade exceed even the more than $800bn reductions contained in a health bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month. The president also aims to slash welfare by $274bn over a decade, including $193bn on food stamps, driving millions of people off the programme … The blueprint also shaves 31.4% off funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and 29.1% off that for the State Department and other international programmes.”
Trump's budget: major slashes to social programs – but $1.6bn for the wall Read more
It goes on like that. Donald’s dream budget would defund Planned Parenthood, destroy public broadcasting and funnel billions of dollars toward his ludicrous border wall and its defence, a project that, if completed, will serve absolutely no purpose except for a symbolic one – bolstering the lie that America is a white country and emboldening racists to harass, intimidate and discriminate against immigrants. So moderate! Good job, Ivanka!
Sure, Ivanka claims to care about women. She sometimes says the words “paid family leave” out loud and even got her dad to mention it in his budget proposal. Plus, she wrote a whole book about women having jobs (a daring stance!). But what about all the women whose safety, livelihoods, and legal rights and protections are already being threatened by her father’s policies? What about poor women, refugee women, Muslim women, trans women, gay women, undocumented women, disabled women, incarcerated women, women of colour, women working minimum wage, women who can’t find jobs, women who can’t afford childcare, women who need abortions, women who don’t want to die of cervical cancer, women in abusive relationships, women with pre-existing conditions and women who weren’t born into ghastly amounts of inherited wealth, handed the keys to real-estate empires and endlessly congratulated on their entrepreneurial acumen? What about women who are just trying to get by?
Ivanka cares about women in the same way that her father is “the least racist person you’ve ever met”. The way is lying. When it comes to letting us know who they are, the Trumps are more showers than tellers.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivanka during the Trump family’s bizarre state visit to Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
During the Trump family’s bizarre state visit to Saudi Arabia last week, while her father was distracted by the promise of a great big orb he could fondle, Ivanka busied herself the same way she busies herself in the US: crooning nonsensical boilerplate about empowerment at women whose challenges she hasn’t bothered to understand. According to the Washington Post, Ivanka met with “a small group of accomplished Saudi women gathered for a dialogue with her about how to build on their successes”.
“In every country, including the United States, women and girls face challenges,” the heiress said to a group of women who are not allowed to travel without a permission slip from a man. “Saudi Arabia’s progress, especially in recent years, is very encouraging, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
Ivanka Trump can't be white-washed with 'women's empowerment' talk | Arwa Mahdawi Read more
What a bunch of nothing. It’s the same nothing that fills Ivanka’s books, her speeches, her shoe designs and her understanding of feminism. Ivanka is a husk animated by pure branding.
If you’ll follow me on a little tangent, I’ve noticed that a lot of men find the body positivity movement threatening because they are convinced its goal is to force them to have sex with fat women. That’s silly (and not on the table, boys). The real goal, if you distill it to its essence, is to kill the pernicious and persistent fiction that beauty correlates with goodness. That people like Ivanka must have our best interests in mind because their hair is very shiny. That we can trust her because of her teeth. That pretty people deserve more than the rest of us.
It’s not true; we can’t, and they don’t. Ivanka’s nail beds don’t put her on the right side of history. In fact, Ivanka doesn’t moderate her father at all; she sells her father to moderates. Watch out.Have you ever noticed the musical notes tattooed on some unfortunate soul in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”? You might have been too distracted by the guy being kissed by a pig wearing a nun’s habit nearby, or who knows, the two severed ears shot through with an arrow that are crushing naked bodies while holding a knife between them. However, a sharp-eyed college student has transcribed this tune of the damned.
As the Guardian reported yesterday, a Tumblr user named Amelia — “a hard-of-hearing music and information systems double major at Oklahoma Christian University” — was looking at the 15th century painting with a friend and found “much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.” She then posted a recording of this “600-year-old butt song from Hell.”
The recording is a pretty straightforward rendition of the score on piano keys, but this being the internet someone has already gone a step further and made an atmospheric choral version with bawdy lyrics. Appropriately, there is a small choir in the painting, including a Pepto-Bismol-colored demon.
This is hardly the first time someone has gotten obsessed over the finer details of Bosch’s moralistic mania in “The Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych. Back in 2010, Oxford University musicologists created painstaking copies of the instruments in the painting, including the giant lute crushing the bearer of the music. Alas, they sounded “horrible,” with only the flute and drum being at all playable. Along a similar vein of realizing instruments depicted in art, last year Polish pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki debuted his construction of a “viola organista” — a sort of stringed instrument played like a piano — recreated from a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. Lucky for Zubrzycki, Da Vinci was designing a real contraption, whereas for Bosch the instruments were just aesthetic tools of torment. And on the subject of sleuthing for art secrets, Da Vinci may also have hidden music in his art. In 2007, a computer technician claimed that he’d found music secreted within the bread loaves in Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”
One wonders if Bosch himself actually heard the music he decided to stamp on one of his tortured souls, being so caught up in music as a symbol of lustful failings. Perhaps now the “Concert in the Egg” Bosch copy is up for some internet collaboration?
Click here to listen to the recording of the music from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”New Jersey Governor Chris Christie speaks at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida, on August 28, 2012
Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/GettyImages.
Here’s a story from last night’s GOP convention that Republicans could no doubt live without as they make their pitch to the American public this week. CNN reports:
“Two people were removed from the Republican National Convention Tuesday after they threw nuts at an African-American CNN camera operator and said, ‘This is how we feed animals.’
“Multiple witnesses observed the exchange and RNC security and police immediately removed the two people from the Tampa Bay Times Forum.”
The cable news network isn’t giving the story a lot of play this morning, and only posted an item on it after Talking Points Memo first reported the news last night. Nonetheless, it is probably worth pointing out that the CNN post makes no effort to soften its lede with “allegedly” or anything similar.
The official statements coming from RNC organizers and the CNN brass last night provide only vague details of what happened.
Convention organizers: “Two attendees tonight exhibited deplorable behavior. Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated.”
And CNN’s statement: “CNN can confirm there was an incident directed at an employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon. CNN worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.”
The first account of the incident, unsurprisingly, came via Twitter in the form of a tweet from former MSNBC and Current anchor David Shuster: “GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African American CNN camera woman + saying ‘This is how we feed animals.’”Michelle MacLaren tells THR about her landmark episode and teases what's to come Sunday: "I was so blown away."
Update: Read our full chat with director Michelle MacLaren here.
Director Michelle MacLaren and the Game of Thrones team threw loyal book readers for a loop last week with the first episode of the HBO series to stretch significantly beyond George R.R. Martin's novels.
In the final moments of the episode, we were taken beyond the Wall to finally discover what the White Walkers have been doing with Craster's sons all of these years.
PHOTOS: Joffrey's 10 Most Evil Moments
"I was so blown away to find out what they are doing with the babies. I thought 'Wow.' I was very excited to do that," MacLaren tells The Hollywood Reporter of learning the key plot point. She also admits with a laugh: "I had thought they ate the babies – isn't that horrible?"
The revealing scene presented more questions than answers, and that was intentional. MacLaren says showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were very particular |
All events in the series take place at the Alamo Drafthouse Sloan’s Lake
4255 W Colfax Ave, Denver, CO 80204
November 14 | The Man Who Fell To Earth
With special musical performance by members of Chimney Choir and the Ian Cooke Band
6 p.m. Meet & Greet CPR's OpenAir hosts in BarFly
7 p.m. Live music pre-show
7:45 p.m. The Man Who Fell to Earth
Tickets: Buy Tickets
Courtesy of Alamo Drafthouse
Past Shows
September 25 | Labyrinth
With special performance by musical guest Eldren
Courtesy of Alamo Drafthouse
October 20 | The Hunger
With special performance by musical guest The Wham Bam Thank You BandBart vs Australia is one of the most iconic Simpsons episodes of all time. Now obviously, being an Australian website we are always going to be biased towards it, but the proof is in the facts. After all, this was actually the first time The Simpsons writers had dared take the family outside of the United States. It’s actually something that I’m rather proud of as an Australian Simpsons fan, since we were selected based on our sense of humour.
By this point, the show had taken plenty of jabs at their own country, it was time to share the love. With our general “piss take” personality, Australia was the perfect choice to test the waters in poking fun at somebody else for a change. Only problem was that it backfired, and a select number of idiotic viewers were offended by The Simpsons’ portrayal of our fine nation, leaving a sour taste in the mouths of many. However in my opinion it’s the tongue-in-cheek parodies that make this episode so charming. So considering that today is Australia Day, we thought we’d celebrate by running through some facts about Australia that we all learnt from Bart vs Australia.
1. We refer to our currency as “Dollarydoos.”
Granted, since the release of Bart vs Australia we as a nation have warmed to the idea of this currency name change. Well, the portion that are Simpsons fans anyway. We even had a petition going last year to actually make this a reality. It was never going to be successful, but hey, we all love a good bandwagon to hop on board from time to time.
2. Our Prime Minister is also a judge.
A part of me wishes that this one was true. Imagine how great it would have been to see Tony Abbot trying to control a court case. Better yet, seeing him in one of those wigs would have been enough entertainment.
3. Booting is a form of punishment.
Let’s be honest, we all need a good kick up the arse from time to time. Just imagine how successful (and hilarious) the reaction videos would be if this were a real thing!
4. Giant beers are available from the pub.
Australians love beer, everyone knows that, especially The Simpsons writers. Out of all of the exaggerated aspects of Australian culture in this episode, THIS was the one I would a) believe to be true, and b) wish it were true.
5. We all drink Foster’s Lager.
Now you can’t really blame The Simpsons too much for this, since apparently this beer is promoted internationally as “our favourite”. Honestly, I’m now 29 and the only time I’ve ever tasted Foster’s was in England, and that’s because my mate wanted me to “feel at home.” Let it be said, Foster’s isn’t a big deal down here.
6. We waste beer.
In the closing segment we see the angry mob all throw their beers at the helicopter containing The Simpson family. The idea of Australians wasting this amount of beer is laughable, although then again, it was Foster’s after all…
7. Our first Prime Minister was a convict.
It’s no secret that the British stole and used this beautiful land as a settlement for their convicts, however it’s safe to say (I think) that our first Prime Minister was never a convict himself. The funniest (and saddest) part of it all? The majority of Australians probably have no idea who the first PM actually was.
8. We stole our Parliament House sign from Austria.
Your classic “blink and you’ll miss it” Simpsons visual gag, but one worthy of a mention. I’ve never actually been to Parliament House, so I can only assume this isn’t real. If it is, well I’m fine with that too.
9. Our police force carry boomerangs as weapons.
This is false. Our police carry guns and tasers. They hurt and do considerably more damage than a boomerang. Don’t mess with our cops.
10. Uluru is actually called the Wolumbaloo Dirt Monument.
I visited Uluru with my wife over the Summer break a few years back. Whilst on a guided tour I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask “When did the name change from the Wolumbaloo Dirt Monument to Uluru?” The reference was lost on everyone, including my wife.
and finally…
11. Our national flag contains a bare arse.
So there you have it guys, just a few random facts about this beautiful country that we learnt from The Simpsons. Hope you all have an amazing Australia Day!
Also don’t forget to check out our Simpsons Podcast archive to listen to our episode reviews, cast interviews, Top 10 lists and more!Sun 26th February, by Annem Hobson
If you like eating your meat with a side of meat and some extra meat on top, then look no further. This Pancake Day, Oxford based restaurant group House of Jacob have invented ‘Pigcakes’ – a Shrove Tuesday classic made entirely of meat.
Consisting of 5 different cuts of pork, including belly, cheek and shoulder. This coming Tuesday, the four restaurants will be serving up a ‘classic American’ style meat stack, as well as a refined ‘brisket ballotine’. Both will be served with chunky ‘slaw and veal jus as an alternative to the standard lemon and sugar.
Created by Executive Head Chef, Chris Kennedy – he comments,
“Pancake Day was originally about ‘pigging out’ before Lent, so we decided to update the boring batter mix and hero our organic pigs by creating an all-meat alternative.”
Chris’s recipe sounds divine as he slow cooks the pork belly for four hours until it can be moulded into the classic, pancake shape. He then fries it off with carrots, onions and candied apple, served with a dousing of veal jus and a side of cherry tomatoes and chunky ‘slaw.
A complete carnivores dream, if you’re sick of sweet options on Pancake Day then this is the place to be.
The ‘Pigcakes’ will be served at all day at all of their four venues this coming Tuesday, costing £8.50 with the option to add a fried egg for £1.
Visit any of their venues below between 9am and 10pm on Tuesday 28th February:
Jacob’s Inn, Wolvercote, Oxford
Jacobs & Field, Headington, Oxford
Jacobs Brasserie, Osler Road, Oxford
The Woodstock Arms, Woodstock, OxfordIranian human rights defender and writer Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, sentenced to six years in prison for writing a story about the cruel practice of stoning, was rearrested on Sunday and the judicial review of her conviction is being illegally blocked, said Amnesty International today.
Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee was returned to Evin prison after being picked up by Revolutionary Guard officials while on the way to visit her gravely ill husband, human rights defender Arash Sadeghi, in hospital. She had been on temporary prison leave since 3 January, awaiting a judicial review by Iran’s Supreme Court of her six-year imprisonment for writing an unpublished, fictional story. The review is being deliberately held up in the courts by the Revolutionary Guards.
The Iranian authorities must put an end to all attempts to penalize the peaceful activities of Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee and Arash Sadeghi in defence of human rights, immediately and unconditionally release them and ensure that their unjust convictions are quashed without further delay Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa Share this Twitter
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“Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee's rearrest and the intrusion into the judicial process by the Revolutionary Guards is the latest alarming development in the authorities’ arbitrary and unjust treatment of this activist couple,” said Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.
“The Iranian authorities must put an end to all attempts to penalize the peaceful activities of Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee and Arash Sadeghi in defence of human rights, immediately and unconditionally release them and ensure that their unjust convictions are quashed without further delay.”
Prior to her arrest, she told Amnesty International that her sentence and the 15-year sentence given to her husband for his peaceful human rights work had been assigned for review to Branch 33 of the Supreme Court, but the Revolutionary Guards had obstructed the process by preventing the transfer of the court files from the Revolutionary Court in Tehran.
Golrkh Ebrahimi Iraee also told Amnesty International that the Associate Prosecutor of Evin Prison had admitted that illegalities had taken place in their case and promised that they would be addressed.
The authorities have effectively taken Arash Sadeghi’s health hostage. The decision to deny him access to the medical care he so desperately needs and condition it on his wife’s return to prison is patently a callous punishment for his hunger strike and amounts to torture on the part of the Iranian authorities Philip Luther, Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa Share this Twitter
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In addition to obstructing justice, Amnesty International is disturbed that the Revolutionary Guards continue to inflict calculated pain and suffering on Arash Sadeghi by blocking his access to urgent medical care. Arash Sadeghi was on a 72-day hunger strike between October 2016 and January 2017 in protest at the imprisonment of his wife. He ended his hunger strike on 3 January, following a global outcry and after the authorities eventually released Golrokh Ebrahim Iraee on temporary prison leave, promising to extend the leave until her case undergoes judicial review – a promise they have now broken.
In recent weeks, he has been transferred to the prison medical clinic almost on a daily basis due to internal bleeding, shortness of breath and severe coughing. Doctors have said that he is suffering from a severe lung infection, gastrointestinal problems and kidney dysfunction and requires an extended period in hospital to receive appropriate medical care.
Despite these warnings, the authorities have refused to transfer him to a hospital. Prior to her arrest yesterday, the Prosecution authorities had told Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee that the Revolutionary Guards will block Arash Sadeghi’s transfer to hospital until she returns to prison.
“The authorities have effectively taken Arash Sadeghi’s health hostage. The decision to deny him access to the medical care he so desperately needs and condition it on his wife’s return to prison is patently a callous punishment for his hunger strike and amounts to torture on the part of the Iranian authorities,” said Philip Luther.
“His condition is dire and he must be granted the necessary treatment or else his health will continue to worsen, which could put his life in danger.”
Background
Arash Sadeghi has been serving a 15-year sentence in Evin prison for his peaceful human rights activities since June 2016. His wife, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, was arrested on Sunday to continue serving a six-year prison sentence on charges including “insulting Islamic sanctities”. Their joint request for judicial review is currently pending before Iran’s Supreme Court. Amnesty International considers both to be prisoners of conscience.
In a report entitled Health taken hostage: Cruel denial of medical care in Iran’s prisons and published in July 2016, Amnesty International documented a pattern of authorities – in particular the Office of the Prosecutor, prison administrations and intelligence officials – deliberately preventing access to adequate medical care, in many cases as an intentional act of cruelty intended to intimidate and punish political prisoners, or to extract forced “confessions” or statements of “repentance” from them.Creators of Queensland study say visible acts such as donations less significant than membership of tight-knit networks
Researchers have quantified the value of political connections to property developers in rezoning decisions worth “many billions of dollars” across Australia every year.
A new study, “Clean money in a dirty system”, which examined the record of Queensland’s Urban Land Development Authority (ULDA), found developers connected to networks containing politicians and bureaucrats were 19% more likely – and those at the centre of networks 44% more likely – to win favourable decisions than “outsiders”.
University of Queensland economics researchers Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters said outsiders could, however, buy their way into “the right club” by paying lobbyists such as former politicians, boosting their prospects by 37%.
Murray and Frijters, who linked relationships to property gains through land, lobbyist, donor and company records, said political favours were less a result of visible acts like donations than membership of “tight-knit groups that include key decision-makers and wherein everyone knows each other”.
Political insiders were favoured in a way that had led to “very odd-shaped” rezoned areas that appeared less suitable than others nearby – right down to the opposite side of a street, the researchers said.
“We are now getting high-rise apartments and new city neighbourhoods where the cost of infrastructure is probably much higher than in areas identified as more suitable for development in the earlier (state government regional) plans, simply to accommodate a political in crowd,” they said.
John Menadue, a former senior public servant, diplomat and business executive, said the study highlighted “a very, very serious problem [where] vested interests are corrupting public debate and policy in Australia”.
“The figures frankly don’t surprise me. People with money are able to secure quite remarkable concessions on zoning from various levels of government in Australia,” he said.
The study found politically connected developers gained $410m in profits purely through rezoning decisions that had “wrong-footed” both councils footing infrastructure bills and unconnected property developers.
Connected developers owned 75% of land in areas rezoned by the ULDA between 2008 and 2010, compared with less than 12% in the areas just outside.
The ULDA, which was headed by a former executive of development company Lend Lease, was dismantled in 2012.
Murray and Frijters said Lend Lease were among the large companies which currently indicated in their prospectus they “expect new favourable rezoning decisions in areas that are unlikely to be technically optimal”.
This was “basically showing that these companies are confident they can get new favours from the current politicians that will come at the expense of the general population”, they said.
Their study found lobbyists were “extraordinarily effective at ensuring land is rezoned”, with clients owning 30% of rezoned land and none of the land just outside.
It argued lobbyists were a substitute for membership of networks in which mutual favours result from a “revolving door where property developers and the key political/bureaucratic positions are the same people, exchanging positions over time”.
“Those with advantageous positions in relationship networks are able to get preferential treatment precisely because of their ability to be involved in implicit dealings that take advantage of a missing formal market in political favours,” the study said.
Menadue said forcing lobbyists to publicly “disclose in some detail and quickly who they’ve spoken to and the nature of those conversations [would] cause some of these people to be much more careful than they are at the present time”.
“I also think it’s important that politicians and public servants who retire should not in any way take paid executive or other positions with companies with which they had an association while they were a minister or senior bureaucrat,” he said.
“Ministers and public servants who retire and God bless me, within a few months they’ve got a job with a company they were dealing with – they just change their coat from one day to the next, when there’s clearly a potential conflict of interest.”
The study claims its findings around the ULDA, involving “a tiny sample of planning activities” in Queensland, suggested a likely “avenue for allocating many billions of dollars in development rights to connected land owners annually” when applied to the rest of Australia.
It argues the public is losing out on its claim to these property value windfalls which “could be priced in a market rather than allocated politically and incurring the associated costs” of perpetuating network or lobby influence.
Options included taxes on “land betterment” or public auctions of development rights, the researchers said.
However they noted “the same relationship networks that allow current favouritism to thrive in rezoning decisions will surely hinder any systematic reform of the rezoning process”.March 31st, 2015 2:00 PM
By Deborah Kadin
It will be the first quarter of 2016 when Fresh Thyme Market is ready for business in River Forest, company and village officials confirmed last week.
Pegged as the best option for redevelopment by the River Forest Economic Development Commission, the former Dominick's at 7501 North Ave. has been closed since late 2013 when its parent company, Safeway, abandoned the Chicago market.
But because of unspecified delays by the landlord, Mid-America Real Estate Group, plus the scope of work that will be needed, Fresh Thyme won't open in early December 2015 as it had planned, said Justin Haasch, chain's director of real estate.
Village Administrator Eric Palm told a meeting of the EDC just last week that building and fire inspectors and other village staff were just in the store getting a real first look inside the structure.
And from the looks of things, this will be bigger than the normal renovation of a store. A tremendous amount of demolition will be needed there, said Thomas Wall, the construction project manager for Fresh Thyme. The interior of the old Dominick's hadn't changed much since he shopped there in the 1970s, said Wall.
"We are going to take out everything and demolish the interior," Wall said. "We have to upgrade all the coolers and freezers, the boilers, air conditioning, the electrical system. All will have to be replaced."
Ceilings will have to be upgraded and floors will have to be stripped. The storefront will have to be redone to reflect the Fresh Thyme concept, he said.
"It is over and above what we intended to do," Wall said.
Village President Catherine Adduci didn't appear too fazed by the delay.
"The good news is that Fresh Thyme will be brand-spanking new," Adduci said. "It's all worth waiting for."
Because of all the planning needed prior to construction, it could be fall before the chain starts its work, Wall said.
Five to six weeks before the store actually opens, company operations people will hire and train staff, Wall said.
Michael George, a principal with Mid-America, said things with the transfer were in "pretty good shape," but would not comment further.
Roughly $4.1 million will be invested in the site to make it viable. The Phoenix-based Fresh Thyme chain will recoup up to $1 million in property taxes from Cook County to renovate the building.
As many as 100 part-time and full-time employees will be hired, Haasch said.
Based on the performance of other locations, Fresh Thyme is projected to have sales of $11.7 million in the first year, and sales are expected to increase by 5 percent from year one to year two.
Fresh Thyme estimates that the new store will generate $400,000 in sales tax annually, based on the performance of other stores.On receiving my read as Arnold Schwarzenegger Barbara had this to say: "THIS IS GREAT!! Love it already, you are very talented, glad we found you! We are now big fans and I'll tell my colleagues about you as well!
So if you're thinking about hiring him... tell him what you want... give him a sample to read... I'm sure he can deliver what you want. We're very VERY impressed. Will use Jay's services many more times in the future. Secondly, he delivered our project within a day and made adjustments within the hour. Highly highly recommend."
A couple of unique things about Jay. First, his demo reel shows a great selection of voice options to chose from... but none of them were exactly what we were looking for. However, when we told him what we wanted he was able to take our abstract ideas (about being educational, sincere, conversation etc) and transform those directions into EXACTLY what we had in mind.
Dealing with Rejection
26th October 2016
One of the things I wish someone had told me before I got in to voice acting was just how much rejection I was going to have to cope with and more importantly how much that rejection would hurt. The same goes for any facet of life really, rejection can always be difficult to navigate but when it’s attached to something creative it seems to gnaw at you that little bit more.
I can’t speak for everyone but whenever I audition for a project or put myself forward for something there is always a little bit of “me” in it. It’s always intensely personal, usually because I’ve had to draw on something from within to create a character or give a certain performance. Even for something non-character based such as a commercial, it always feels personal, it’s your take on the script, your interpretation.
Here’s the thing though, if you want to last more than 5 minutes in the acting industry you need to get a grip on rejection and how you handle it, a good booking rate would be 10%-15% which means you’re going to lose 85 – 90% of jobs you go for. It took me a while but I have found a way to deal with the rejection, don’t get me wrong, it still sucks but it’s simply become part of my process. So, here’s my tips and philosophies that might hopefully help you when the chips are down:
The rejection isn’t personal
This is possibly the most important aspect of dealing with the rejection, understanding that it’s not personal. When we don’t book a job the usual go to thought is that we’re not “good enough” or that “they didn’t like me” but the problem is that that’s a flawed thought process to start with. Part of the problem with anything creative is that ultimately it’s always subjective, meaning you could deliver what you think is an outstanding performance and 50% may love it and 50% may hate it (we’ve all got films we love that others think are atrocious J ). If you prepared properly and delivered your best you can be happy.
I like to use the analogy of Oscars Dresses to try and explain this one; imagine there are 10 dresses on a rack and you must pick one to wear to the Oscars. All 10 dresses are exquisitely made and fantastic but there’ll just be one that you pick for reasons you probably can’t determine. Now, the fact that one dress got picked doesn’t mean the other 9 dresses aren’t equally suited to a night at the Oscars, it just means a different dress got picked. The story there is that not getting selected doesn’t necessarily reflect anything about your performance!
Give up control
Let me state this clearly, you have no control over whether you book or not. The only thing you can control is the performance you give and even that is subject to the information and direction given to you by the client. Stop thinking that booking or not booking a job is even remotely within your control, there are far too many variables at play for this to be the case and it’s arrogant to assume otherwise. What is in your control is giving the best performance you can give; the rest is up to who knows who. By giving up attempts to control the outcome of the audition you are much freer to give a performance not bound by a desire to book the job, which ironically is always a better performance and therefore more likely, but not guaranteed, to book!
By understanding that you have little control over the outcome you become less tied to it and therefore when you don’t succeed you don’t fall in to the “what else could I have done” trap. That doesn’t mean you can’t think about your performance and what you might improve next time but that’s something you should be doing regardless of whether you book the job or not.
Someone else’s squee!
This one is an interesting one and is more about thinking outwardly rather than inward. When you don’t book a job, what can help is to remember the times you did book and the “squee” of excitement it generated in you. Understanding that by you not booking a job someone else out there is having a “squee” moment can be comforting; you can tune in to that feeling and somewhat have that “squee” vicariously. When you don’t book, especially if it’s a gig you really desired, it’s oh so easy to forget all the times you do book, you suddenly feel like your entire career is measured against this one gig you didn’t get. By focusing outwardly on someone else’s squee it can give you perspective and help to remind you that you too have had those squee moments yourself.
There’s always more opportunities
This one, this one helps you move forward.
I had a period recently where I had 6 irons in 6 delightful fires, I was very grateful for those opportunities and blown away by the sort of company’s I was in discussion with. Do you know what happened? Not even one of those opportunities turned in to bookings. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement, it was a pretty big punch to the gut. Now, when things like that happen (and they will, see the booking rate in the first section!) it’s imperative to remember that there are ALWAYS more opportunities. It’s incredibly hard to do at the time and it can feel like your career is in the toilet but I promise there are always more opportunities. Sure enough a week later I got 4 auditions through for AAA games and a new animation series but when you’ve taken a hit it’s very hard to see what’s coming in the next weeks and months. You must keep moving forward, you must fire and forget on your auditions and focus only on keeping going, momentum is your friend!
Take the time you need
Finally, take the time you need to get over the rejection. Even with coping mechanisms and thought processes in place losing jobs is always tough and will get you down at some point. What’s important is that you take the time to feel down, leave the booth alone for a day, take a day to yourself, go out for lunch, watch some Netflix and try again tomorrow. When you feel down sometimes the worst thing you can do is keep going, it’ll seep in to your auditions and start a vicious cycle. So, sometimes, just walk away and come back again tomorrow.“It’s strange knowing more about a writer than you do about what he has written – stranger still to know more about at least a couple of the books he has published than a cursory reading of them might afford. This second statement needs to be qualified: in asserting that it’s possible to know more of a book by reading about it than by actually reading it, it may seem that I’m trespassing into that odd area of enquiry occupied by none other than de Selby himself, the peculiar eminence grise – natural philosopher, psychologist, ballistician – whose enquiries into the nature of the world form the footnotes, and the queered epistemic backdrop to The Third Policeman.
“So, let me explain: The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien, is my kind of a book: heedless of the supposed dictates of literary naturalism or realism, steeped in Joycean word-play, penned by a dipsomaniacal Irish civil servant in the late 1930s, and sentenced to oblivion during his lifetime, only to be resurrected after his death and become a sort of off-beat minor classic. I must have heard of The Third Policeman when I was at university in the early 1980s – I certainly remember essaying O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds but giving up on it due to my jejune inability to cope with its modernist inflections. From then until now, being in the literary line of work myself, I must’ve heard numerous references to the book in conversation and writing, so many and so various that about a decade ago I read the Wikipedia entry on it, and the entry on its pseudonymous author. (O’Brien’s real name was Brian O’Nolan, his novels and the satirical newspaper columns he published in the Irish Times and elsewhere appeared under various noms de plume due to the strict apolitical character of the Irish civil service during this period.)”
Read the rest of Will’s article at the Jewish Quarterly here.The rumors started flying pell mell at some point late last week[1. It could have been longer ago, the pages of Orange Power are where searches go to die.] and only picked up steam until we arrived at what happened tonight.
Cowboys Ride For Free, an OSU blog[2. And a pretty good one at that.] at SB Nation posted that the camo uniforms were real and were going to be worn this Saturday against Texas (on national television no less).
This is the photo that was cited…
I checked around a little bit and have come to believe that these photos/drawings/prototypes are real and were (WERE) proposed by Nike to the OSU athletic department (and Gundy) at some point (I believe last season).
I’ve also been led to believe that they were shot down and never saw the light of day in terms of production. They were a brainstorm, an idea that never evolved into anything more.
I’m not sure why everything is coming to a head this week before the Texas game, or why CRFF is so convinced that we are wearing them, or why the Dallas Morning News(!) and Fox 25 in OKC are chasing the CRFF report.
@pistolsguy so fox 25 in okc says were debuting camp unis against Texas. I'm going to vomit all over my flannel shirt if this is true. — Johnathan Peterson (@OSUPeterson) September 26, 2012
It’s not true though, these will not be worn this weekend. Carson Cunningham echos this sentiment…
Very credible source says the camo uni's aren't real. Nike drew them up, but OSU never went through with them. #okstate — Carson Cunningham (@KOCOCarson) September 26, 2012
I’m pretty relieved this isn’t a real thing to tell you the truth. Those mock-ups look Nike executives lost a bet with Wal-Mart executives and the wager was that Wal-Mart got to design one college football uniform of their choice.
Should have chose OU, Scooter and Jack would have jumped all over the chance to FINALLY get a top to match all their hats and pants.Home Roboexotica Roboexotica
Robotics Day @ TGM Vienna This year's partner event Robotics Day Vienna 2018 will take place on Nov 23, 2018 at Technologisches Gewerbemuseum, Wexstraße 19-23, 1200 Wien, from 8:30 AM to 6 PM. The exhibition will be open to the public from 1 PM to 6 PM. You can get there by tram 31 or U6, Jägerstraße.
Welcome to Roboexotica!
Festival for Cocktailrobotics since 1999
Cheers! Roboexotica 2018 took place November 22-25, 2018 at Theater Nestroyhof Hamakom, Nestroyplatz 1 in Vienna's second district.
Until what seems almost recently, no attempts had been made to publicly discuss the role of Cocktail Robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out.
Check out Vienna Robotics Day 2018 at TGM Vienna on Nov 23, 2018
and celebrate at Roboexotica afterwards!Share. Even without real-money microtransactions, it has an evil progression system - but there's still good in this one. Even without real-money microtransactions, it has an evil progression system - but there's still good in this one.
[Editor’s Note: As we frequently disclose, Battlefront 2’s single-player campaign story was co-written by former IGN editor Mitch Dyer. In effort to put forward the most impartial review possible, our review is written by Tom Marks, who joined IGN after Mitch left and, in fact, has never even met him.]
Like a Jedi with hatred inside them, Star Wars Battlefront 2 is its own worst enemy. It’s a sequel that’s managed to vastly improve upon its predecessor in some major ways: harder-hitting blasters, a wider variety of iconic Star Wars heroes, gorgeous locations, and a short single-player campaign all stand out. At the same time, it’s taken a giant leap backward with its bafflingly terrible progression system and rushed, disjointed storytelling, which keep it from being much more than shallow Star Wars fun.
Star Wars Battlefront II 10+ IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 56 Kamino multiplayer map 01 OF 56 Kamino multiplayer map Star Wars Battlefront II Download Image Captions ESC
Much like the first game (or the third, if you’re counting the original Battlefront games from Pandemic), Battlefront 2 faithfully captures the look and feel of the Star Wars universe, with beautifully detailed levels, vehicles, and characters across some of its most recognizable venues. Every blaster, TIE Fighter, and Battle Droid looks and sounds like it’s straight out of the movies, with the only notable exception being a couple of less than stellar voice impersonators used for heroes like Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Kylo Ren.
Lovingly recreated locations like Maz Kanata’s bar from The Force Awakens and the palace on Naboo from The Phantom Menace are wonderful to explore, even if you’re being shot at while it happens. The music and sound effects deserve a special shout out as well, doing a lot of the work of sinking me into a world I’m already very familiar with.
Bad to the Groan
Battlefront 2’s campaign caters to that fandom as well, but ends up being a bit of a mess because of it. At only about four hours long, it mostly follows the story of Imperial Special Forces commander Iden Versio - a fierce leader who still manages to express compassion from her position within the Empire - from the final moments of Return of the Jedi into the era of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. Despite its darker choice of perspective (we haven’t seen much from the Imperial soldier point of view since 1994’s TIE Fighter), the plot moves forward in a fairly unimaginative fashion from there.
Exit Theatre Mode
It’s a shame Iden doesn’t get more time to develop as a character because Battlefront 2 does a decent job of introducing her (outside of some stilted dialogue in the opening scene) as a competent, sympathetic person. But Battlefront 2’s campaign doesn’t really have much of a cohesive story to speak of in which for her to complete a believable arc. Instead, it feels more like a series of barely connected missions across a smattering of recognizable locations, featuring the major characters you’d expect. It’s essentially digital Star Wars tourism tied around the loose concept of Iden’s battles in the final days of the Galactic Civil War. Not enough time is devoted to Iden and her relationships to give her pivotal decisions the context they need.
“ It's essentially digital Star Wars tourism.
Instead, several missions put you in direct control of some of the heroes available in multiplayer. These missions are fun enough, but they feel hamfisted in how they are incorporated into Iden’s story, especially when she’s almost entirely absent during them.
It’s also disappointing that the events we’re participating in don’t seem to have much impact on the story. Whether it’s securing a secret cache of the Emperor’s, sabotaging a weapons facility, or gathering intel about the enemy, you usually just jump to the next mission afterward to see what thing from the movies you’ll encounter next. Sometimes there’s such a large time jump between them that any impact of what you just did is entirely glazed over.
Even the ominous Operation Cinder, which is introduced after the second mission as the Empire’s next big bad weapon, is unceremoniously resolved before you even reach the campaign’s halfway point. Iden’s own character arc essentially stops around the same time, and a time jump entirely skips any sort of character development that would explain the very different version of her you take control of on the other side.
Exit Theatre Mode
Battlefront 2 sprints through all of the nuance of its relationships, which often makes its characters’ actions feel unfounded and confusing. Jumping from space rock to space rock means there’s never really time to establish Iden’s relationships with other characters, blunting the impact of any emotional moments they attempt to have together - and a romantic kiss toward the end of the campaign comes from so far out of left field that it was actually laughable.
That all said, the excellent voice acting and lifelike facial animations sell each character’s performance well. The sound design, cutscene editing (I hope you like screen-wipe transitions), and writing feels straight out of a Star Wars movie - even if an overabundance of exposition-heavy dialogue comes as part of that praise.
But there are gems to be found in the story: a companion named Shriv has a sarcastic wit that made him one of my favorite new game characters in a long time. A quirky mission featuring him and Lando had me laughing out loud at multiple points, but moments like that tended to be the gasps of fresh air in an otherwise-stale room. It’s definitely not a campaign that takes any risks, but it inherits the chunky new blasters that I already learned to love in Battlefront’s multiplayer and uses them in unexpected scenarios.
Exit Theatre Mode
All of the story and structure problems aside, the campaign can still be an enjoyable Star Wars spectacle, if extremely straightforward and simple in its design. The firefights on the ground are traditional whack-a-mole-style first-person shooter action, throwing waves of enemies at you until you can advance to the next area. One area where Battlefront 2 feels strange is that it only allows you to carry one weapon at |
and Braddell MRT stations, rendering services along a stretch of the North-South Line inoperable for 20 hours.
SMRT has already removed and redeployed senior executive, Mr Ng Tek Poo, who was in charge of maintenance and systems as a result of the incident.
In a press conference to address the disruption on Oct 7 and Oct 8, SMRT group chief executive Desmond Kuek said Mr Ng was removed so that an investigation into the team's entire workflow, processes and culture could be done in a more open and transparent way.
"It may not end up as one person. There will be a whole process of disciplinary proceedings and investigations that we will have to allow to take its proper course," Mr Kuek added.
Apologising to commuters for the disruption, Mr Kuek said that since the massive MRT breakdowns in December 2011, SMRT has "gone into overdrive" to address maintenance issues arising from age-related serviceability issues.
This included beefing up the SMRT Trains team by increasing staff strength from 3,500 to 5,300 currently. The number of engineers has tripled to nearly 500 now, Mr Kuek added. Performance incentives were also tied to a basket of measures, of which safety and reliability was given the "greatest weight", he said.
Mr Kuek said that there has been much criticism about the rail operator's work culture.
"Indeed, many of our major disruptions in the past have been attributed in some part, or all, to human error or failure. We regret that this is so," he said.
While much progress has been made to inculcate a positive work culture in SMRT, there remain some "deep-seated cultural issues" within the company that has needed more time than anticipated to root-out, he added.
But Mr Kuek said that it would be wrong to paint everyone in SMRT with the "same brush".
"Nine in 10 of our people are incredibly committed, professional and commuter-focused. They are Singaporeans too, with family members and friends who commute, and work hard under challenging conditions to deliver the best possible public transport service for all our commuters," Mr Kuek said.It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for Autostraddle, and not just because we’ve gotten to continue our celebration of the Bisexual Takeover of 2016. The anticipation of which pop star is coming out next has been reason enough to get us out of bed in the morning, but we’ve also been blessed by Obama’s vetting of the Lesbian Takeover of America’s Rural Southern Farms (Article Nine, Section Two of The Gay Agenda).
And it’s not just us who can’t get enough of this news! The mainstream media has gotten a hold of it and some people are so excited that they’re literally screaming about it on the radio! Have you ever cared about anything so much that you’ve screamed into a microphone about it, every syllable being amplified, no – empowered? I want you to really think about that.
Truthfully, though, this is not what I saw being chosen for The Gay Agenda’s next phase of implementation. I was hoping if anything was going to be vetted by POTUS it was going to be the Lesbian Takeover of America’s Got Talent (Article Twelve, Section One of The Gay Agenda) because I think it’s fair to estimate three billion people watch it and quite frankly I’d love to be a judge, but it’s important to remember that rural farms are the heart of America and therefore their destruction is the most strategic, if boring, choice.
So, what does this mean for us? Now that everything’s been made public, the roll out on this is going to be quick. Things are going to get complicated and you’re going to have questions! What rural town from which you’ll steal land is best for you? Should you diversify and steal from multiple areas? Should you stake claim on your new land by driving a dildo into the ground?
Then there’s the culture difference. Not to mention the circumstances surrounding your acquaintance! There’s a lot to consider here and you’re probably thinking there’s just no way there’s precedence for something like this. And guess what? You’re wrong. I’ve been stealing rural southern farms as a lesbian for years. Here’s everything I’ve learned about the etiquette of it.
Write Them A ‘Thank You’ Note
If you remember nothing else today remember this: the thank you note in a rural southern setting is as imperative as central AC. It’s also your most invaluable power move.
Now technically because you’ve stolen this farm it’s not something your neighbors have necessarily given you, but still, aren’t you grateful to have it? There’s no way this can come off as pouring salt in the wounds, so get elaborate with it! “Hey y’all, thank you sooooooooooooooooooo much for this wonderful gift! We can’t wait to see where this ‘grows” with you!’ and then maybe a bunch of cry-laughing emojis.
Give Them A Copy of You’ve Got Mail
In this scenario we’re essentially the Fox Books to their Shop Around the Corner. This will be a playful suggestion of where things can progress from a state of tension if you just give it time and communicate via calculated omissions about your true self and intentions. Maybe like in the movie you’ll even get to a point where you share a dog together, as is custom in your culture.
Bring Them A Baked Good, You Asshole!
Bringing a baked good to a new neighbor is usually the responsibility of the established residents, but in this case you sort of owe them for forcibly removing their old neighbors. Bake your pie, tart or turnover with ingredients from your newly stolen farm!
Never Talk Money
Specifically, how much you’re going to make from your newly stolen farm.
Throw Your All White Party Between Easter and Labor Day
As is custom in lesbian tradition, we honor those people who have gone before us. To Dinah Shore’s All White Party. Still, that’s no reason to be untimely (read: tacky) about it.
Walk Curbside of the Women You’re Recruiting
There was a time when lesbians could take straight women on recruitment walks without the inconveniences or dangers of road traffic. Just free floating down a path together as plans for the recruitment cookout were set in place. Now it’s custom that when we take these walks with potential draftees we remain curbside to protect their vulnerable state.
Talk in Euphemisms
Around company it’s best to talk about harsh or private realities by cushioning them with softened language. After all, disassociating has been a part of southern rural life since the War of Northern Aggression! Sometimes something as simple as a woman being pregnant is too rooted in realism and she instead becomes a woman that is “expecting.” So: when referencing your lesbian bed death, explain that your lesbian bed has “passed” rather than “died.”
Draw Your Blinds When Brushing Your Gal Pal’s Hair
Brushing our lesbian partner’s hair as a means of intimacy is a thing we all do at night. Except now you’ll have to do it with your blinds drawn, because in the rural south it’s considered uncouth for a lady to be seen grooming in public. Herself or others! This one’s a bit old school, but so are you now.After a brief hiatus, Nokia has returned to the world of smartphones. So far, however, its planned resurgence hasn’t gone off with a bang so much as a faint whimper, and the phones we’ve been treated to – for lack of a better word – have failed to recapture the firm’s past glories. Now that the firm’s first proper flagship phone, the Nokia 8, has finally landed, the question is whether this is the handset that can turn the company’s fortunes around. Going by what I’ve seen so far, the answer may well be yes.
READ NEXT: The best smartphones
Nokia 8 review: What you need to know
Nokia has already launched a handful of phones this year, but the Nokia 8 is its premium flagship handset. Equipped with a 5.3in, 2,560 x 1,440 display, 4GB of RAM and the latest Snapdragon 835 processor, this is a top-tier handset. Expect stock Android Nougat right out of the box, with Android O making an appearance sometime in the near future.
Nokia 8 review: Price and competition
It once would've cost you £500 to get your hands on a Nokia 8, a price that's very much what you'd expect from a flagship device. That seems a little steep – especially considering that the Nokia 6, one step down, costs just £200. But buying the handset outright is now considerably cheaper. If you click over to eBay, you can currently pick one up for a few pennies less than £300.
Trust us, the Nokia 8 is a flagship in every respect, and you’re getting a top-tier phone with your hard-earned cash.
At this price, though, the Nokia 8 faces stiff competition. There’s the Samsung Galaxy S8 to contend with – which has just dropped below £600 – and the Google Pixel range starts at £600, too. If you’re willing to forgo Android, there’s also the iPhone 7 family to consider, which works its way up from a starting price of £600.
Nokia 8 review: Design and key features
The first thing you’ll spot is the 5.3in, 2,560 x 1,440 display on the front. That resolution amounts to a pixel-perfect density of 554ppi, and Nokia has wisely opted to protect it with a sheet of Gorilla Glass 5. It’s a tad disappointing to note that the Nokia 8 lacks the snazzy edge-to-edge displays of the Galaxy S8 and LG G6, but it’s a decent screen nonetheless. It’s bright and clear, and exactly what we’d expect to find on a flagship phone.
So bright in fact, that the Nokia 8 is positively dazzling. A max brightness of 663cd/m2 is more than suitable for even the brightest Summer days, and you'll never have to squint at your phone again. Mark my words.
As for colour accuracy, the Nokia 8 perfectly poised in that department, too. An sRGB colour gamut coverage of 98.5%, as measured by our X-Rite colour calibrator, rivals even the likes of Samsung's AMOLED displays, and an average Delta E of 3.28 points at a display that's well worth your time. Given this is a 2K display too, you'll be perfectly suited for watching Netflix shows on the go.
Nokia has really pushed the boat out when it comes to design, though. While its other handsets have failed to inspire, Nokia has drawn on the design cues of the iconic Lumia handsets to create something pretty special. The 8 is wonderfully slim, measuring a dainty 7.3mm thick, and as it’s crafted from just a single block of aluminium, it both looks and feels like an absolute stunner.
Everyone loves a nicely chamfered edge, and these are quite plainly some of the finest chamfers you’ll encounter on a smartphone. It doesn’t just look good, though: the curved sides ensure that the handset sits snugly in the hand, and make it easy to use the fingerprint reader without adjusting your grip or shuffling the phone about in your palm.
Nokia 8 review: Camera
It’s the camera which really sets the 8 apart from the crowd. Out back, you’ll find a Zeiss-branded dual-camera setup, with one being a monochrome f/2.0 13-megapixel sensor, and the other incorporating a 13-megapixel bog-standard RGB sensor. The two work in tandem, with the monochrome sensor capturing detail and the RGB sensor capturing colour. This is a technique used by several other recent flagships from rival manufacturers, but the end result is an image with oodles of detail and bright, punchy colours.
One particularly intriguing new feature is what Nokia is calling a “bothie”: the ability to take pictures with both the front and rear cameras simultaneously. Press the shutter button and both shots are squeezed into a single frame, with a snap of your reaction on one side, and the view you’re gawking at on the other. It’s a neat little addition, and a feature that is perfectly suited for Facebook and YouTube live streams.
Nokia 8 review: Performance and battery life
The Nokia 8 has the kind of horsepower you’d expect for a modern flagship. There’s Qualcomm’s latest octa-core processor on board – the Snapdragon 835 – and this is partnered with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (expandable up to 256GB via microSD). That’s a reliable recipe for high-end performance, no question about it.
And the figures show. Running Geekbench 4, the Nokia 8 reached 1,930 in the single core test, and a blisteringly quick 6,540 in multi-core. Stacking it up against 2017's other big-hitters, this result puts the Nokia 8 firmly among them, with near-identical scores to the Galaxy S8, Xperia XZ Premium and iPhone7.
As for gaming performance, it isn't quite the same story. An average 35fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3.0 on-screen test is by no means abysmal, but when put side-by-side with other Snapdragon 835-equipped handsets, the Nokia 8 starts to fall a little flat. The culprit? Its 2K display, for certain. Take a look at the chart below, and you'll see what I mean.
Nokia also talked up the Nokia 8’s “advanced heat management solution” at its launch. In short, a liquid-cooled copper pipe runs across the length of the Nokia 8, with graphite shielding dispersing heat from the Snapdragon chipset throughout the metal shell. This all sounds very impressive, and Nokia says it’s the perfect way to keep heat levels to a minimum, and thus – potentially – extend battery life.
In fact, battery life is the 8's raison d'être. The fancy thermal tech inside seems to have done its job, with the Nokia 8 reaching a total of 18hrs 46mins on a single charge during our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our standard 170cd/m2 brightness. For comparison sake, the Nokia 8's 3,050mAh battery is longer-lasting than the Galaxy S8, XZ Premium and iPhone 7, but falters when put head-to-head with the OnePlus 5.
Nokia 8 review: Verdict
Everything is all above board, but the burning question is whether there’s still room for Nokia in 2017. Before now, I’d have argued not, and especially so given the firm’s recent track record with middling handsets like the Nokia 3. But it looks like the Nokia 8 may just put the Finnish firm back on course – there’s every chance that this smartphone will see Nokia grabbing headlines for all the right reasons come September time.
It certainly helps that Nokia has opted to build a more traditional flagship rather than pushing niche, high-end features – case in point, it isn’t asking for absurd amounts of cash like Asus with its £800 Zenfone AR. Granted, the Nokia 8 might not be as flamboyant as key rivals such as Samsung’s stunning Galaxy S8, but with bang up-to-date internals, a lengthy battery life, and a design that befits its asking price, the Nokia 8 is a confident stride in the right direction.Is Ron’s plain old hamburger really better than Chris Traeger’s patented East-meets-West turkey burger in Parks and Recreation? Just how gross is the maple-topped spaghetti from Elf? And can you really slice garlic with a razor blade and liquify it in tomato sauce, like Paulie in Goodfellas? These are the types of questions that torment those who are obsessed with both food and pop culture.
Andrew Rea is here to provide the answers. (The answers he has found, by the way, are “yes,” “very,” and “no.”)
Rea is the chef behind Binging With Babish, a YouTube channel that now has more than 720,000 subscribers. He picks out comestibles depicted in popular movies and television shows, whether they appear to be delicious or disgusting, and demonstrates how to prepare them in real life from the kitchen at his Harlem, New York, home. In some episodes of his series, such as the one featuring spaghetti aglio e olio from the film Chef, Rea offers a straightforward tutorial. In others that display more revolting cuisine, he whips up verbatim recipes, and upon tasting the wretched results, offers improved versions.
“I knew I wanted to make a cooking show... and I realized I had a pretty good setup to make a cooking show that was halfway between a traditional cooking show and those Tasty videos,” Rea, 29, tells Eater. “Then I realized there’s a lot of movie foods that I was very curious — what would they actually taste like? It’s not an original idea. Other people have done this before, but I thought I could bring a new voice to it and a new perspective to it, and I hope that’s what people are enjoying about it.” The project, at first meant to be a one-off for fun, is a hit, and the videos Rea publishes regularly exceed one million views.
With a film school degree from Hofstra, a professional background in videography, and an impressive self-taught culinary skill set, Rea already had a strong foundation on which to build. His vision for this format calls for quick videos, most under five minutes, that focus on the food, not the host. He does want to entertain and show personality, but not too much: “There are 30-minute-long videos of how to make a burger, and they don't start cooking for 15 minutes,” he bemoans.
Rea’s latest installment deals with Homer Simpson’s moon waffles (caramel candy, store-bought batter, and liquid smoke that is cooked in a waffle iron and wrapped around a stick of butter), which he elevates by making a homemade batter and topping the finished waffles with brown butter, caramel sauce, and smoked sea salt. This episode is a fine example of the Binging With Babish style: Rea narrates the action against a soundtrack of light electronic beats while the camera stays fixed on his hands and the food on the countertop.
Depending on the complexity of the dish, each episode takes roughly 15 to 30 hours to produce and costs around $100. There are exceptions: Rea spent $300 on eggs Woodhouse, an over-the-top play on eggs Benedict introduced on the FX animated series Archer. Its ingredient list includes Iberico ham, black truffles, Kashmiri saffron, and white sturgeon Osetra caviar.
Devotees of The West Wing, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s smash-hit 2000s drama about White House goings on and scintillating conversations had while walking down hallways, might recognize part of the “Binging With Babish” name. Rea’s Reddit username is OliverBabish, an homage to fictional White House Counsel Oliver Babish. Sorkin’s show doesn’t have many food-centric scenes — high-level government employees don’t enjoy much time to obsess over dining and cooking — but there is one West Wing recipe Rea wants to try: tomate du saltambique. This is a seedless beefsteak tomato stewed for three hours in creme de caramel; stuffed with passion fruit, kiwi, and hazelnuts; and served on a pomegranate reduction. The dessert is on a menu curated for President Josiah Bartlet and Chief of Staff Leo McGarry by visiting French chef Pierre Boileau in the Season 2 episode, “The Stackhouse Filibuster.”
Rea attributes his success to the Reddit community. “[T]hey were the springboard by which I was able to reach a larger audience, and they've supported me as a community would,” Rea explains. He interacts with commenters on his own Binging With Babish subreddit, where fans ask about the cookware used on the show, show off their attempts at his recipes, and make requests for future episodes. Rea says he doesn’t let a question or comment go unanswered. When deciding on dishes to attempt for his series, he considers those that interest him personally and fan requests. The most popular request, by far, is the Krabby Patty from SpongeBob SquarePants. He’s not quite sure how to tackle that one, but he’s working on it.
Rea posted his first Binging With Babish video, the Parks and Rec burger episode, on February 10, 2016, and it initially picked up around 10,000 views. He continued publishing new episodes roughly once a month. Then, in November, an audience beyond the Reddit community began to take notice. He created an episode for “the moistmaker,” a Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich made famous by Ross Geller on Friends. It was picked up by media outlets such as Huffington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and Today. “Okay, I've got something here,” Rea said to himself after seeing the viral potential for his videos. “I should start making this once a week.” Since then, he’s been “cranking them out.” As of this week, he’s produced 32 videos since that first episode.
Thanks to advertising revenue and more than 1,400 patrons contributing in excess of $6,000 per month on Patreon, Rea is living every aspiring YouTube star’s ultimate fantasy: He’s quitting his day job as a visual effects artist at the end of May and making Binging With Babish a full-time gig. A few new series may be in the offing, too. Basics With Babish would demonstrate specific kitchen techniques. Boozing With Babish would spotlight cocktails, obviously, and, yes, Brunching With Babish would disseminate knowledge for Sunday Funday staples. Bashing With Babish would offer recipes for party foods. Rea is exploring a leap into television and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. He’s already landed a book deal: Eat What You Watch: A Cookbook for Movie Lovers, will be published by Dovetail Press and is scheduled for release on October 3.
“I want to be part of the new wave of media creators,” Rea says. “The landscape of entertainment is changing rapidly. I want to create new forms of cooking shows. I feel like the formula is tired and it’s time for some new ideas to be brought to the table.”
It doesn’t take much consideration for Rea to determine the worst dish he’s put on film: milk steak, something he made in an episode rounding up the horrifying fare seen on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “It was really horrible, just because steak boiled in milk is not a good flavor,” he explains. “Steak boiled in anything is not a good flavor. It just had this horrible, slippery, slimy texture. Then it also had fucking jelly beans on it. It was repugnant. It was really bad.”
On the flip side is il timpano, Rea’s masterpiece to date.
Il timpano is a massive, lasagna-like casserole featured in the 1996 film Big Night. A sheet of fresh pasta dough is wrapped around layers of more fresh pasta, meatballs, tomato sauce, hard-boiled eggs, mozzarella, aged provolone, and Genoa salami, and it’s all baked in a Dutch oven. It took Rea 14 hours to make the dish, and it left him muttering to himself while assembling ingredients in the middle of the night. Despite the level of difficulty, he pulled it off and dished out slices to friends at a dinner party, just as chef Primo and his brother Secondo do in Big Night. Rea views this nine-minute episode as his best because it combines a stunning dish, a healthy dose of personality, and guests to enjoy his work — the reason he does all of this in the first place.
“I have always loved throwing dinner parties, because I love making things and sharing them with those around me and seeing what sort of experiences that I can give them,” Rea says. “This show is another form of that. I’m really happy that I get to make food now for a living and I get to share it with everybody around me. That’s an absolute dream come true.”
Chris Fuhrmeister is editor of Eater Atlanta and a reporter for Eater.com.
Editor: Greg Morabito
• Binging With Babish [YouTube]
• All Pop Culture Coverage [E]FBI Director James Comey abruptly announced Sunday that a review of newly discovered emails sent or received by Hillary Clinton has not changed his conclusion that the Democrat should not face criminal charges. His announcement came in a letter to congressional lawmakers two days before Election Day.
Comey said the FBI has worked “around the clock to process and review a large number of emails” obtained from a device belonging to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman and estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. He said the review has not changed the bureau’s assessment from earlier this year that Clinton should not be prosecuted for her handling of classified information at the State Department.
Fox News Anchor Bret Baier Apologizes For Reporting Hillary Clinton Faces Indictment
The new review has roiled the presidential campaign in its final days, shattering what had appeared to be Clinton’s solid grip on the race and emboldening Republican Donald Trump. During a campaign stop earlier Sunday, Trump warned that Clinton would be under investigation as president, prompting an “unprecedented constitutional crisis.”Kent Hovind was recently named to the Creation Science Hall of Fame. They may have to wait for any sort of induction ceremony as he is presently a federal inmate in Berlin, NH with a projected release date of August 11, 2015. Nick Lally believes that Mr. Hovind is in jail "out of principle and not deceit". We'll get to that, but first I should explain that the Creation Science Hall of Fame does not yet have an actual hall, although they have projected one to be built. The Hall will be strategically located between the Answers In Genesis Creation Museum and the upcoming Ark Encounter. I'm thinking I'll wait for all three to be completed before I visit Petersburg KY as the only other attraction I noted there involves horseback riding. Here is what qualified Mr. Hovind to be admitted to the Creation Science Hall of Fame:
Kent E. Hovind (born January 15, 1953), an American young earth creationist, is considered by many to be one of the foremost authorities on science and the Bible. The amazing ability of Kent Hovind to communicate complicated scientific concepts in an easy-to-understand format makes this essential information accessible for youth and laypersons, as well as science professors. The goal of his creation seminars is to convince listeners to reject theories of evolution, geophysics, and cosmology in favor of the Genesis creation narrative from the Bible. As of 2012, this Creation Seminar has parts translated via subtitling in 37 languages.
What Is Young Earth Creationism?
One of the most important fundamental beliefs of contemporary evangelical Christianity is "scriptural inerrancy". If you combine "scriptural inerrancy" with a certain style of literalism, you end up with the Earth being roughly 6,000 years old. That is not nearly enough time for evolution to work. Geologists also have a problem with a young earth. (I asked my friend, Claire Pless, a graduate student at the Colorado School of Mines about that. She told me about something called zircons.)I could try to explain how "scriptural inerrancy" could be reconciled with an old earth, but dammit Jim, I'm a tax blogger, not a theologian, so I turned to my blogging buddy, Reverend William Thornton:
There are many conservative Christians who both consider the Bible to be inspired and inerrant and who do not accept evolution but who do accept that the earth is very old. I acknowledge that the many lines of physical evidence indicate a very old earth.
If one's interpretive approach to Scripture is such that a very young earth is demanded, then it is necessary to discount each and every
instance where modern scientific evidence differs from this; hence, the, uh, modern creation (mid-twentieth century) of young earth
specialists who generate sufficient publications discounting any and all old earth claims to satisfy the demands of likeminded biblical
interpreters, many churches, and Christian schools.
Why Is Kent Hovind In Federal Prison?
You will see reports that Kent Hovind is in prison for tax evasion. This is understandable. According to this recent Tax Court decision concerning Mrs. Hovind, neither he nor she were filing 1040s. That is not what he is in prison for. In 2006, a jury found Kent Hovind guilty on all counts of a fifty-eight count indictment. Twelve counts concerned failure to file quarterly payroll tax returns for Creation Science Evangelism (Mr. Hovind's ministry which operated the Dinosaur Adventure Land theme park). Forty-five counts were for "structuring". He or his wife made cash withdrawals from the bank in the amounts of $9,500 or $9,600 on forty-five separate occasions between the summer of 2001 and the summer of 2002. The 58th count said he had corruptly endeavored "to obstruct and impede the due administration of the internal revenue laws". That particular offense reminds me of a crime that the city cops I hung around with in the seventies used to talk about. They called it "B and A", which stood for "being an _______". In Hovind's case it included filing complaints, making threats and paying his employees in cash and calling them missionaries.
The Creation Hall of Fame has replaced its statement that Mr. Hovind was testing the constitutionality of the tax laws and was unable to find a righteous judge with a lengthy statement by Hovind that explains that he was not doing that. Here are some excerpts:
I have NEVER been a tax protester. America was founded by those type guys and we NEED them today, but I am NOT one.
The government, however, broke over 20 laws to put me in prison. This has been the history of man. See the story of Joseph, Job, Jesus, 6 million Jews in Hitler’s camps etc.
I DO NOT say the tax laws are unconstitutional nor did I break one to “prove a point” or “test the law.”
Hovind appealed his conviction and sentence to the Eleventh Circuit, which upheld both, but he has not given up.
He has a letter from an anonymous sympathetic banker on his site that gives this analysis of the structuring charge:
By this twisted logic, if you deposit or withdrew $500 from your own bank account every week for 21 weeks, you could be arrested and charged with 21 counts of structuring because the amount went over $10,000.‘ You could be fined $5,250,000 and sentenced to 105 years in prison (even though you never had the $10,000 in your account at any one time and the money was not earned or spent illegally)!
The Fight Continues?
Retired IRS Appeals Officer Robert Baty had a brief e-mail exchange with Mr. Hovind in which he indicated that he is still fighting:
The 45 counts I was charged with are flawed for a number of reasons spelled out in document 335, 349 and 351 in my case.
If the charge in the indictment is wrong the court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case.
It is NEVER too late to challenge jurisdiction. This is NOT over yet. :)
Apparently having been tried and convicted and his appeal turned down, he still thinks that he can get the indictment overturned. He just does not see how it can be a crime to take money out of the bank to pay the expenses of his ministry.
Is What The Government Doing A Good Idea?
Despite his claim to the Creations Science Hall of Fame that he is not a tax protester, Mr. Hovind at different points in time has made the type of statements associated with protesters and based on the outcome of civil litigation had not been filing returns. He was pretty well trounced in Tax Court and it is possible that going after him criminally was superfluous, but I have never been able to discern why it is that some cases rather than others go criminal. Assuming that it made sense to go after him criminally, I imagine the reason for the structuring charges is that they are much easier to prove and having so many of them makes quite an impression on the jury, but I'm not sure it is sending the right message. The structuring conviction can be painted, as it is in this article, to make Kent Hovind look like a victim.
There has always been this delicious irony about gangster Al Capone finally being convicted of income tax evasion rather than the multitude of other crimes that escaped punishment. Somehow convicting Dr. Dino (as Kent Hovind is known) for taking his own money out of the bank rather than for income tax evasion just does not seem as satisfying.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.
Update May 2016
After over three years, this post continues to get traffic. Kent Hovind was released pretty much as scheduled in the summer of 2015 after facing a new trial. He is now building a bigger better Dinosaur Adventure Land in Alabama. I declared an end to L'affaire Kent Hovind as a Forbes worthy tax story in August 2015, but continued to follow his adventures on my alternative blog Your Tax Matters Partner. Doctor Dino has started up a thriving Youtube channel and is putting out appeals to help in the new venture.Venison is the meat of a deer.[1] Venison can be used to refer to any part of the deer, so long as it can be consumed, including the flesh and internal organs. Venison, much like beef or pork is categorized into specific cuts, including roast, sirloin, and ribs.
Etymology [ edit ]
The word derives from the Latin venari (to hunt or pursue).[2] This term entered English through Norman in the 11th century, following the Norman conquest of England, and the establishment of Royal Forests.
Definition [ edit ]
Venison originally described meat of any game animal killed by hunting,[3] and was applied to any animal from the families Cervidae (deer), Leporidae (hares), and Suidae (wild pigs), and certain species of the genus Capra (goats and ibex). In Southern Africa, the word venison refers to the meat of antelope.[4] There are no native Cervidae in sub-Saharan Africa.
Food [ edit ]
Raw venison escalope.
Venison escalope cooking in sauce
Venison may be eaten as steaks, tenderloin, roasts, sausages, jerky and minced meat. It has a flavor reminiscent of beef, but is richer and can have a gamey note.[5] Venison tends to have a finer texture and is leaner than comparable cuts of beef.[6] However, like beef, leaner cuts can be tougher as well.
Organ meats of deer can also be eaten. Traditionally, they are called umbles (originally noumbles). This is supposedly the origins of the phrase "humble pie", literally a pie made from the organs of the deer.[7][8]
Venison is widely considered by modern nutritionists to be a very healthy meat for human consumption. Since deer are inherently wild animals living on a healthy diet of grass and wild plants, their meat is all-natural and hormone free. Venison is higher in moisture, similar in protein and lower in calories, cholesterol and fat than most cuts of grain-fed beef, pork, or lamb.[9]
Since it is unknown whether chronic wasting disease (CWD), a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy among deer (similar to mad cow disease), can pass from deer to humans through the consumption of venison, there have been some fears of contamination of the food supply.[10] Farmers have had tests developed especially for the particular species they raise to obtain better results than those used on cattle. Hunters are advised not to shoot a deer that appears sick or is acting strangely and are also advised to take general precautions in examining the meat from deer they have killed.
Venison jerky can be purchased in some grocery stores or ordered online, and is served on some airlines.
Venison burgers are typically so lean as to require the addition of fat in the form of bacon, olive oil or cheese, or blending with beef, to achieve parity with hamburger cooking time, texture, and taste.[citation needed]
Europe [ edit ]
Historically, venison was considered to be a status symbol among many Europeans. In England, for example, hunting rights were restricted in an effort to preserve property rights. As a result, the possession and sale of venison was tightly regulated under English law.[11] Venison is widely available in European supermarkets through the traditional hunting season, October to December. The main cuts available to European consumers are derived from the saddle and the hind leg.
North America [ edit ]
In the United States, venison is less common at retail due to the requirement that the animal be first inspected by USDA inspectors. There are very few abattoirs which process deer in North America, and most of this venison is destined for restaurants. Most venison sold through retail in the United States comes from New Zealand and Tasmania. It is available through some high-end specialty grocers and some chains which focus on more 'natural' meats. Non-retail venison is often obtained through hunting and self-processing or contracting to small meat processing facilities to do the processing for the hunter, but sale of the finished meat is usually illegal.[12]
Arby's gained some attention in October 2016 when word leaked through social media that they were about to test a venison sandwich. Arby's later confirmed the offering, selecting 17 stores in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin (all major deer hunting states) to offer it during a four-day test during those states' respective hunting seasons. Both due to curiosity and heavy demand from hunters, the sandwiches sold out in all markets on the first day of the test.[13]
Venison consumption is sometimes stigmatized by reference to the 1942 Disney movie "Bambi," which personifies wild deer and includes a scene where the title character's mother gets shot and killed by a human hunter. The film implicitly portrays hunters as cold-hearted and anti-conservationist. Controversy was somewhat renewed when Disney released a long-awaited sequel to the movie in 2006. Nevertheless, there has been an increase in acceptance and promotion of venison in recent years due to the cited nutritional benefits of wild meat and a growing trend toward the belief that hunting an animal for its meat is more environmentally "correct" than the production of meat through |
the superintendent said neither the student nor the staffer who reported him will face disciplinary action.
NBC reports the lockdown at JFK Middle School is the second in recent weeks, after issued a lockdown a few weeks ago while investigating a nearby back robbery.
Several who posted to the news sites had some harsh criticisms for how school officials handled the suspicious person complaint.
“All over a ‘military style jacket.’ Gee, what’s going to happen when someone wears their Cub Scout or Boy Scout uniform to school?” WFSB poster KRB052 questioned.
“Is it any surprise why American students lag behind their international peers when this is the caliber of people ‘educating’ them?” @ToucanSamLV posted.
“Good grief! I used to wear my dad’s military jacket to school all the time,” Wayne Kovacs posted to the NBC story. “Some innocent kid is going to get killed because of OVER VIGILANT, ‘BETTER-SAFE-THAN-SORRY’ IDIOT!”
“Fear is what will ruin this nation,” Brian Kelnohofer wrote. “Fear is what will turn this nation into a police state.”Between 100,000 and 240,000 Texas women ages 18 to 49 have attempted to terminate their own pregnancies without medical assistance, according to new research.
The survey, conducted by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, asked 779 participants to reveal whether she thought her best friend had ever tried abortion self-induction (since the behavior is stigmatized and the participant might be more likely to reveal the truth about a friend), and then whether the participant herself had ever attempted it. 1.7 percent claimed to have performed an abortion on themselves, while 4.1 percent said they thought their best friend had.
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These abortion self-inductions were attempted in a number of ways—most commonly with the drug Misoprostol (brand name Cytotec), but also with “herbs or homeopathic remedies, getting hit or punched in the abdomen, using alcohol or illicit drugs, or taking hormonal pills.”
“It started off slow and... went from zero to sixty real quick and it was just like really painful, intense cramping. It was the worst cramping I’ve ever had and probably one of the worst pains I’ve gone through,” said a 24-year-old from Lower Rio Grande Valley.
“And there was also the fact that I’m doing it at home, we’re not—though we have all the information as to how much bleeding is too much bleeding, you know, or that, there’s always that slight uncertainty of, like, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
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Last week, the Supreme Court has announced it will review HB2, the Texas abortion law that was designed to shut down a majority of the state’s clinics. But until then, Texas women have few options when it comes to reproductive services.
The New York Times reports:
Texas is now home to 17 abortion clinics, down from 41 in 2012, just before the law was passed. The 17 are almost all in major cities in the central and eastern part of the state, which are more able to fulfill the new requirements. The average Texas county is now 111 miles from the nearest clinic, up from 72 miles in 2012. This is substantially higher than the national average outside Texas, 59 miles, and more than triple the average in deep red South Carolina, 36 miles.
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“I just wanted something to work,” a 26-year-old from Corpus Christi said. “I didn’t want to have to spend the money again. I didn’t want to have to do the drive. Not to mention, you know, I don’t have other family. My family lives out of the country so I’m stuck in this town by myself. And my boyfriend I have, but he works... and I have to find somebody who’s willing to drive me two and a half hours and back.”
“Given that the populations we found to be most familiar with abortion self-induction are among those that have been most directly affected by the closure of abortion clinics in the state,” the study reads, “we suspect that abortion self-induction will increase as clinic-based care becomes more difficult to access.”
Contact the author at joanna@jezebel.com.Doctors cut a piece of skull from a man with head injuries and placed it inside his stomach to keep it safe while he recovered.
Michael Donnelly, 42, walked around for three months with the chunk of skull in his belly while a swelling to his brain subsided.
He has now fully recovered after an operation to re-attach the piece of skull which had been stored just under the skin and next to his intestine.
Doctors inserted it into his stomach to preserve it at body temperature, safe in the knowledge that it would not be rejected.
The patient, a heavy goods vehicle driver, was left unconscious after an attack outside a public house in Havant, Hants, in May.
He was treated at the neurological unit at Southampton General Hospital where he underwent an operation to remove shattered parts of his skull from his brain.
But his brain was swelling so much that doctors decided to remove a section of his skull to relieve the pressure.
Five weeks after the attack, Mr Donnelly was allowed home to his wife Melanie, 34, and seven children.
After two months, he was required to return to the hospital for a six-hour operation to have the piece of skull restored.
Mr Donnelly said: "Having it put back in was great because feeling the piece of skull inside me was a bit unsettling. I got used to it but am glad its back in its rightful place."
Damage can occur to the brain when it swells and presses against the bone.
In the past, the pieces were sterilised and kept in airtight bags before being stored in freezers.
June Farrar, clinical services manager at the neurological department at Southampton General Hospital, said: "We can still store the pieces in the old way if people prefer, as some patients don't like the idea of having a bit of their own skull inside them.
"But this technique is perfectly safe and an easy way to make sure it is protected and it takes just a few minutes."
A 17-year-old youth has been charged with grievous bodily harm in connection with the incident.TeamLiquid ESPORTS Profile Joined July 2011 1 Post Last Edited: 2014-04-03 13:52:50 #1 IEM World Championship 2014: Pre-tournament Interviews Oz and Revival — MaNa and Nerchio — StarDust and San — jjakji and TaeJa IEM STUFF IEM Season 8
World Championship
Countdown:
Detailed information on
Countdown:Detailed information on Liquipedia $100,000 Dollar Men
StarDust and San Interviews by Waxangel
On March 13th, some of the best StarCraft 2 players in the world will gather in Katowice, Poland for a shot at winning the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship and its $100,000 grand prize. Not just the grand prize, but only prize.
IEM's decision to make the World Championship
But what do the players think? We talked to yoe.San and mYi.StarDust, two of the underdog Koreans, about their thoughts on the stacked tournament.
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
mYi.StarDust "I know what the most popular build is, even if it's not the best build. But I don't like to copy that build, because then there will be nothing that makes me different from everyone else. So instead, I try to use builds that counter the most popular builds."
How are you feeling ahead of the tournament? Has it been hard adjusting to the balance patch?
Hmm, personally I'm doing alright. I actually thought Terran players were so bad that they needed an advantage. A few Terrans were constantly working hard to find a solution, but the rest of them were only complaining. The hydra buff, Ican't really tell how much it's increased their efficiency.
Do you think you're one of the championship contenders at IEM? What do you think of your chances?
Usually I don't have a huge amount of confidence in my skill, but looking at the roster ahead of this tournament there's a lot of Protoss players. PvP is half/half, so I think I have a shot. Even so, it will be hard to take first place. I think bracket luck, as well as my condition when I arrive at the tournament, will be very important.
Your PvP win rate over the last few months is incredibly high. Why do you think it's a half/half match-up?
Personally I'm confident but... When I go into game at a tournament, I start feeling uncomfortable and afraid. I've come to the weird conclusion that I'm confident but it's still half/half. In other match-ups, if there's a big enough skill difference, you can even get to the level where you almost never lose. PvP's not like that.
The players have split opinions on the winner-take-all $100,000 grand prize. What are your thoughts on it?
There's been a lot of talk around it... I don't think it's good. It feels like you're making 15 losers for the sake of one winner. In other tournaments if you get knocked out in the semis, then you can still recover yourself thinking that you've at least made some prize money.
For second to fourth place at IEM... I think there will be some damage, especially for second place. And if you lose the final 4:3? Just thinking about it makes me shudder.
If two of my friends play in a final, I usually go to the loser first to give him encouragement since the winner is always happy regardless of the prize money. This time around, I don't think I'll be able to approach the loser, lol... As a joke we say it's retirement for the loser.
San says it's suicide.
That kid doesn't have a thought in his head. Please edit his interview, you're not supposed to use such extreme expressions, lol.
Have you thought about where you'd use the $100,000 if you did win?
There's so many things I want to do... I guess around $70,000 would be left after taxes? I'll nomnom on about $40,000 for myself and give $30,000 away to charity, so please cheer for me.
Donate to who?
Uh, smart students who don't have money, LOL. And of course I'm not just saying this because I don't think I have a chance
You've been in Europe a while. Do you think you've assimilated somewhat?
No, I don't think so at all. I may be living on the continent of Europe, but I spend so much time in the team house. When I go out and try to talk to regular people, they have a hard time understanding me at first because my pronunciation is poor.
Still, you must feel like you have an advantage over some of the players at IEM due to your experience traveling to and competing at European tournaments.
Yes, I do benefit from that point, but on the other hand, living in Europe means I can't practice with Korean players... I think that disadvantage might outweigh the advantages.
When Korean players see a good build, they all work to develop that build, tweak it into a version of their own.
Foreigners all have builds that are uniquely their own, so sometimes when I play them I think "ah, this isn't something a Korean would ever do" and think that it's just not useful practice.
What do you think of Polt then, who is actually enjoying the best results of his career after moving abroad?
I think that players like Polt who have the ability to create their own style of play can succeed abroad. Some players have a very stubborn and rigid way of thinking, I don't think they would do well abroad. Polt hyung lives is in a world of his own, and he works to improve inside that world. I think that's why he can do well.
Even before I started playing SC2, he was already famous as 'the Marauder from Seoul National University.' He hasn't changed the larger framework of his play, and he's continuing to improve on his own terms.
Also, you can play on Korea from the US... T_T
Don't you think you're a creative player as well? For instance, your unique PvZ style helped you win the DreamHack Summer championship.
This is the way I am: I know what the most popular build is, even if it's not the best build. But I don't like to copy that build, because then there will be nothing that makes me different from everyone else. So instead, I try to use builds that counter the most popular builds.
My games tend to be either really long or really short. It's tough to figure out a timing in the middle of a build, you have to go by feel. So I prefer to just keep increasing my lead incrementally and taking it to a late game where I can't lose.
Who do you think will win IEM?
I think sOs probably has the highest chance. Watching him in individual leagues, he wins so easily. Especially in GSL.
When you watch SC2, there are players who win because they win because they are good, and players who 'just' win. I think he's both. Me, I think I'm the type who wins because I HAVE to win.
I'll pretend I understood that.
LOL. I mean, it's like....
sOs knows how to take the initiative and control the course of the game, and he makes timings where he knows he can win. Part of that is because of his ability to make builds. In any case, he's on a roll right now and I think he'll do well.
If your girlfriend was kidnapped by Somalian pirates, which three progamers would you take along with you on a rescue mission?
MC is rich, so I'll throw him to the pirates as bait. Then I'll go in for the rescue with Stork.
Why Stork?
He's a ghost!
What about the third member?
Don't need one, I don't think it would be worth the risk to take another person. What would I be worried about, we have a ghost in the party! A Darth Vader ghost at that...
Okay, any final comments or shoutouts before the tournament?
RIP Naniwa.
You can follow StarDust at:
Twitter: @StardustSC2
Stream: 90Stardust
yoe.San "We joke around and say that if you take second place you'd probably kill yourself, but really, I think it would be alright... I'd feel very empty and deflated, but it would still be an interesting experience in life and people would give you a lot of attention. I'd have to take some solace in the WCS points."
How are you feeling ahead of IEM Katowice?
When I first heard that they were only giving prize money to the winner, I thought man... why can't they just do it like last year, this is some serious business right here.
But right now, it actually feels like a relief because my skill has dropped so much. Last year there was a prize difference between each round, and it would have been disappointing to lose in the earlier rounds. This year 16th place and 2nd place are the same, so I feel like there will be less pressure.
I've been practicing hard in the lead up to the tournament, but I don't know if it will be enough.
But if you DID take second, the mental damage would be substantial.
ROFL. We joke around and say that if you take second place you'd probably kill yourself, but really, I think it would be alright... I'd feel very empty and deflated, but it would still be an interesting experience in life and people would give you a lot of attention. I'd have to take some solace in the WCS points
Has your mindset changed after finally winning a big tournament?
It's just made me think that I want to try harder and win a championship again. I don't have a trophy T_T [ASUS ROG Winter did not award a physical trophy]
Did you end up taking the novelty check back to Korea at least?
Yes... From Finland to Switzerland to Germany to Finland to Korea... the edges have become rags.
What are your thoughts on the new balance patch?
Me, as well as my friends Daisy and PartinG, we're just cursing as we ladder together T_T. But I'm repenting as I watch GSL and see Protosses advance.
Your PvP played a big part in you winning ASUS ROG. Do you think the nerfed MSC scouting has made it a more random match-up? How do you feel about the prospect of playing many PvPs as IEM?
I don't MSC scout much in PvP so it doesn't change much for me in PvP. But since I keep losing PvZ and PvT after the patch... StarCraft 2 is a game of mentality, and because my mentality is broken from PvZ/PvT right now, I'm losing PvP as well. I've become awful at SC2 lately, and rather than hope to do well, I just just hope that I can avoid playing embarrassing games.
Any players you want to face? Any you want to avoid?
I want to avoid Terrans. Especially TaeJa, these days he's showing god-like gameplay.
Who do you think will win the tournament?
If it's Protoss then sOs, if Terran then TaeJa.
Any final comments then?
Thanks for the interview. IEM is the big tournament that wraps up an entire year, so I think it will be a great memory for me just to have been there. Cheer for me please!
You can follow San at:
Twitter: @SC2San
Stream: SanWon
On March 13th, some of the best StarCraft 2 players in the world will gather in Katowice, Poland for a shot at winning the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship and its $100,000 grand prize. Not just the grand prize, butIEM's decision to make the World Championship winner-take-all has been controversial, with some fans eagerly anticipating the heightened stakes, and other fans angered by the inequitable distribution of prizes.But what do the players think? We talked to, two of the underdog Koreans, about their thoughts on the stacked tournament.Hmm, personally I'm doing alright. I actually thought Terran players were so bad that they needed an advantage. A few Terrans were constantly working hard to find a solution, but the rest of them were only complaining. The hydra buff, Ican't really tell how much it's increased their efficiency.Usually I don't have a huge amount of confidence in my skill, but looking at the roster ahead of this tournament there's a lot of Protoss players. PvP is half/half, so I think I have a shot. Even so, it will be hard to take first place. I think bracket luck, as well as my condition when I arrive at the tournament, will be very important.Personally I'm confident but... When I go into game at a tournament, I start feeling uncomfortable and afraid. I've come to the weird conclusion that I'm confident but it's still half/half. In other match-ups, if there's a big enough skill difference, you can even get to the level where you almost never lose. PvP's not like that.There's been a lot of talk around it... I don't think it's good. It feels like you're making 15 losers for the sake of one winner. In other tournaments if you get knocked out in the semis, then you can still recover yourself thinking that you've at least made some prize money.For second to fourth place at IEM... I think there will be some damage, especially for second place. And if you lose the final 4:3? Just thinking about it makes me shudder.If two of my friends play in a final, I usually go to the loser first to give him encouragement since the winner is always happy regardless of the prize money. This time around, I don't think I'll be able to approach the loser, lol... As a joke we say it's retirement for the loser.That kid doesn't have a thought in his head. Please edit his interview, you're not supposed to use such extreme expressions, lol.There's so many things I want to do... I guess around $70,000 would be left after taxes? I'll nomnom on about $40,000 for myself and give $30,000 away to charity, so please cheer for me.Uh, smart students who don't have money, LOL. And of course I'm not just saying this because I don't think I have a chanceNo, I don't think so at all. I may be living on the continent of Europe, but I spend so much time in the team house. When I go out and try to talk to regular people, they have a hard time understanding me at first because my pronunciation is poor.Yes, I do benefit from that point, but on the other hand, living in Europe means I can't practice with Korean players... I think that disadvantage might outweigh the advantages.When Korean players see a good build, they all work to develop that build, tweak it into a version of their own.Foreigners all have builds that are uniquely their own, so sometimes when I play them I think "ah, this isn't something a Korean would ever do" and think that it's just not useful practice.I think that players like Polt who have the ability to create their own style of play can succeed abroad. Some players have a very stubborn and rigid way of thinking, I don't think they would do well abroad. Polt hyung lives is in a world of his own, and he works to improve inside that world. I think that's why he can do well.Even before I started playing SC2, he was already famous as 'the Marauder from Seoul National University.' He hasn't changed the larger framework of his play, and he's continuing to improve on his own terms.Also, you can play on Korea from the US... T_TThis is the way I am: I know what the most popular build is, even if it's not the best build. But I don't like to copy that build, because then there will be nothing that makes me different from everyone else. So instead, I try to use builds that counter the most popular builds.My games tend to be either really long or really short. It's tough to figure out a timing in the middle of a build, you have to go by feel. So I prefer to just keep increasing my lead incrementally and taking it to a late game where I can't lose.I think sOs probably has the highest chance. Watching him in individual leagues, he wins so easily. Especially in GSL.When you watch SC2, there are players who win because they win because they are good, and players who 'just' win. I think he's both. Me, I think I'm the type who wins because I HAVE to win.LOL. I mean, it's like....sOs knows how to take the initiative and control the course of the game, and he makes timings where he knows he can win. Part of that is because of his ability to make builds. In any case, he's on a roll right now and I think he'll do well.MC is rich, so I'll throw him to the pirates as bait. Then I'll go in for the rescue with Stork.Don't need one, I don't think it would be worth the risk to take another person. What would I be worried about, we have a ghost in the party! A Darth Vader ghost at that...RIP Naniwa.When I first heard that they were only giving prize money to the winner, I thought man... why can't they just do it like last year, this is some serious business right here.But right now, it actually feels like a relief because my skill has dropped so much. Last year there was a prize difference between each round, and it would have been disappointing to lose in the earlier rounds. This year 16th place and 2nd place are the same, so I feel like there will be less pressure.I've been practicing hard in the lead up to the tournament, but I don't know if it will be enough.ROFL. We joke around and say that if you take second place you'd probably kill yourself, but really, I think it would be alright... I'd feel very empty and deflated, but it would still be an interesting experience in life and people would give you a lot of attention. I'd have to take some solace in the WCS pointsIt's just made me think that I want to try harder and win a championship again. I don't have a trophy T_TYes... From Finland to Switzerland to Germany to Finland to Korea... the edges have become rags.Me, as well as my friends Daisy and PartinG, we're just cursing as we ladder together T_T. But I'm repenting as I watch GSL and see Protosses advance.I don't MSC scout much in PvP so it doesn't change much for me in PvP. But since I keep losing PvZ and PvT after the patch... StarCraft 2 is a game of mentality, and because my mentality is broken from PvZ/PvT right now, I'm losing PvP as well. I've become awful at SC2 lately, and rather than hope to do well, I just just hope that I can avoid playing embarrassing games.I want to avoid Terrans. Especially TaeJa, these days he's showing god-like gameplay.If it's Protoss then sOs, if Terran then TaeJa.Thanks for the interview. IEM is the big tournament that wraps up an entire year, so I think it will be a great memory for me just to have been there. Cheer for me please!About
Thank you for your interest in The Zombie Game Experiment!
Please make sure to visit our official site: ZombieExperiment.com
As we are always wish to improve the project, please contact us if you have any suggestions.
The Basics
This is an experiment in "Community Game Development". The public funds the development and the public helps to design the game. All donors are given free access to the final version of the game. This game will be a light heated zombie game, which material we can equate to a teen rating.
We accept donations for the experiment which funds the development of the game. 25% percent of the donations and game revenue are donated to TeamFox of the The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
Details
Please review ZombieExperiment.com as well as the FAQs.
We have modified the forums to work with this project and continue to do so. If you wish to be involved with the design process of this project you will need to register on these forums. Registering is very quick and easy to complete.
Wait for the registration email to come to your email box. When it arrives, click on the link in your email which confirms that you are a real person and you are set! Your email will not be used for spam.
Donations
You may donate via KickStarter. If you wish to design the game, you will then need to send a confirmation contact with your forum user name so that we may enable your special forum status.
You may also donate via our automated forum PayPal system.
We have broken the funding milestones into four stages.
Stage One is the initial design stage where we begin to design the game and develop rough builds of the game.
Stage Two is the Alpha Build stage where we have a more stable version of the game with your ideas implemented.
Stage Three is the Beta Build stage where a nearly completed version of the game will be available for testing.
Stage Four is the Gold stage where we begin to market the game and sell it to the public.
We are currently funding: STAGE ONE
Design
Once you have donated you will have access to the design forums!
You may be able to pitch design ideas on the design discussion forums.
As the community agrees and votes on design ideas we will add the designs to the design documents.
A base design is being created by the project management to help start the project. We must start with a base design in order to plan for the total development costs. We are envisioning an iso-metric zombie shooter in-which you gain power-ups. More details will be released as the game is designed!
Development
The Hive Media team will be completing most of the development at reduced costs for the Zombie Game Experiment. Other professionals are welcome to donate their services! If you are interested in donating your services please contact us with your idea and previous work samples. As an incentive, we may be able to add you in the professional credits.
While the development team is still being assembled, here are a few of the people involved:
William Weaver is the Development Director.
Aaron Rosenberg is the Lead Writer. (Information on Aaron can be found in the middle of the linked news update.)
Andrew Lackey is the Sound Designer.
Jonathan Coulton has worked with us to use his "Re: Your Brain" song. (Wikipedia)
The Game Designer is YOU.
Software:
The Zombie Game Experiment will be using the Unity3D middle-ware game engine.
A Few Sketches and Concepts:
Spread the Word
Other than donating and being active in the community, the best way to help this project is to tell as many people as you can!
Add us to your Twitter, MySpace and FaceBook.
Tell others about the project! Use the above mentioned sites and Digg, Reddit, forums, chat rooms, blogs, anywhere you can think of! This project is dependent on the community!
The most important thing is to have fun. That is what this project is about, people having a good time and helping a good cause through Community Game Development.LETTER: Thomas Jefferson to William Short
William Short had been Jefferson's Private Secretary when he was Minister in Paris, 1786-1789. They were neighbors in central Virgina, Short living in the Village of Shadwell.
Monticello, October 31, 1819
Dear Sir, — Your favor of the 21st is received....
[The first paragraph discusses Jefferson's recovery from a recent illness.]
.... As you say of yourself, I TOO AM AN EPICUREAN. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus, indeed, has given us what was good of the Stoics; all beyond, of their [doctrines] dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. Their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. The merit of his philosophy is in the beauties of his style. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious of their own invention. These they fathered blasphemously on Him whom they claimed as their Founder, but who would disclaim them with the indignation which their caricatures of His religion so justly excite. Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon; for Plato makes him one of his Collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his name; a liberty of which we are told Socrates honestly complained. Seneca is indeed a fine moralist, disfiguring his work at times with some Stoicisms, and affecting too much antithesis and point, yet giving us on the whole a great deal of sound and practical morality. But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of His own country was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really Huis from the rubbish in which he is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of His biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable He did not live to fill up. Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent Moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture which has resulted from [misconstructions of his words by his pretended votaries] artificial systems*, invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by Him, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind; but this work is to be begun by winnowing the grain from the chaff of the historians of His life I have sometimes thought of translating Epictetus (for he has never been tolerably translated into English) by adding the genuine doctrines of Epicurus from the Syntagma of Gassendi, and an abstract from the Evangelists of whatever has the stamp of the eloquence and fine imagination of Jesus. The last I attempted too hastily some twelve or fifteen years ago. It was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day. But with one foot in the grave, these are now idle projects for me. My business is to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life, as I endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear.
I take the liberty of observing that you are not a true disciple of our master Epicurus, in indulging the indolence to which you say you are yielding. One of his canons, you know, was that "that indulgence which presents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided." Your love of repose will lead, in its progress, to a suspension of healthy exercise, a relaxation of mind, an indifference to everything around you, and finally to a debility of body, and hebetude of mind, the farthest of all things from the happiness which the well-regulated indulgences of Epicurus ensure; fortitude, you know, is one of his four cardinal virtues. That teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them, like cowards; and to fly, too, in vain, for they will meet and arrest us at every turn of our road....
[A paragraph follows, inviting Short and his friend Correa to Monticello, with some news of the progress at the University]
I will place under this a syllabus of the doctrines of Epicurus, somewhat in the lapidary style, which I wrote some twenty years ago; a like one of the philosophy of Jesus, of nearly the same age, is too long to be copied. Vale, et tibi persuade carissimum te esse mihi.
Syllabus of the Doctrines of Epicurus
Physical-
The Universe is eternal.
Its parts, great and small, interchangeable.
Matter and Void alone
Motion--inherent in matter which is weighty and declining.
Eternal circulation of the elements of bodies.
Gods, an order of beings next superior to man, enjoying in their sphere, their own felicities; but not meddling with the concerns of the scale of beings below them.
Moral -
Happiness is the aim of life.
Virtue the foundation of happiness.
Utility the test of virtue.
Pleasure active and In-do-lent.
In-do-lence [a-tarax-ia] is the absence of pain, the true felicity.
Active, consists in agreeable motion; it is not happiness, but the means to produce it.
Thus the absence of hunger is an article of felicity; eating the means to obtain it.
The summum bonum is to be not pained in body, nor troubled in mind.
i.e. In-do-lence of body, tranquillity of mind.
To procure tranquillity of mind we must avoid desire and fear, the two principal diseases of the mind.
Man is a free agent.
Virtue consists in 1. Prudence 2. Temperence 3. Fortitude 4. Justice.
To which are opposed, 1. Folly. 2. Desire. 3. Fear. 4. Deceipt.
*e.g the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection & visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election orders of Hierarchy etc. [This footnote is often expurgated from published texts]
Text: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ed. A. A. Lipscome and A. E. Bergh) Volume XV (Washington DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association 1905) pp. 219-224. For an appreciation of Jefferson's editorial work, see C. Bruce Hunter, "Jefferson’s Bible: Cutting and Pasting the Good Book, " Bible Review 13. 1 (February 1997) 38-41; 46.
Photograph of the original (in the Library of Congress: The Thomas Jefferson Papers), transcribed and edited by Gerard W. Gawalt, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress:
Letter of Thomas Jefferson to William Short, October 31, 1819.[Pugmire] July Update!
Pugmire
Hello good dogs, and excellent cats! So much to cover, so let’s get to it!
MONARCHIES OF MAU KICKSTARTER
In case you’ve missed it, the Mau Kickstarter is live! We funded in just under an hour, which is wonderful. At the time I’m writing this, we’re over $91,000, and we still have nine days to go! And just like with this Kickstarter, once you back you have access to the Early Access PDF in the first backer update. So if you haven’t backed it yet, you can go check it out right here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/monarchies-of-mau-fantasy-tabletop-rpg
PUGMIRE KICKSTARTER
To the printers!
I’ve done some last-minute proofing with Mike Chaney, we both had some final corrections, and now it’s really happening! The book, dice, cards, pins, and screen are all being printed, then will get shipped to our distribution warehouse. From there, everything will be compiled, and they’ll start mailing things out! |
says he's been told flooded roads are part of the reason for his teams' diversion to northern Texas. O'Brien says he's unsure how long the Texans will remain in Dallas. He says he's also uncertain where Houston would practice, but adds the Dallas Cowboys would probably share their training facilities if needed. The Texans are hoping to return to Houston as soon as possible, so they're not able to announce plans beyond Sunday because they're waiting to see how Houston comes through the storm. Players say they're praying for Houston and confident its residents will pull through as well as possible.
Statement from the Houston Texans on the team's delayed return to Houston due to Hurricane Harvey: pic.twitter.com/nPpvMMBNGt — Texans PR (@TexansPR) August 27, 2017
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This Topic is Missing Your Voice.War on Warren.
Wall Street donors have a message for Hillary Clinton: You can have our cash or Elizabeth Warren as your running mate, but you can’t have both. Dozens of anonymous financial fat cats tell Politico that Vice-President Warren would be “damaging to the economy” — especially the “economy” of Hillary for America.
“If Clinton picked Warren, her whole base on Wall Street would leave her,” a top Democratic donor told the political-news outlet. “They would literally just say, ‘We have no qualms with you moving left, we understand all the things you’ve had to do because of Bernie Sanders, but if you are going there with Warren, we just can’t trust you, you’ve killed it.’”
If the Clinton campaign decided to plant a story to amplify the credibility-enhancing potential of a Warren pick to grieving Sandernistas, this is pretty much how it would read: The dozens of big-money donors all insisted on anonymity because “they feared Warren’s wrath”; they warn that a Vice-President Warren could jeopardize a deal on their preferred version of corporate tax “reform”; they suggest Warren doesn’t feel “comfortable spending time with the rich people you need to raise money from"; and they say there is a “chance for much better relations between business and the White House than during President Barack Obama’s tenure” — a tenure that was so unfriendly to business, it featured the bailout of the financial sector, a “free trade” agreement that actually offers trade protection to well-connected American industries, and a cabinet staffed with no small number of former Wall Street executives — but not if Warren is in the White House serving as the wet-blanket-in-chief.
Every quote in the piece reads like it was given by Warren, disguised in a fake mustache, top hat, and monocle. But there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of Wall Street’s antipathy for the senator. Warren created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which makes it more difficult for the finance industry to scam ordinary investors, and led the charge for the Obama administration’s “fiduciary rule,” which requires investment advisers to put the financial interests of their clients ahead of their own — in other words, traders can no longer gamble with grandmas’ rent money. And, of course, Warren is one of the party’s strongest advocates for breaking up the big banks.
The threat these donors are making isn’t an idle one. The Clinton campaign has received $28 million from the securities and investment industry during the 2016 cycle so far, considerably more than it’s taken in from any other sector, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Still, Warren has many advocates within the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party more broadly. Among those reportedly pushing for her selection is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. And sources close to the campaign told Politico that she remains a top contender for second-in-command.A volunteer health worker removes a Guinea worm from the leg of a patient in the village of Yari in Central Equatoria state on February 2, 2010 (AFP Photo/Louise Gubb)
Juba (AFP) - Health workers celebrated Friday a key step towards eradicating the flesh-burrowing guinea worm after South Sudan, once by far the worst affected country, said it had recorded no cases this year.
The World Health Organization called the results "remarkable", and the progress comes despite a civil war raging in South Sudan for the past 18 months.
In the mid-1980s, 3.5 million people in 20 countries were infected with the water-borne parasite that causes agonising pain and leaves sufferers unable to function for months. Now, apart from South Sudan, guinea worms exist only in Chad, Ethiopia and Mali.
"The task is not yet complete...until there are zero cases of guinea worm throughout South Sudan, and the country is certified guinea worm free," South Sudan's health ministry said in a statement, announcing cash rewards for anyone reporting a case to medics.
"Eradication of this painful scourge is within our reach... let us work together in the final push."
- Little dragons -
South Sudan's health ministry said that in 2006 there were over 20,500 recorded cases, while there has now been no recorded case since October 2014.
The Carter Center -- the not-for-profit organisation founded by former US president Jimmy Carter -- has been working in South Sudan since 1989 to exterminate the worm once and for all. The centre said it was "thrilled" at the news.
If the campaign succeeds, guinea worm will become the first parasitic disease to be eradicated and only the second human disease to be wiped out worldwide after smallpox in 1979.
In 2014, South Sudan reported the highest number of cases globally, a total of 70, far higher compared with the only other three countries left with the worm - Mali where there were 40 cases, Chad where there were 13 and Ethiopia where there were just three.
Also known as dracunculiasis, from the Latin for "little dragons", the worm is a particularly painful water-borne parasite that can leave people weakened and sick for months every year.
After about a year feeding inside the body, the long white worms dig through the body towards the skin, releasing chemicals to burn the flesh and then spewing thousands of larvae as they exit.
Although there is no direct treatment, the breeding cycle can be broken by making sure people do not wash in sources of drinking water while the worm is emerging from the skin.
Worms mainly exit from the legs and arms but affected communities say they have been known to emerge from the head, sexual organs and even the eyes.
They must be slowly teased out by wrapping the wriggling worm around a stick -- the reported origin for the medical symbol of a snake coiled around a staff.Audacious Epigone mentions that Kansas University is hosting a Tunnel of Oppression in which you walk through a tunnel and get yelled at by students and staff of color pretending to be white racists. Or something.
What really jumped out at me reading up on the Tunnel of Oppression phenomenon was that it seems to appeal most to the most fly-overish colleges imaginable: Boise State, Wichita State, Texas Tech, Indiana, Southern Illinois, Northern Illinois, Western Illinois, and so forth.
You might think that the Tunnel of Oppression would appeal to coastal elitists, but I can’t find any evidence that Harvard, Yale, or Princeton have ever touched the Tunnel of Oppression with a ten-foot pole.
You might think that ultra-liberal Brown U. would host the Tunnel of Oppression, but a Google search reveals only that it was set up in the Brown Ballroom at Illinois State. Similarly, the Tunnel of Oppression has been at Penn State, but not at Ivy League Penn.
In the San Francisco Bay area, the Tunnel of Oppression has been hosted at San Jose State, Santa Clara, and Cal State East Bay, but not, as far as I can tell, at Berkeley or Stanford.
Similarly, the Tunnel of Oppression Test can distinguish Directional State Universities from the more prestigious Flagship Universities. The Tunnel of Oppresion was featured at the U. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, but not at the U. of Wisconsin-Madison. It was at the Texas State (which What Would Tyler Durden Do suggested is not an actual college but merely a made-up university to play against in the Big Game in football movies), but not at the U. of Texas-Austin. Washington State in Pullman on the Idaho border is a stronghold of the Tunnel of Oppression, but not the U. of Washington in fashionable Seattle.
This even works for the most subtle distinctions in status. For example, in the Cal State system, Cal Poly Pomona has a Tunnel of Oppression but not Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. What’s the difference between the two Cal Polys? If you have to ask, perhaps you’d be more comfortable in Pomona.
So, basically, if your college hosts an annual Tunnel of Oppression, your only hope in life is to be the costume designer for Napoleon Dynamite 2.
Language NSFW:
[Comment at Unz.com]I’m not particularly fond of circular logic, but it sure gets used a lot. Here’s an example: there are more men working in tech than women, therefore men are better at coding than women. It’s easy to find people who accept that reasoning without a qualm.
But those same people balk at another example: more women than men are getting published in science fiction now, therefore women are better writers than men. They go to extraordinary lengths to rationalize away the current difference. Why, the SJWs must be actively discriminating against men! I can prove it using math, because men are also naturally better at math than women!
I have found the most remarkable example of this “proof”. This fellow has gone through back issues of various magazines and tallied up the number of male and female authors published — and also the number of “not real sex” authors, which sort of tells you right there what kind of regressive asswipe we’re dealing with. He comes to the conclusion that there’s a huge discrepancy in the numbers of F&SF stories getting published by men and women, and that it’s the product of a conspiracy by SJWs to actively harm men. Really!
It’s been obvious for a long time in publishing that men need not apply, you’re not welcome. But now in the 2% where men were actually allowed to compete, it’s been completely taken over by social justice warriors who don’t care in the least about equality, but want to actively harm men both as professionals and readers.
In order to demonstrate this, he engages in some amazing cherry picking and distortion of the statistics. He plugs numbers into a spreadsheet and then does some weird analysis. For example, here’s the month-by-month counts for a podcast, the Escape Pod. The thing is, there are huge numbers of podcasts out there — why is he selecting this one? Is he going to exhaustively summarize the state of the podcast genre (no, of course not, because that would be a huge undertaking), or is he selecting this one because it will support his claim? You know it’s the latter. I looked it up, and here’s one of the criteria for entries in the podcast:
We are especially interested in seeing more submissions from people of backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented or excluded from traditional SF publishing, including, but not limited to, women, people of color, LGBTQ or non-binary gender people, persons with disabilities, members of religious minorities, and people from outside the United States. If you identify as part of these or other underrepresented groups, we welcome and encourage you to indicate so when you send us your story. We acknowledge the reality of unconscious bias and will make our best efforts to account for it during the editorial review process. Our goal is to publish fiction that reflects the diversity of the human experience.
So yes, they intentionally are casting a wide net, and are trying to bring in diverse writers. They aren’t discriminating against men at all.
So let’s see the numbers.
So a podcast that is actively encouraging diverse submissions still includes 20 stories from men, vs. 30 stories from women. That’s not bad at all. But wait: what’s that number? He’s saying that there are 50% more stories by women than men? That’s odd. How does he get that?
Looking at several of his examples, it becomes obvious: he’s taking the difference in the number of stories by men and women, and then dividing, not by the total number of stories, but by the number of of stories by men. It’s a way to amplify and exaggerate the differences — it allows him later to claim that some magazines publish 247% more women! 306% more women! Aaaiee! It’s a bullshit statistic, though.
And then there’s this interesting table: these are the long-standing big names in SF publishing: Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF. There are more men getting published in the established magazines than women! You would think this would be a troubling statistic for his thesis.
So magazines that encourage diversity in their authorship get fewer submissions from men, which is totally unsurprising. What is odd is that a couple of magazines buck the trend. Why? Our intrepid investigator has an explanation.
The oldest of the old guard of magazines still seem to be a safe place to submit if you’re a man. Now the numbers look very skewed in men’s favors and a feminist might cry foul here saying that these magazines actually discriminate against women. This is where they’re wrong. A source that will remain nameless told me that the editor of Asimov’s, Sheila Williams, prints male to female stories in the ratio of submissions she receives. Even though the monthlies look a little suspect, if these periodicals still work in an old way of proportionate representation of submissions, this is probably an accurate picture of what Science Fiction authors make ups are overall, and what one should expect were that more the case.
Uh, wait. This is actually a bit bothersome. I expect the role of the editor is to select the best quality stories for publication, without regard for the identity of the author. This guy is actually saying that this is not true for Asimov’s — that they have a quota system. If 60% of the submissions for that month are from men, they decide that, regardless of quality, 60% of the published stories for that month have to come from that pile? So all the guys have to do is throw lots and lots of trash at the magazine, and they’ll effectively squeeze out stories from women authors?
Excuse me, but I don’t really believe that. If true, though, that works both ways, and all the women have to do to break the male hegemony at Asimov’s is to submit, submit, submit stories. Fish the crappy stuff out of the wastebasket and send it in anyway — it probably won’t get published, but it will enable more of your sister writers to get in.
Which is why I don’t believe this story.
But then take a look at his conclusion.
If you’re a man, even with the skewed results of the legacy three magazines of Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF, that are vocal about the fact that they’re proportionate in representation of submissions, you’re hosed. An analysis of all the markets that accept these submissions on a monthly basis (I left out Lightspeed Magazine which has dead even results), the total discrimination against men is big. The totals of all stories published in this market survey over a year are: Men: 426 Women: 487 Which means women have a 14.3% advantage just in sheer numbers of stories published. If the industry holds with ratios of 4:1 submissions, and say the accepted represents about 1% of all submissions, it means there’s about 91,300 submissions in the industry. Rough estimates puts men at 73,040 submissions and women at 18,260 submissions.
First look at that bit I highlighted: he threw out a data point because Lightspeed Magazine happened to have equal representation of men and women authors — that is, he discarded data that didn’t fit his hypothesis. You don’t get to do that! He doesn’t even seem to be aware that this is a great big flaming no-no in data analysis. Of course, given how he chose to inflate numbers throughout, it’s not surprising that he’s clueless here.
Second, he’s claiming that discrimination against men is big, yet all he’s got to show for it is a difference of 426 to 487? What’s the statistical significance of that? Wait, scratch that: his methodology means that at best he’s confirming a bias he favored with his process, which isn’t particularly interesting. He intentionally selected magazines that are trying to acquire a diverse audience, so of course he sees some underrepresentation of men. It doesn’t say there’s a conspiracy, or that men are being harmed.
Third, to amplify his claim of discrimination, he brings in this other statistic: men submit more stories than women with a ratio of 4:1, so there’s even more invisible bias! To back up that claim, he mentions a submissions tracker and market database called The Grinder. I poked around in there, but didn’t see a way to pull up stats on women’s vs. men’s submissions — maybe someone could explain how you do that. But the thing is that in his one specific example of Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF, he claims that the proportion published is representative of the proportion submitted, and it’s nowhere near 4:1. I also rather suspect that those magazines that encourage submissions by underrepresented groups also tend to get relatively fewer stories from your traditional white male engineering types, so the 4:1 doesn’t hold.
But given that 90% of everything is crap, I don’t find submission rates to be particularly compelling, so that line of argument is also crap.
But here’s my bottom line: of course there is bias! It’s everywhere! Some places will favor women, others will favor men. Go to your supermarket and look at the magazine racks: there are magazines “for men”, and magazines “for women”, and they tend to propagate some ugly stereotypes. In a field like science fiction that tends to encourage innovation and change, and that like all literary fields goes through waves of new emphases, there will be times when people are trying to shake up the old staid tropes, and that means that the previous beneficiaries of convention will fall out of favor, and will find it harder to publish. People are looking for new twists and interesting ideas in their fiction, and of course if you want to write stories exactly like the ones you read 30 years ago, you’re going to be discriminated against.
Or you’ll find a niche publishing market.
Really, I don’t choose my preferred reading material by the color of the author’s skin, or what genitals are slung under their pants. I read Nnedi Okorafor, or Scott Lynch, or Ann Leckie, or NK Jemisin, or China Mieville, because they challenge me with new ideas and good writing. Sometimes to get new ideas you have to encourage new perspectives, which tends to disrupt the Old Guard.
But here’s another factor that influences what authors I favor. The good ones (even the white male authors!) will read those new authors, too, and praise what they like and grow and change themselves to value those novel approaches, and their writing will get better.
The bad ones will read stories by authors different from themselves and resent it, and run away from the challenge, blaming others for their lack of adaptability and talent.
But don’t worry, White Men! You’re just as capable of writing great stories as people who are not White Men, as long as you don’t get tangled up in your persecution complex.The European Commission (EC) has agreed to finance a grid-integration project between Slovenia and Croatia with €40 million ($44.9 million). The project will be financed with funds from the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), an EU funding instrument which promotes improvement of existing EU networks in the fields of transport, energy and digital services.
The EC said the smart grid project will improve the links between the electricity grids of Slovenia and Croatia, and drive renewable energy development across the region. Furthermore, the project is intended to allow smaller power producers to participate in the local market, and to include storage solutions in order to stabilize security of energy supply.
The grid-injection of renewable energy will be regulated through a new virtual cross-border control centre, that makes use of specialist IT infrastructure and software, says the EC, while all the applied technology is expected to have the potential to be used to connect other regional energy systems in neighboring countries around Europe.
The project will be implemented by the Croatian Transmission System Operator Ltd. (HOPS) and Croatia’s power distributor HEP ODS, and by Slovenia’s SODO electricity distribution system operator, d. o. o. (Ltd.) and state-owned electricity transmission company of Slovenia, Elektro-Slovenija, d.o.o. (ELES).
Further interconnections of Italy with its neighboring countries, of South-East Europe with Central Europe and across the Balkan peninsula are identified as one of the main barriers for power exchange across Europe by the association of European electric transmission system operators (TSOs) ENTSO-E in a report released in December.
ENTSO-E, stressed that a lot more power grid is needed if the 2030 target of a 27% share of renewables set by the EC in the Winter Package must be achieved, and if pressure on high-voltage grids is to be reduced. Tensions usually occur, the report says, between European regions with a high potential for renewables and densely populated, power consuming areas in between.A Bernie Sanders White House would be $8 trillion in the hole over a decade. The socialist U.S. presidential hopeful wants to shake up the U.S. economy with dramatically more spending. His promises from free college tuition to a government health system, which he is likely to outline during Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate, would cost far more than additional taxes would bring in.
The Vermont senator’s most expensive idea is to convert the American healthcare market to a national system with the government as the single payer. Sanders would essentially extend the current Medicare program, which is for retired people, to everyone. Breakingviews calculates that this would cost some $9.6 trillion more than current projections over the usual 10-year budget period, based on 2010 healthcare spending and other assumptions including a 25 percent discount thanks to Medicare-style negotiating power and price controls.
Sanders wants another $1 trillion to spend on infrastructure. U.S. roads, bridges, trains and the like need investment, but it’s still a hefty sum. And Breakingviews estimates that his call for free public college for everyone who wants it will cost almost as much again, while universal daycare will weigh in at around $500 billion. Along with four other proposals, this yields $12 trillion in new spending. That’s about 25 percent more than currently projected over 10 years.
The candidate running under the slogan “Feel the Bern” isn’t shy about boosting government revenue, too. He would institute a Wall Street trading tax, aiming to raise $1.5 trillion over 10 years. His corporate tax plan would eliminate most loopholes and deductions but leave today’s 35 percent rate intact and applicable to global profit, which Breakingviews calculates would bring in another $1 trillion. Lifting the income ceiling for Social Security payroll tax would bring in a similar amount. All-in, Sanders would lift revenue by about $4 trillion over a decade.
It may be he has other tax increases in mind beyond what he has already mentioned, or thinks some of the spending will boost GDP growth and hence revenue. But $8 trillion isn’t the kind of money easily found between couch cushions, even in the lofty expanse of the U.S. economy. If Sanders wants to realize his socialist dream, he’ll need much higher taxes to achieve it. Coming clean on that might reverse the trend that has narrowed his polling gap with front-runner Hillary Clinton.The United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process panned Hamas leaders Sunday for urging the destruction of Israel, and said Palestinians should make resolving the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip the focus of their efforts.
Nickolay Mladenov’s comments came after senior figures in the Hamas terror group declared that a reconciliation with rival Fatah does not mean that Hamas will end its efforts to wipe out the Jewish state.
“I condemn the latest statements made by some Hamas leaders, reportedly calling for the destruction of the State of Israel,” Mladenov said. “They do not serve the interest of peace and the goal of achieving a negotiated two-state solution.”
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“Under the auspices of Egypt, Palestinian leaders have embarked on a course to solve the grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza and enable the government to take up its responsibilities in the Strip. I encourage them not be distracted from this objective.”
Palestinians factions Fatah and Hamas agreed earlier this month in Cairo on a landmark deal to end a decade-long split and are seeking to form a unity government along with other parties.
Iran’s Press TV reported Saturday that Hamas deputy chief Salah al-Arouri, leading a Palestinian delegation to Tehran, said that Hamas and Fatah “confronted” three preconditions set by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for dealing with any Palestinian government in which Hamas sits — that Hamas disarm, recognize Israel and cut all relations with Iran.
Regarding the first and second demands, he said, “We’re not in the stage of recognition; rather we are now in the stage of preparing to eliminate the Zionist entity.” As for the third, cutting relations with Iran, he said, “Our visit to Tehran is our practical rejection to the Israeli demand to cut ties with it.”
Hamas has controlled Gaza with Iran’s backing since ousting the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in a violent coup in 2007.
Under the recent deal between the two factions, Hamas is set to hand administration of the Strip back to Fatah while retaining its massive fighting force.
The United States has said any joint government must recognize Israel and disarm Hamas, but the group has stridently rejected the conditions.
“No one in the universe can disarm us. On the contrary, we will continue to have the power to protect our citizens,” Hamas Gaza head Yahya Sinwar said Thursday.
“Over is the time Hamas spent discussing recognizing Israel. Now Hamas will discuss when we will wipe out Israel,” Sinwar said, according to the Hamas-linked news agency Shehab.
Arouri is in charge, among other things, of Hamas’s terrorist activities in the West Bank. He lives in exile in Beirut after being expelled from Turkey and Qatar.
When Fatah and Hamas signed their reconciliation agreement in Cairo last week, Arouri, who headed the Hamas delegation that negotiated the deal, said Palestinian unity was vital “so that we can all work together against the Zionist enterprise.”
Agencies contributed to this report.The “Impeach Donald Trump Now” campaign, which called for the president’s impeachment for “serious violations” and “unprecedented level of corruption” since he took the office, has gained over half a million signatures.
The campaign, an independent public interest initiative, is led by nonpartisan and nonprofit Free Speech for People and RootsAction.
“As of January 20, 2017, President Trump’s refusal to divest from his business interests has placed him in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause and on a collision course with the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause and with the federal STOCK Act [Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012],” according to the campaign’s website.
The campaign claims that Trump’s business holdings in the U.S. and across the world show conflicts of interest, which violate the American constitution. Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech For People, on Tuesday alleged that Trump is making profit at public expense.
“On inauguration day, we issued the call for Congress to investigate whether President Trump should be impeached for violating the Constitution by holding onto his business interests,” Fein said in a statement. “Donald Trump is profiting from the presidency at public expense, and people are suffering as a result.”
On Jan. 23, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal legal watchdog, sued Trump accusing him of breaching the country’s constitution by letting his businesses receive payments from foreign governments. The lawsuit alleged the 70-year-old president accepted cash and favors from foreign governments through guests and events conducted at his hotels, leases in his buildings and real estate deals across the world.
The American constitution allows a president to be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” However, the process is complex. It begins in the House of Representatives. Following this, it goes to the Senate where a vote is conducted to remove the president from office. While the House needs a majority vote, the Senate requires a two-thirds vote to impeach the president. If Trump is ousted from office through this process, Vice President Mike Pence will take his place.
There has never been an impeachment by both the House and Senate. However, some presidents have come close to getting impeached. Richard Nixon stepped down from his office, paving way for Gerald Ford to take office in 1974. And in 1998, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House but not the Senate.In the 1970s, Oregonians blew up a beached, rotting whale. Here in Washington, we'll do no such thing.
Sorry, guys, put away the dynamite. That’s not how we handle these sorts of things in Washington.
Washington State Parks rangers will be leaving a dead gray whale to decay on the beach near Twin Harbors State Park after it washed ashore Tuesday.
Instead of blowing it up, like the Oregonians fatefully tried back in the 1970s.
“Visitors can expect strong, unpleasant smells as the carcass rots over the summer months,” a the State Parks statement stated, in a wild understatement.
The 30-foot-long juvenile female, believed to be 1 to 2 years old, was healthy when it died of a traumatic injury, the statement said.
The whale’s carcass, south of Westport in Grays Harbor County, is in the Washington state Seashore Conservation Area, which covers much of the state’s western coastline.
Experts advised State Parks officials to leave the body to decompose naturally so it could serve as a food source for other wildlife.
The whale came to rest in the intertidal area, where crabs can feed on it at high tide and birds can do so during low tide.
Coyotes — a not-so-natural predator —can also feed off the carcass at dusk.
State Parks officials advise people not to take parts of the rotting whale — it’s a federal offense.Intel’s Silvermont architecture powered Atom Z3000 series or Bay Trail as it is formerly known is going to be unveiled on 11th September but thanks to our sources, we have got the details regarding the low power SOCs which would power the future generation of tablets and mobility devices.
Intel Atom Z3000 Series “Bay Trail” SOCs Performance and Lineup Detailed
It is no doubt that the mobile market has grown up tremendously in the recent year and consumers are leaning towards low-power, portable devices day after day. Intel has been gearing up its Atom lineup for years now and now plays a major role in mobility devices. The Intel Atom Z3000 series ‘Bay Trail’ SOCs would be powered by the latest 22nm Silvermont architecture which would also be featured in the company’s Avoton, Rangeley, Merrifield and a soon to be announced brand for various platforms. The Atom Z3000 ‘Bay Trail’ would end up in tablets and would feature enhanced performance over the past generation of Atom processors and current competitors.
The Atom Z3000 series would be split into two product segments, the Atom Z3700 series would be Quad Core variants targeted towards Windows and Android ecosystems while the Atom Z3600 Dual Core SOCs would be targeted towards the Android OS. There would be a total of six SKUs under the Atom Z3000 series which are listed below:
Intel Atom Z3000 SKUs Lineup:
Atom Z3000 Series Atom Z3770 Atom Z3770D Atom Z3740 Atom Z3740D Atom Z3680 Atom Z3680D Process 22nm 22nm 22nm 22nm 22nm 22nm Cores 4 4 4 4 2 2 L2 Cache 2 MB 2MB 2MB 2MB 1MB 1MB Frequency 2.4 GHz 2.4 GHz 1.8 GHz 1.8 GHz 2.0 GHz 2.0 GHz Memory Technology LPDDR3-1067 DC DDR3L 1333 LPDDR3 1067 DDR3L 1333 LPDDR3 1067 DDR3L 1333 Memory Bandwdith 17.1 GB/s 10.6 GB/s 17.1 GB/s 10.6 GB/s 8.5 GB/s 10.6 GB/s Memory Capcity 4 GB 2 GB 4 GB 2 GB 1 GB 2 GB Display Resolution 2560×1600 1900×1200 2560×1600 1900×1200 1200×800 1900×1200
The Silvermont core itself features higher performance through out of order execution engine, a new multi-and system fabric architecture featuring new IA instructions on the level with Intel’s Westmere Core series and new security and visualization technologies. On the power side, the Silvermont would be highly efficient featuring wider dynamic operating range and enhanced active and idle power management. Not to mention the 22nm design itself which is built with the latest 3D Tri-gate transistors which is specifically tuned for SOC products.
The Atom Z3000 Series architecture is powered by the above mention Silvermont core, featuring support for LPDDR3-1067 and DDR3L-RS memory configurations, Intel HD Graphics with Clear Video HD Technology with 4 Execution Units or EUs with 8 threads each. The graphics processor would feature dynamic frequency mode adjusting the clock speeds from high to low depending on the usage and supporting max resolution of 2560×1600.
A single Bay Trail Atom Z3000 Series chip is going to offer Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, 3G/LTE, PMIC, Sensor Hub, NFC, Audio Codec, Panel, HDMI, Front Camera, Rear Camera, Touch Controller, NDR Flash, eMMC, SD Card and USB 3.0/2.0.
Getting back to the graphics part, the Intel HD Graphics architecture featured on the Atom Z3000 series comes with 4 Execution Units, SIMD32 which are a DX11 and Open GL ES 3.0 compatible graphics core supporting ultra high resolutions and speeds of upto 667 MHz. On the media side, the new Bay Trail SOCs would feature full HW acceleration and support H.264, VC1, MPEG2, MVC, VP8, MPEF-4/H.263, MJPEG formats and also give out HDCP 1.4 and HDCP 2.1.
The power and clock management is handled by the latest Intel Burst Technology 2.0 which is similar to their Intel Turbo Boost 2.0. The tech allows processor cores to run faster than their base frequency if they are running below their power, current and temperature limits.
Finally the performance which detailed in the slides looks like an incremental improvement over the past Atom cores and also the current ARM based SOCs which include NVIDIA Tegra 4 with four Cortex A15 cores and Qualcomm’s Snarpdragon 800 featuring four Krait400 cores. In single and multi-threaded benchmarks, the Atom Z3770 is faster than both of the fastest ARM solutions currently available. The graphics performance also seems to be strong with 4.5 times the performance over the previous generation Atom Z2760 Clover Trail and twice the improvement over Quadcomm’s Snarpdragon S4 powered Dell XPS 10 and NVIDIA Tegra 3 powered Microsoft Surface RT in 3DMark Ice Storm benchmark.
The Atom Z3000 Series ‘Bay Trail’ SOCs would be officially launched on 11th September at IDF13 San Francisco. Moving into the future, Intel would release Cherry Trail powered by the Broadwell GPU architecture which means that in a year’s time, we would get around 50-70% performance improvement over Intel’s current Bay trail HD graphics while CPU side would be powered by the 14nm Airmont cores on both Cherry Trail and its successor Willow Trail. More details regarding next generation Atom chips can be found here.
Intel Atom Z3000 ‘Bay Trail’ Slides:I have not written anything of significance about the YG Network’s Room to Grow agenda, but Ross Douthat writes a piece here about an aspect of it, the child tax credit expansion, which I have criticized in the past, along with Scott Lincicome. It also provides a glimpse of an interesting underlying question about the motivations of reform on the right.
The politics of dramatically expanding the child tax credit entitlement (and yes, it is an entitlement) just don’t make all that much sense to me. Consider the landscape of America today, where more people are staying single longer and having fewer kids of their own volition, as they pretty much always do all over the world as cultures become more highly educated. These are not recent developments:
“Between 1970 and 2012, the share of households that were married couples with children under 18 halved from 40 percent to 20 percent. The proportion of one-person households increased by 10 percentage points between 1970 and 2012, from 17 percent to 27 percent. Between 1970 and 2012, the average number of people per household declined from 3.1 to 2.6.”
I understand that the people behind this agenda think this is a bad thing, and I largely agree (from a more libertarian perspective, intact families are the greatest hedge we have against the expansion of government, as it rushes in to do the things that intact families do). But why is it conservative or even an example of limited government to use tax policy to essentially reject that steady decision-making over the course of decades? Is it because there are too many young people voting for Republicans? Isn’t there something better that could be offered to single people 18-34 – a disturbing portion of whom are still living with their parents – without suggesting that they’re pursuing the wrong American dream if they’re unmarried or don’t have children?
How about instead cutting taxes for working Americans broadly by getting rid of the payroll tax entirely? You could even create big tax advantaged savings accounts attractive for families and for single people who don’t have retirement accounts through work – like Canada did, but perhaps with a large HSA component. If you assume that people still want to get married and have children, but are simply too burdened financially to do it… shouldn’t the obvious limited government policy solution here be about removing government-imposed burdens, not expanding an entitlement that subsidizes one portion of society and alienating those outside of it?
What is good for society may be good for the soul, but government policy ought to set that aside and instead focus on the idea |
man," 90-year-old Jules tells me while tending the last embers of a fire that has burned for 24 hours. "My work is crude. It involves some skills, but Helen is the heart of this work."
At first the Rabins' bake house was outdoors. But they put up a building around it so they could work during Vermont's harsh winters. As Helen, 73, mixes flour, water, salt and sourdough starter in an industrial-size mixer from the 1920s, she belittles her contribution to the enterprise.
"The formula for the bread itself and the flour and the sourdough is really available to anybody," she says, "but if our bread is different — and I think it's somewhat different from what most other people make — it has to be the oven."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jon Kalish for NPR Jon Kalish for NPR
The 38-year-old wood-fired oven at their home in Marshfield, Vt., is based on one they saw at a commune in France while Jules was on sabbatical. Knocking on a wood food counter used for forming loaves from the dough, Helen says, "I'm especially proud because after 35, 40 years, it hasn't fallen down."
Helen is still able to lug 50-pound sacks of flour and grain around the bake house. The Rabins use King Arthur white flour but grind their own wheat and rye flour in a small electric mill.
The tools used for the fire have a DIY edge to them: A broom, hoe and mop used on the oven floor are attached to 6-foot-8-inch tree limbs. The mop is a burlap coffee sack that Jules refer to as a shmatte, using the Yiddish word for rag.
"This whole enterprise is based on shmatte technology," he says.
Helen scoffs at the notion that it's kind of cool that she's kept her original batch of sourdough starter going since the late 1970s. She points out that the bacteria used in the starter are everywhere in the natural environment. Her daughter, Nessa, says it's definitely cool.
Nessa is a proud union baker at the Hunger Mountain Food Co-op in Montpelier. The union is the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, and Nessa is a pastry chef. She's been taking Fridays off during the summer to go help her parents bake.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jon Kalish for NPR Jon Kalish for NPR
The Rabins retired in 2002, but son Julian's need for a summer job four years ago provided the impetus for them to come out of retirement.
At the Plainfield farmers market, the only place where you can buy Rabin bread, Nessa greeted a customer who joked about getting to the market late and still scoring a loaf of Rabin bread.
The weekly trip to the farmers market is a time when the Rabins socialize with their fans and friends, who are often one and the same.
"We've been buying this bread since they started baking it," said Lorrie Goldensohn, whose husband, Barry, taught at Goddard with Jules. "We've had great bread in Paris and Austria and this has always been right up there."
Clutching a loaf of sourdough rye, Eleanor Randall remarks, "Oh, my God. This is so good. It's just moist and grainy and makes you think you're in France for a little while."
To which her husband. Leonard Irving, adds: "There's no better bread than Jules and Helen's.... And, of course, it's baked the same morning. You can't beat that."
The bread that many in central Vermont can't live without will be available for two more Fridays at the Plainfield farmers market. The Rabins say that they're not sure if they'll bake again next summer.
Manhattan-based radio reporter Jon Kalish has reported for NPR since 1980. Links to radio documentaries, podcasts and stories on NPR are at Kalish Labs.POSTED BY manish ON
Have you ever faced this situation, when you were making payment through your debit card or credit card?
“Sir How are you making payment? Debit Card or Cash?” “Card” “Sir, There will be 2% extra charges if you pay by Debit Card? ” “Why extra charges? I use it at every place and no one charges any thing extra? ” “Sorry Sir, this is our Policy. You can take out the CASH from the nearby ATM if you want to save that extra charges” “Huh!.. &^#$^&*J#^&&#%$&*N”
You often face the above situation, when you buy things like jewelry, Laptops, Mobile phones etc. I faced this 2-3 times myself, but could argue well with the shopkeeper, because I knew this is just a tactic used by shopkeepers to save on the charges they need to pay from their own pocket. Hence I never paid that extra 2% or just left the shop.
Merchants cant charge any extra charges on Debit Card Payment – say RBI
Now yesterday, RBI has openly cracked down on this unfair trade practice and issued a notification saying that Shop Merchants can not charge any extra charges from customers, if payment is done through Debit Card. Below is the exact wordings from RBI Notification
4. Levying fees on debit card transactions by merchants – There are instances where merchant establishments levy fee as a percentage of the transaction value as charges on customers who are making payments for purchase of goods and services through debit cards. Such fee are not justifiable and are not permissible as per the bilateral agreement between the acquiring bank and the merchants and therefore calls for termination of the relationship of the bank with such establishments.
Why Shopkeepers Charge extra 2% on Debit Card payments?
When you swipe your debit/credit card for purchasing some item, the merchant has to pay some fees (1%-2%) to the Bank or the rental fees for the swipe machine. The charges goes out of their own pocket, as the cost of running the business and convenience of taking the payments (more customers will come, if card payment is there). If its a small payment like Rs 500 or Rs 1000, then its a charge of Rs 10 or Rs 20, which is fine. But when it becomes a payment of lets say Rs 30,000 (imagine buying laptop or iPad), then its around Rs 300-600 and to save that big charges, they discourage debit/credit card payment.
They often ask customers to pay by CASH and point them to nearby ATM. Almost always, customers could not refuse, because they have already made the buying decision, and dont want to argue for the small charge, and a lot of times, they finally believe that may be its not illegal, and finally give the CASH even if they do not want, or just allow the merchants to charge additional 2% charges.
But, as per RBI, its not a fair practice, because merchants already have agreed in the agreement with the card swiping machine bank that they will not charge anything extra from the customers. Here is one example of asking for 2% extra fees by some Geeta Ramani on rediff website
My worst experience was when I intended to purchase a Tata Sky card worth Rs 1000. The shopkeeper said 2.5% = 25 rupees extra. I told him — you give 10, I will give 15 rupees. He spoke quite roughly — hum kyon den? I told him it was because he was supposed to pay the bank, not I, and that I was doing him a favour and not the other way round. He said he did not earn anything from the transaction. Anyway, I did not give in. I didn’t purchase from him and purchased the same from Indiaplaza instead online without any transaction fee
What you should do, if Shopkeeper does not agree?
RBI has clearly asked all the banks to break their relationship with those merchants who are practicing this. So, when any merchant asks you for extra 2% charges and even after the debate they do not agree, you can complain to the RBI about this and also complain to the bank. Each Bank has a “Merchant Services” section on their website and when you mail them or complain in personal to their branch, mention that you want to complain about Merchant Services. Example for ICICI bank is here and Axis Bank is here. But
When you take this step, at-least some merchants might fear the consequences and oblige!, but now the problem is how many people will go to this extra mile. It would require some time and effort from your end.
So next time you are asked to pay extra 2% on debit card payment, you can clearly tell them about this RBI notification. If required better take the print out of the notification and keep it with you in your wallet or as an image in your smartphone.
Have you ever faced a situation where you were asked to pay extra 2% charges on debit card payments and were pointed to a near by ATM, and what did you do in that situation, please share!At the same time there is increasing evidence that a failure to respect and protect property rights undermines environmental stewardship, particularly on private land. This is important in a country like the United States in which a majority of land is privately owned. This problem is most evidence in the context of endangered species. A majority of those species listed as endangered or threatened rely upon private land for some or all of their habitat. If these species are not saved on private land, they may not be saved at all. Yet the Endangered Species Act, in effect, punishes private landowners for having maintained their land in a way that is beneficial for listed species. The end result, as empirical research has shown, is a decline in endangered species habitat on private land. Greater protection of property rights could actually enhance species conservation, as I explain here. (And for more on the Endangered Species Act in particular, see this book.)
Whatever the benefits of property rights for environmental protection, they are no panacea. Where property rights are a particularly effective way of aligning incentives for resource conservation, the application of property-rights approaches to pollution problems is more difficult. In principle, a commitment to property rights should entail a commitment to protecting people and their property from unprivileged or unconsented to invasions. Imposing waste or emissions on another's land should be recognized as a violation of their rights. In practice, however, this can be difficult to do. Whereas it may be relatively easy to adjudicate disputes between neighboring landowners, such as when one neighbor's activities generate odors or smoke that interfere with the other, it is more difficult to address those pollution problems that involve numerous parties on either side of the equation, particularly if one believes tort litigation, in the form of common law nuisance actions, is the best way to address pollution problems. I explore these problems in greater depth in this paper forthcoming in Critical Review.
While property-based environmental strategies have their limitations, they should not be overstated. Quite often, "markets" or private enterprise are blamed for environmental problems that have other roots. Nobel laureate Ronald Coase noted this phenomenon in his seminal essay, "The Problem of Social Cost"), when he commented on those who blame nuisances, environmental and otherwise, on market failure.
When they are prevented from sleeping at night by the roar of jet planes overhead (publicly authorized and perhaps publicly operated), are unable to think (or rest) in the day because of the noise and vibration from passing trains (publicly authorized and perhaps publicly operated), find it difficult to breathe because of the odour from a local sewage farm (publicly authorized and perhaps publicly operated) and are unable to escape because their driveways are blocked by a road obstruction (without any doubt, publicly devised), their nerves frayed and mental balance disturbed, they proceed to declaim about the disadvantages of private enterprise and the need for Government regulation.
Coase's immediate point is that problems blamed on private markets often have political roots, such as when the government authorizes or encourages environmentally destructive behavior. Pollution resulting from government subsidies for favored industries is a good example. More broadly, this passage suggests it is important to consider the underlying institutional arrangements when diagnosing environmental ills. Consider the tragedy of the commons scenario discussed before. Even if the relevant resource users are for-profit corporations, it would be a mistake to label a commons problem as "market failure" or evidence of the environmental rapaciousness of free enterprise. The reason for the tragedy of the commons has little to do with capitalism or corporate entities and everything to do with the underlying institutional arrangements, and the lack of property rights in particular.A YOUNG woman who was abused by a grooming gang in Newcastle suffers from regular night terrors and now sleeps with a knife by her bedside, a court heard.
The girl, who has depression and has started losing her hair, was raped by Habibur Rahim who used a wardrobe to barricade her in the room with him.
North News and Pictures 4 Beast...Habibur Rahim who has been jailed for 29 years
The 34-year-old father-of-two from Fenham, Newcastle, had already plied her with alcohol and drugs.
Rahim, known as Sham, was part of the North East gang which groomed vulnerable girls, often exploiting and prostituting them to other men.
Northumbria Police controversially investigated the group with the help of an informant called XY who himself was a child rapist who was paid £10,000 for his information.
North News and Pictures 4 Monster...Badrul Hussain, 37
In a victim statement read out at Newcastle Crown Court the girl, who was 17 at the time, said: "I have suffered severe depression and a split personality.
"I feel paranoid all the time and don't feel safe in my own flat, I have started losing my hair.
"I wake up in the night fearing Sham is in the flat. I keep wanting to take my own life to get away from it all. I now sleep with a knife by my bed.
"My boyfriend is scared to leave me alone in case I try to kill myself."
MOST READ IN NEWS Exclusive PIE ROLLER £148m EuroMillions winner scoffs 50 home-delivered Cornish pasties every WEEK MOMO NO-NO Momo Challenge in 'Peppa Pig and Fortnite vids' as YouTube and Instagram slammed Exclusive BRUTE FARCE Albanian murderer fighting boot from UK 'to avoid splitting family' beats wife MOMO SHOCK Creepy'suicide character' Momo told lad, 8, to'stab himself in neck' Exclusive DARK PAST Homeless man doused in water by rail staff KILLED man who splashed him with paint 'HE STRANGLED ME' Girl, 10, 'pretended to be dead to stop boy, 16, raping her on way home'
Rahim was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to incite prostitution, relating to eight different victims, a number of trafficking for sexual exploitation offences and one count of rape.
Jailing him for 29 years, Judge Penny Moreland said he had been a high profile and active member of the group and had engaged in "sustained and systematic abuse".
She said he had caused extreme harm to his victims by cultivating their dependence on alcohol and drugs.
Rahim was joined in the dock by Abdul Sabe, 40, Badrul Hussain, 37 and Mohibur Rahman, 44, and despite the serious nature of the charges, Judge Moreland was forced to ask them to stop "stretching and yawning".
North News and Pictures 4 Abdul Sabe, 40, who was convicted for his part in the the sicko gang targeting vulnerable kids
Sabe, of Dean House, Walker, Newcastle, was jailed for 12 years for conspiracy to incite prostitution, conspiracy to traffic for sexual exploitation, conspiracy to sexual assault, and supplying drugs to victims.
He was already on the sex offenders' register having previously exposed himself to women on the street.
North News and Pictures 4 Caged...Mohibur Rahman will have plenty of time to reflect on his part in the horrifying abuse
Hussain, of Drybeck Court, Newcastle, was jailed for four years for allowing drugs to be used at his premises and of supplying drugs.
Rahman, known to victims as Jimmy, was jailed for four-and-a-half years for conspiracy to incite prostitution and five drugs charges.
Judge Moreland repeated her statement from a previous sentencing that there was no evidence for the offences being racially aggravated and the gang picked out their victims because they were young and vulnerable.
More gang members will be dealt with throughout the week.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.Greetings from the battlefield!This weekly update introduces, among other things, new dynamic events, as well as numerous improvements for interface and AI.New dynamic events, designed for the new players, engage Ismirean players to stop the Midlandic partisans attack at the Mereley fort. This event chain guides the newcomers through the very first moments in game and helps them to learn the basics of gameplay.There are also numerous improvements for the experienced players as well, such as implementation of the inventory context menu. It allows to choose precisely an action which a player wants to perform with selected item or even to display a list of recipes in which such item can be used! This change greatly improves comfort of the inventory management and learning the crafting system.We have also greatly improved the AI as well, so now the fights between NPCs look much better and they can perform various immersive actions, such as cutting woods, harvesting crops, mining or sitting on benches.See you in battle!– Implemented new chain of dynamic events near Mereley – attack of the Midlandic partisans at a Northern gate of the fort and chase after them to the camp – and slightly redesigned events occuring in this location– Improved behaviors of the NPC mercenaries who support players in the PVP tournament “Valley of Death”– Added spawning the NPC mercenaries of a losing team during the “Valley of Death”, even if such team doesn’t control a flag– Improved behaviors of the NPCs, such as fighting the other NPCs, sitting or gathering resources– Replaced animation of blocking with shield by a player– Increased loading speed and slowed down unloading speed of the blocking power bar for shields– Balanced the resources harvesting times– Made the stagger time dependent on the power of attack and current stamina of an attacker– Added safezones around the camps of exiled players– Implemented the guild ranks system – leader, besides of the current permissions, can now nominate guild members to an officer or recruit and pass their function, officer can invite and remove recruits, recruit doesn’t have any additional permissions– Added context menu in the inventory window, after clicking RMB on a chosen item – it greatly improves comfort of using the items, showing their exact purpose– Added transition between the inventory and crafting windows – after clicking RMB on a chosen item and selecting a specific option in a context menu, available recipes in which the item can be used will be displayed in a separate window, therefore significantly improving comfort of the inventory management and learning the crafting system– DIsabled ability to consume crafting materials in order to avoid confusion– Fixed an issue causing that leaders couldn’t manage their guilds– Fixed an issue causing displaying animation of falling down when walking up or down the stairs– Fixed an issue causing that animation of blocking with fists was blocking a controller– Fixed an issue causing that some informations about a character were saved after removing it and passed to the next character with the same name– Fixed an issue allowing to duplicate items when looting playersBy Yoon Sung-won
A team of Korean researchers have developed technology to produce “sticker” cells that can be attached to the human body and cure damaged skin and organs, the science ministry said Tuesday.
The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said the research team at Sogang University has cooperated with a bio-disease laboratory at Harvard University to develop the “sticker cell,” which can be easily applied to damaged human skin and organs.
The technology is also expected to facilitate follow-up research on safe human organ and nerve treatments that do not cause rejections or side effects, the ministry said.
“We have achieved good results through long-term research since 2011. We will continue our research on the practical application of the sticker cells for skin regeneration from this month,” said Shin Kwan-woo, professor at Sogang University who led the research team.
Shin said there have been several research projects underway on the medical treatment on damaged organs and nerves by nurturing tissue cells. But most of them have used prosthesis made of metal or plastic materials, which can be rejected by the body. It is also impossible to naturally connect these artificial materials to other cells in human body tissue, the professor said.
The research team has artificially built a protein network and incubated cells, extracted from an experimental rat’s organ. As a result, the researchers could confirm that the cells were growing with normal organic functions.
The professor said the sticker cells are expected to smoothly join with existing cells because they will be made from the recipients own cells. This means that they can enhance the success rate of treatment on human organs and nerve cells.
The achievement has been published at the front cover of the international academic journal Advanced Materials on May 13, the ministry said.
The science ministry also said the successful development of the new medical science technology will accelerate the progress of its other research and development projects in the bio and healthcare sector.CAIRO (Reuters) - A group of Ethiopians who had been kidnapped in Libya arrived at Cairo airport on Thursday after Egyptian army forces rescued them, state media quoted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as saying.
Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi speaks during a news conference with Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos (not pictured) after their summit at the presidential palace in Cairo, April 23, 2015. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
But one Ethiopian in the group, and a Libyan source, appeared to cast doubt on that version of events, saying the men had only been held up by Libyan immigration.
State TV broadcast live footage of Sisi greeting about 30 Ethiopians who had arrived on an Egyptian government plane.
“Sisi announced during a seminar the success of the armed forces in returning the Ethiopian brothers who had been kidnapped in Libya,” state news agency MENA reported.
The state broadcast gave no details of their identity, the manner of their release or circumstances of detention.
Security sources told Reuters that Egyptian intelligence services had provided Libyan authorities with information that helped them free the Ethiopians who had been held by armed groups in the cities of Derna and Misrata.
One of the Ethiopians said they had been held by Libyan immigration authorities.
“The Libyan government came and took us to the anti-illegal immigration body and then the Egyptian government took us from there,” he told reporters at the airport. That account was confirmed by a Libyan official.
A statement from the Egyptian presidency’s office said Sisi had greeted 27 Ethiopian citizens who represented “the first batch of returning Ethiopian brothers from Libya”.
Sisi has repeatedly called for international efforts to combat Islamist militants in Libya, which has descended into chaos since veteran autocrat Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in 2011 during the “Arab Spring” uprisings.
The former army chief has portrayed himself as a champion of moderate Islam in a battle against what he calls the global existential threat from groups such as Islamic State, which seized large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq.
Last month, a video purportedly made by Islamic State appeared to show militants shooting and beheading about 30 Ethiopians in Libya.
Militants professing loyalty to Islamic State have claimed several high-profile attacks on foreigners in Libya this year, including the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in February.
The killing of the Egyptians prompted Sisi to order air strikes on Islamic State targets in OPEC oil-producer Libya.
Libya’s mayhem has complicated Sisi’s efforts to combat hardline Islamist groups at home, including pro-Islamic State militants based in the Sinai.
“What happens in Libya is a concern for all of us, and we are saying to the world that Libya should return a safe and stable country for its people and even to its visitors,” Sisi told reporters at the airport.Pasco–Hernando State College (PHSC) is a Florida state college with campuses in Pasco and Hernando counties. It is the newest four year state college with campuses in Brooksville, Dade City, New Port Richey, Spring Hill, and Wesley Chapel.[1] The name of the school changed from Pasco-Hernando Community College (PHCC) to Pasco-Hernando State College (PHSC) on January 21, 2014.[2]
PHSC was established in 1967 by the Florida Legislature and is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award the associate degree, as well as two bachelor's degrees.[1] The college also offers other certification programs in computer science, health care, and law enforcement. Some of the newest programs include the Associate in Science in Professional Pilot Technology and the Associate in Science in Aviation Administration both of which PHSC began offering in the fall of 2017. Additional aviation programs, Aviation Maintenance Administration and Unmanned Vehicle Systems Operations Associate in Science (AS) degrees, have recently been approved by Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) and are slated to begin in 2018. PHSC also offers dual-enrollment classes for high school students. Many students select the four-year state college as an alternative to higher priced four-year institutions with the prospect of transferring.[citation needed]
A fifth campus opened in 2014 in Wesley Chapel to serve central Pasco County.[3] The new campus is named the Porter Campus at Wiregrass Ranch after the Porter family which donated the land to the college.[3]
In March 2013 PHCC President Katherine Johnson announced plans to change the college's name to correlate with the beginning of offering baccalaureate programs in 2014.[4] The school sought public feedback via its website regarding four proposed new names: College of Pasco-Hernando, Pasco-Hernando College, Pasco–Hernando State College, or State College of Pasco-Hernando.[4]
Notable alumni and attendees [ edit ]
Alumni Status is open to Pasco-Hernando State College graduates, all former students of PHSC who regularly matriculated and left the college in good standing.
|- |Annette Indelicato Doying |Former Director of the Pasco County Office of Emergency Management from 2011 to 2016 |}
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:BOSTON -- Watch the Boston Celtics bench after Jaylen Brown's next highlight play. Isaiah Thomas might jump nearly onto the court. Avery Bradley might scream until veins pop out of his neck. Marcus Smart might hop up and down like a child who just unwrapped the perfect Christmas present.
Players should always show so much exuberance for a teammate's accomplishments, but all it takes is one look to see the veterans have taken a liking to Brown. It's not just that the older Celtics think Brown will help the team immediately, or that they enjoy watching Brown's high-flying dunks. They do, but they are also struck by the rookie's maturity and work ethic.
"First of all, Jaylen is a very special player," Bradley told MassLive. "Not only a very good basketball player, but even a better person. And he's going to be a good player."
Before continuing, Bradley laughed for effect.
"Man, that's all I can say," he said. "He's going to be really special."
Brown's just 19. Despite his growing collection of highlights, he still makes silly mistakes every game. He isn't even close to whatever he will become. How can you be sure he will be really special?
"First of all because he's just a freak already," Bradley said. "He comes in every single day, working hard. He just has to learn the game and learn how to work even harder on the defensive end. And I feel like he's going to prove a lot of people wrong. Whoever thought whatever they thought about him or didn't know much about him, he's going to show everybody."
Four months ago, Celtics fans booed when the team introduced Brown as the No. 3 overall pick. Monday night, he received a loud ovation before checking into his first preseason game. The public is coming along already.
So are the Celtics.
"I wasn't as smart as him (at that age)," said Jae Crowder. "I wasn't as heady as he is. Physically I could play basketball, but I just didn't have the tools up top at the age of 19. I had to go through college and I had to go through a lot more obstacles to get to where I'm at today. But he has his head on right, he thinks properly, he works. He's become more of a professional earlier than I was.
"(He's uncommonly mature for his age) for sure because a lot of guys come in and are behind the curve a lot mentally. We're not talking physical, we're just talking mental, and the game here at this level is a lot mental. And that's one thing he brings with him. His mental approach is where it needs to be."
Entering training camp, Celtics head coach Brad Stevens intended to simplify things for Brown, hoping to bring the rookie along slowly. Instead, the coaching staff pivoted quickly, deciding not to limit Brown's versatility. He has played the wing in big lineups and power forward in smaller units. He has guarded Frank Kaminsky, a 6-foot-11 big man, and Carmelo Anthony, one of the best scorers alive.
After allowing Kaminsky an easy baseline drive out of the post, Brown went to the tape to watch film of his defensive possessions. Though he has played power forward for a large chunk of his preseason minutes, he said he rarely played there during his lone college season. Learning how to guard bigger guys is an adjustment, but Brown doesn't sound too concerned.
"Kaminsky's not -- I don't think he's stronger than me," he said. "So he's got a size advantage, but if I do my work early then he's pretty much beat. He got me on a couple plays and he's a really good player, but I feel comfortable guarding the 4."
During interviews, Brown sounds like a self-aware optimist. He can shift from listing all of his current flaws to stating he intends to become a top-five player one day. While discussing his growth, he can sound almost like Stevens, repeatedly stressing a focus on daily work rather than results.
"Coach said something to me... that really helped me out," Brown told MassLive last week. "He said once you get in a rhythm and once you have some more games under your belt, you'll do less thinking and the game will tell you what to do. So I trust the game of basketball and I trust myself."
Brown also trusts Crowder and Bradley, the two veterans he has leaned on the most.
"Everything," Brown said of what he's learning. "Off the floor and on the floor I'm learning from Jae. Just how to be a pro, how he handles himself and things like that. I'm just picking up how to be a vet. The way he moves, the way he orchestrates everything, he's efficient. He doesn't really waste a lot of time because he has a lot of things he has to do. So I'm getting better at stuff like that. On the floor, same thing. How to be efficient, how to pick your spots, how to be aggressive, when to shoot, when not to shoot, when to attack, when not to attack. Get up the floor. Certain things like that, you just watch him, talk to him, pick their brains, and then you learn."
Much to the delight of All-Star teammate Al Horford, Brown can accomplish some rare athletic feats already. Everybody knows he can fly, but he needs to recognize when and where he should.
"Just finding a rhythm in the game," Brown said. "Just knowing when to attack, knowing when to be aggressive, knowing when to go, knowing when not to go. Sometimes I go and it's not the right time to go, and sometimes I should've went and I didn't. So it's just having that balance and trying to figure that out. And I'm sure I will. I'm almost 100 percent positive I will."
The latest episode of the Locked on Celtics podcast focuses on some rumors (sort of) and the race for the final roster spot. Listen to the episode below. You can also go to the show page on Audio Boom, download the Audio Boom app for your phone, and subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.S.No. Brokers Dealers
1. Brokers are called as agents as they play a role of inter-mediator between a buyer and a seller for carrying out the transactions. Dealers are called as the market makers for the securities he neither conducts business on behalf of his clients.
2. Broker is a person or firm that acts as a financial intermediaries in secondary market who handles the buying and selling of securities in the secondary market. A dealer is a person or firm who will buy and sell securities on their own account, whether through a broker or otherwise.
3. Brokers charge commissions for their services on every deal which is usually a percentage of the actual transaction amount.It does not matter whether the deal has a positive or negative impact on his clients. His commission is ensured as a percentage share in the trading amount. A dealer does not get any commission as he does the deal on his own behalf. His earnings are the amount of profit he makes in the deal. As he deals in the transfer of assets, he must have his own assets which he can download at a later stage if required.
4. Brokers have generally restricted freedom and rights in comparision to dealers. Dealers have generally more freedom and rights in comparision to brokers.
5. Brokers does not require any special knowledge and experience.Brokers acts as a facilitator as they only deals on behalf of his clients.He is not responsible for the decisions taken by his client. Dealer need to have special knowledge and more experience because they have more responsibilities Many dealers had been brokers earlier in their lives and after gaining a certain amount of experience they have graduated into dealers,
6. In case of assessibility whenever a person wishes to deal in the stock market the first person he contacts is the broker who deals for the client and he is also sometimes referred to as the agent. In case of assessibility, a dealer need not be accessible to the public,however any person can directly deal his shares with the dealer without going to the broker.In phase transitions, for instance between water and water vapor, the motional energy competes with the attractive energy between neighboring molecules. Physicists at ETH Zurich have now studied quantum phase transitions in which distant particles also influence one another.
When water in a pot is slowly heated to the boil, an exciting duel of energies takes place inside the liquid. On the one hand, there is the interaction energy that wants to keep the water molecules together because of their mutual attraction. On the other hand, however, the motional energy, which increases due to heating, tries to separate the molecules. Below the boiling point the interaction energy prevails, but as soon as the motional energy wins the water boils and turns into water vapor. This process is also known as a phase transition. In this scenario the interaction only involves water molecules that are in immediate proximity to one another.
A team of researchers led by Tilman Esslinger at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, and Tobias Donner, a scientist in his group, have now shown that particles can be made to "feel" each other even over large distances. By adding such long-range interactions the physicists were able to observe novel phase transitions that result from energetic three-way battles.
Artificial quantum worlds
The physicists did not, of course, perform their experiments in a cooking pot, but rather in an artificially created quantum world called a "quantum simulator." To do so, the researchers cooled a tiny cloud of rubidium atoms to temperatures just above absolute zero and then caught them in a crystal-like lattice made of laser beams. The interaction energy stems from collisions between atoms that move back and forth between lattice sites. The motional energy of the atoms, on the other hand, can be controlled through the intensity of the laser beams, which determines how easily the atoms can move inside the lattice.
Finally, in order to bring about an interaction between atoms that are far apart, Renate Landig, a PhD student in Esslinger's group, and her colleagues used a technical trick. Using two highly reflecting mirrors they built a resonator that ensured that light particles scattered by one of the atoms would fly through the rubidium cloud several times. In that way, sooner or later all the atoms in the cloud come into contact with the scattered photon. They thus "feel" the presence of the original atom that first deviated the photon. This feeling over a distance is tantamount to an effective long-range interaction. How strongly the atoms interact in this way can be exactly controlled through the frequency of the laser beams.
"Using this trick we now have three competing energy scales in our system: besides the motional and interaction energies there is, in addition, the energy associated with the long-range interaction", explains Landig. "By varying the motional energy and the long-range interaction energy, we are able to study a number of novel quantum phase transitions."
First order phase transitions
The researchers were already familiar with some of the possible phase transitions. For instance, when the long-range interaction is very small and the motional energy is increased little by little, the phase of the rubidium cloud changes from a Mott insulator, with one immobile atom sitting on each lattice site, to a superfluid, in which atoms can move completely freely.
If, by contrast, the researchers increase the long range interaction energy, something completely different happens. At a particular strength of that interaction the atoms spontaneously arrange themselves in a checkerboard pattern, with one empty lattice site between two atoms. "The peculiarity of this phase transition, which is similar to that between water and water vapor, is that it's a first order transition", Donner emphasizes. In such phase transitions a particular property of a substance changes suddenly, whereas second order phase transitions, which are the type of transitions that have been detected in artificial quantum systems up to now, are characterized by a gradual change.
Supersolidity detected
The physicists were also able to induce another unusual phase transition by making both the motional energy and the long-range interaction energy very large. In that case, too, a checkerboard pattern appeared inside the lattice, but this time there was phase coherence between the atoms - in other words, their quantum mechanical wave functions were synchronized. Phase coherence is usually only observed when the atoms are relatively free to roam, as is the case, for instance, in the |
even more outrageous is that Americans are projected to spend over $50 billion on tobacco in 2018.
When people in the future look back at NASA and what it was able to accomplish in the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, they’ll think two things: First, they’ll think how amazing it was that NASA did what it did. The Moon landings, the Shuttle program, the Hubble, Curiosity, and the James Webb.
Then, they’ll be saddened by how much more could’ve been done collectively, if so much money hadn’t been wasted on something as deadly as smoking.
(Note: All amounts are US Dollars.)Søren Kierkegaard was born in Denmark on May 5, 1813. He was a difficult and troublesome boy. He quarreled with his father and lived a flippant and self-indulgent life as a young man. Then he had a conversion experience. He broke with his fiancé and became an urban hermit of sorts. He studied philosophy and started to write. He believed that he had a truth to tell the people of his time. The people didn’t want to be told — do they ever? This caused him to fight with his fellow Danes and anyone else who got in his way. He became an object of ridicule around Copenhagen. The local papers made fun of him for his hunched back and clubbed foot. He wrote many books under various false names, most of which were ignored. He died in relative obscurity at the age of 42.
Thus, the short and painful life of Søren Kierkegaard. Over the last 200 years, however, Kierkegaard’s writings have resurfaced in influential places. A mad German named Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed with Kierkegaard’s writings. He helped to keep Kierkegaard from falling into complete oblivion. Another rascally German rediscovered Kierkegaard in the early 20th century. This was Martin Heidegger who, unintentionally, turned Kierkegaard into an intellectual predecessor of Existentialist philosophy. More recently the Post-Modernists rediscovered Kierkegaard, fascinated by his use of fragmentary writing and multiple narrative voices. Kierkegaard is the philosopher who will not go away.
Today, at the 200th anniversary of his birth, Kierkegaard seems as relevant as ever. That’s because there is a public discussion about faith in America today. Kierkegaard’s central concern was faith and the problems of faith. Today, the evolutionary biologist and sometimes children’s author Richard Dawkins is at the forefront of the faith debate. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is a frequent contributor, as well as the neuroscientist Sam Harris. The late, great Christopher Hitchens was the angriest and funniest participant. We’ll call these figures The New Atheists.
Søren Kierkegaard was not an atheist. He was a Christian. All of his writings are either directly or indirectly about Christianity. He’s thus a natural opponent to Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. Except for one thing. Kierkegaard detested Christianity as he found it. He considered the vast majority of Christians to be hypocrites. Kierkegaard took a look at the Christianity practiced in his time and proclaimed it complacent and self-satisfied. Christianity, thought Kierkegaard, was mostly an excuse for being lazy and dumb.
The New Atheists of today also criticize religion for being lazy and dumb. To be intelligent is, for the New Atheists, practically tantamount to being anti-religious. The moniker that Dawkins and Dennett have taken on for themselves is “bright.” In an article for The New York Times in 2003, Dennett explained “brights” like this:
A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny — or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic — and life after death.
Dennett goes on to say “brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don’t trust God to save humanity from its follies.” Dennett thinks some religious people take their civic duties seriously too. But they hide behind God in doing so. They think someone else, namely God, is going to save them in the end. This form of religion doesn’t demand much from its followers. Dennett finds it pathetic. So did Kierkegaard. Indeed, you can imagine Kierkegaard cheering the brights on.
Of course, there is one big difference between Kierkegaard’s attack on religion and the attack coming from The New Atheists. Kierkegaard attacked the religious pieties of his day in the name of a more authentic religion he claimed to see in the New Testament. Real religion, thought Kierkegaard, is doubt-wracked. Real faith, Kierkegaard wanted us to know, is profoundly involved in working out the deepest paradoxes of being alive. That’s why Kierkegaard once said, “The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.”
That’s a strange thought for most Christians. What did Kierkegaard mean? He meant that if you are self-assured in your belief then you have neutered faith to make it intellectually palatable. Faith requires belief in things that are insane from the perspective of reason. It doesn’t make sense that God became man on earth. No amount of thinking about it is going to make it logical. It is a strange and shocking and downright crazy notion. If you are going to believe it (and live your life accordingly), you are going to have to find resources within yourself that transcend reason.
The New Atheists dismiss attempts to transcend reason as simply incoherent. Richard Dawkins once said the following: “One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.” But Kierkegaard would more or less agree with this thought from Dawkins. Kierkegaard would simply add that it is a positive accomplishment to become satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all. Let’s put this another way. Dawkins and Kierkegaard agree there is no real answer to the question “Why did God become man?” They even both agree that it is an insane question. Dawkins thinks that the insanity of the question means it can be dismissed. Kierkegaard thinks that the insanity of the question forces us to surrender to a logic that is beyond us. Think about it this way. If God came to the world in a way that we could fully understand, it would mean that God is similar enough to us and our world to be understandable. This would be proof that the man who came wasn’t God at all. God could only come to earth in a way that outstrips our understanding. God must be beyond our comprehension to be God. And God must come to us in a way that reveals our own incomprehension so that we can surrender. You don’t surrender to something that you have power over, that you can command and control. You surrender to something that breaks your ability to understand.
Kierkegaard acknowledged that accepting this affront to reason and surrendering is very difficult to do. There’s no great reason to do it either. Kierkegaard noted that being a Christian as described in the New Testament means being lonely, shunned, and generally thought insane. It means suffering. But Kierkegaard thought that true Christianity’s relentless assault on reason, good sense, and any normal definition of self-seeking was the closest thing to a proof of its being true. The surrender must be its own reward. This is an inherently uncomfortable thought. But Kierkegaard wanted faith to teeter right on the edge of impossibility. Kierkegaard thought that a person who believes without hope of understanding even while desiring still to understand is the only person with a chance at real faith.
Maybe it is impossible for The New Atheists to take Kierkegaard’s thoughts on faith seriously. The New Atheists and Kierkegaard may be, necessarily, two ships passing in the night. But because Kierkegaard does not think that religion provides causal explanations for natural phenomena, The New Atheists cannot attack him in the same way as they attack Creationists or believers in Intelligent Design. Religion, for Kierkegaard, does not compete with science. Religion is wholly other from science. What would it mean, then, for brights like Dennett or Dawkins seriously to engage the work of Søren Kierkegaard? Sam Harris, for instance, says that “Faith is the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail.” This almost sounds like something Kierkegaard would say. But the Kierkegaardian version of the thought would go like this: “The fact that reasons fail is the opening for religious belief.” Is the universe perfectly understood? Does reason ever fail? It would be interesting to hear what The New Atheists think. A discussion of faith that begins with these questions would be a nice 200th birthday present for the irascible hunchback of Copenhagen. • 8 May 2013When you get caught doing something you've campaigned fervently against, it looks really bad. Just ask Eliot Spitzer, and maybe Sony's (NYSE: SNE) and Bertelsmann's Sony BMG music label. A small French company has alleged that Sony BMG pirated its software.
According to sources like Wired News, a small French software company named PointDev is after Sony BMG for pirating its software. Apparently, it was found on four of the company's servers. PointDev has said it isn't interested in "an amicable settlement" with Sony BMG, on account of principle. According to translations of the original article reporting the situation, Sony BMG even tried to convince French news source La Provence not to release the story.
I'm not the first and certainly not the last to think this story is steeped in irony. Sony BMG is one of the high-profile members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group that also includes major labels from Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), EMI, and Vivendi's Universal Music Group. And of course, it's not lost on anybody that the RIAA has been hard at work for the last couple years suing the pants off consumers for piracy. But I guess that's different? Not really.
And of course, its zeal to stop piracy in its tracks led to the rootkit controversy a couple years ago, too. Sony BMG planted what many considered the equivalent of spyware on customers' machines when they loaded up some of its CDs onto their PCs.
When I'm considering stocks to invest in, I like to take a look at how the companies deal with customers and the world, and I like to try to avoid the ones that seem to teem with hubris or the implication that a company feels it can play by different rules than everybody else. And of course, the ongoing RIAA lawsuits have always struck me as a poor way to treat your fans when industry innovation would likely make everybody happy. And it's not like there isn't innovation and experimentation taking place -- take Nine Inch Nails' recent move.
Sony BMG may be only a small part of electronics and media giant Sony, but this type of story, with what appears to be a heaping dose of hypocrisy, gives us investors a textbook look at how companies should not conduct themselves.The father of Barcelona's Thiago has revealed the midfielder is hopeful of securing a move away from the Camp Nou in the summer in a bid to play more regularly.
Thiago's playing time has been limited at Barcelona
Thiago has been forced to settle for appearances off the bench for Barcelona this season, with Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Sergiou Busquets keeping him out of the starting line-up.
The Italian-born Thiago was hopeful of establishing himself in the first team with Barca, but his father insists another season with the club will stunt his future prospects.
The comments from Thiago's father Mazinho have sparked further rumours that the 21-year-old will join Manchester United next season.
"My son would play a lot more in any other team in the world," he said, according to the Daily Mail. "He's learning a lot playing with great players but Thiago is very ambitious and needs to play.
"No one knows what might happen in the future. Football changes a lot and anything can happen. If Thiago wants to go to the 2014 World Cup, he needs to play much more.
"Thiago has the quality to succeed at Barca. But he'd play a lot more at another club. He'd get into any other team in the world.
"I don't know if Barca are buying more players in the summer. They already have a lot of players who can play in the middle. Also, [Thiago's brother] Rafinha will be part of the first team squad next season."The Pan American Games (also known colloquially as the Pan Am Games) is a major sporting event in the Americas featuring summer sports, in which thousands of athletes participate in a variety of competitions. The competition is held among athletes from nations of the Americas, every four years in the year before the Summer Olympic Games. The only Winter Pan American Games were held in 1990. And from 2021, there would be a Junior Pan American Games for young athletes.[1][2][3][4] The Pan American Sports Organization (PASO) is the governing body of the Pan American Games movement, whose structure and actions are defined by the Olympic Charter.[5]
The XVII Pan American Games were held in Toronto from July 10–26, 2015; the XVIII Pan American Games will be in Lima in 2019. Since 2007, host cities are contracted to manage both the Pan American and the Parapan American Games,[5] in which athletes with physical disabilities compete with one another. The Parapan American Games are held immediately following the Pan American Games.
The Pan American Games Movement consists of international sports federations (IFs), National Olympic Committees (NOCs) that are recognized by PASO, and organizing committees for each specific Pan American Games. As the decision-making body, PASO is responsible for choosing the host city for each Pan American Games. The host city is responsible for organizing and funding a celebration of the Games consistent with the Olympic Charter (since PASO is affiliated with the IOC, the Olympic Charter) and rules. The Pan American Games program, consisting of the sports to be contested at the Games, is determined by PASO. The celebration of the Games encompasses many rituals and symbols, such as the flag and torch, and the opening and closing ceremonies. Over 5,000 athletes compete at the Pan American Games in 36 sports and nearly 400 events. The first, second, and third-place finishers in each event receive gold, silver, and bronze medals, respectively.[6]
History [ edit ]
Early games [ edit ]
The idea of holding a Pan American Games was first raised at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where Latin American representatives of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggested that a competition among all the countries in the Americas should be created.[7] The first event called the Pan American Games took place in Dallas in 1937 as part of the Greater Texas & Pan-American Exposition, but it attracted so little attention it has never counted in the records of the competition.[8][9]
At the first Pan American Sports Congress, held in Buenos Aires in 1940, the participants decided that the first games should be held in Buenos Aires in 1942. The plans had to be postponed because of World War II. A second Pan American Sports Congress held in London during the 1948 Summer Olympics reconfirmed Buenos Aires as the choice of host city for the inaugural games, which were held in 1951. The games offered 18 sports.[7] Countries that were part of the Commonwealth of Nations such as Canada did not compete at the first Pan American Games.[10] The second games were held in Mexico City, Mexico. Competitions started on March 12 and included 2,583 athletes from 22 countries, competing in 17 sports.[11] The Pan American Games have been held subsequently every four years.[11]
Recent games [ edit ]
The welcome centre at the 2015 Pan American Games athletes' village.
While the inaugural 1951 Games hosted 2,513 participants representing 14 nations, the most recent 2015 Pan American Games involved 6,132 competitors from 41countries.[7] During the games most athletes and officials are housed in the Pan American Games village. This village is intended to be a self-contained home for all the participants. It is furnished with cafeterias, health clinics, and locations for religious expression.[12]
PASO allows nations to compete that do not meet the strict requirements for political sovereignty that other international organizations demand. As a result, colonies and dependencies are permitted to set up their own National Olympic Committees. Examples of this include territories such as Puerto Rico and Bermuda which compete as separate nations despite being legally under the jurisdiction of another power.[13]
Winter Pan American Games [ edit ]
There have been attempts to hold Winter Pan American Games throughout the history of the games, but these have had little success.[14] An initial attempt to hold winter events was made by the organizers of the 1951 Pan American Games in Buenos Aires, who planned to stage winter events later in the year but dropped the idea due to lack of interest.[15] Reliable winter snow in the Americas is limited to two countries, the United States and Canada. Andean winter weather is often fickle, and higher elevation areas in South America with annual snow often lack the infrastructure to host major sporting events. Another difficulty is that the Americas cover two hemispheres, which creates scheduling issues related to reverse seasons.
Lake Placid, New York tried to organize Winter Games in 1959 but, again, not enough countries expressed interest. The plans were eventually cancelled.[14]
In 1988, members of PASO voted to hold the first Pan American Winter Games at Las Leñas, Argentina in September 1989. It was further agreed that Winter Games would be held every four years. Lack of snow however, forced the postponement of the games until September 16–22, 1990[14] when only eight countries sent 97 athletes to Las Leñas. Of that total, 76 were from just three countries: Argentina, Canada, and the United States. Weather was unseasonably warm and again there was little snow, so only three Alpine Skiing events – the Slalom, Giant Slalom, and Super G were staged. The United States and Canada won all 18 medals.
PASO awarded the second Pan American Winter Games to Santiago, Chile for 1993. The United States warned that it would not take part unless a full schedule of events was held. The Santiago organizing committee eventually gave up on planning the Games after the United States Olympic Committee declined to participate, and the idea has not been revived since.[14]
Junior Pan American Games [ edit ]
On 16 January 2019 PASO announced the creation of the Junior Pan American Games. This event, inspired by the Youth Olympic Games, is exclusive for athletes who are under 21 years of age, with less requirements on infrastructure and cost.[4][2][1]
For the first edition of the games, Panam Sports accepted candidate cities until 31th of January. Cali, Colombia, Santa Ana, El Salvador and Monterrey, Mexico were accepted as candidate cities.[16] The host city selection will take place at the next Executive Committee in San José, Costa Rica from March 27 to 28, 2019.[17]
Pan American Sports Organization [ edit ]
The Pan American Games Movement encompasses a number of national and international sporting organizations and federations, recognized media partners, athletes, officials, judges, and every other person and institution that agrees to abide by the rules of the Olympic Charter (which is the same as PASO's charter).[18] As the umbrella organization of the Olympic Movement, PASO is responsible for selecting the host city, overseeing the planning of the Pan American Games, updating and approving the sports program, and negotiating sponsorship and broadcasting rights.[6]
The Pan American Games Movement is made of three major elements:
International Federations (IFs) are the governing bodies that supervise a sport at an international level. For example, the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) is the IF for football (soccer), and the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) is the international governing body for volleyball. There are currently 36 IFs in the Pan American Games Movement, representing each of the Pan American Games sports. [19]
National Olympic Committees (NOCs) represent and regulate the Pan American Games movement within each country. For example, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) is the NOC of the United States. There are currently 42 NOCs recognized by PASO.
Organizing Committees for the Pan America Games (PAOGs) constitute the temporary committees responsible for the organization of a specific celebration of the Pan American Games. PAOGs are dissolved after each Games, once the final report is delivered to PASO.
Spanish and English are the official languages of the Pan American Games Movement. The other language used at each Pan American Games is the language of the host country.For example: at the 2007 Pan American Games who was held in Brazil,the first language was the brazilian portuguese. Every proclamation (such as the announcement of each country during the parade of nations in the opening ceremony) is spoken in these three languages or the main two depending on whether the host country is an English or Spanish speaking country.[6]
Symbols [ edit ]
The Pan American Games torch being lit in Teotihuacan
The Anthem of PASO Adopted in 2008 Problems playing this file? See media help.
The Pan American Games Movement uses symbols to represent the ideals embodied in the Pan American Games charter. The Pan American Sports Organization flag displays the PASO logo on a white background. To highlight the close association between the International Olympic Committee and the Pan Am Games, the Olympic Rings were added to the flag in 1988. The flag has been hoisted during each celebration of the Games.[20] The flag was hoisted while the Olympic Hymn was played until the 2007 Games. In 2011 Games, the new anthem was played for the first time. The anthem itself was composed in 2008.
Similar to the Olympic flame, the Pan American Games flame is lit well before the Games are to commence. The flame was lit for the first games in Olympia, Greece. For subsequent games, the torch has been lit by Aztec people in ancient temples, first in the Cerro de la Estrella and later in the Pyramid of the Sun at the Teotihuacan Pyramids.[21] The only exception was for the São Paulo games in 1963, when the torch was lit in Brasília by the indigenous Guaraní people. An Aztec then lights the torch of the first relay bearer, thus initiating the Pan American Games torch relay that will carry the flame to the host city's main stadium, where it plays an important role in the opening ceremony.[6] Since 2011, the flame is required to be held during the games in the stadium which will host the athletics competition. If the Opening ceremony and athletics competition will be held in different stadiums, the flame will be required to move from one stadium to the other. Exceptions occurred in the 1987, 1999 and 2007 Games, each of which had only one cauldron.[6]
The Pan American Games mascot, an animal or human figure representing the cultural heritage of the host country, was introduced in 1979 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.[22] It has played an important part on the Games identity and promotion. The mascot of the most recent Pan American Games, in Toronto, was Pachi, a porcupine.
List of Games mascots:[23]
San Juan 1979: Coqui (frog)
Caracas 1983: Santiaguito (lion)
Indianapolis 1987: Amigo (green parrot)
Havana 1991: Tocopan (bird)
Mar del Plata 1995: Lobi (sea lion)
Winnipeg 1999: Duck and Lorita (ducks)
Santo Domingo 2003: Tito (manatee)
Rio de Janeiro 2007: Cauê (sun)
Guadalajara 2011: Huichi (deer), Gavo (agave plant) and Leo (lion)
Toronto 2015: Pachi (porcupine)
Lima 2019: Milco (statue)[24]
Ceremonies [ edit ]
Opening [ edit ]
As mandated by the Olympic Charter, various elements frame the opening ceremony of the Pan American Games.[25] The ceremony typically starts with the hoisting of the host country's flag and a performance of its national anthem.[25] The host nation then presents artistic displays of music, singing, dance, and theater representative of its culture and history.[25] The artistic presentations have grown in scale and complexity as successive hosts attempt to provide a ceremony that outlasts its predecessor's in terms of memorability. The opening ceremony of the Guadalajara Games reportedly cost $20 million, with much of the cost incurred in the artistic segment.[26]
After the artistic portion of the ceremony, the athletes parade into the stadium grouped by nation. Argentina is traditionally the first nation to enter in order to honor the origins of the Pan American Games, similar to how Greece enters first in the Olympic Games as the originator. Nations usually then enter the stadium alphabetically according to the Spanish language. During the 1995 Pan American Games, which was hosted in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the Argentine flag entered the stadium first, while the country's delegation entered last (similar to what happened with Greece in the 2004 Summer Olympics). Speeches are given, formally opening the Games. Finally, the Pan American Games torch is brought into the stadium and passed on until it reaches the final torch carrier—often a well-known and successful athlete from the host nation—who lights the Pan American Games flame in the stadium's cauldron.[6]
Closing [ edit ]
The closing ceremony of the Pan American Games takes place after all sporting events have concluded. Flag-bearers from each participating country enter the stadium, followed by the athletes who enter together, without any national distinction.
Two national flags along with the flag of PASO are hoisted while the corresponding national anthems are played: the flag of the current host country and the flag of the country hosting the next Pan American Games.[6] The president of the organizing committee and the president of PASO make their closing speeches, the Games are officially closed, and the Pan American Games family is invited to participate at the next Games. The Pan American flame is then extinguished.[6] In what is known as the Antwerp Ceremony, the mayor of the city that organized the Games transfers a special Pan American Games flag to the president of PASO, who then passes it on to the mayor of the city hosting the next Games.[6] After these compulsory elements, the next host nation briefly introduces itself with artistic displays of dance and theater representative of its culture. The closing ceremony includes a fifteen-minute presentation from the next host city.[6]
Medal presentation [ edit ]
At the conclusion of each event, medals are ceremoniously distributed to the first, second and third-place finishers. The participants stand a three-tiered podium while receiving their medals.[27] After the medals are given out by an IOC or PASO member, the national flags of the three medalists are raised while the national anthem of the gold medalist's country plays.[28] Volunteering citizens of the host country act as hosts during the medal ceremonies, as they aid the officials who present the medals and act as flag-bearers.[29] For every Pan American Games event, the respective medal ceremony is held, at most, one day after the event's final. When athletics was scheduled for the last days, the men's marathon is held in the last day of the games, and the award ceremony is held before or during the closing ceremonies.
Sports [ edit ]
Athletics has been held at all seventeen editions of the Pan American Games. Pictured here is the 10,000 metres event for men at the 2015 edition in Toronto
For purposes of Pan American Games competition, the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO) makes a distinction between sports and disciplines. A sport, in Pan American Games terms, is a single or group of disciplines as represented by an international governing body, namely an International Federation. For example, aquatics, represented at the Olympic level by the International Swimming Federation, is a sport at the Pan American Games that includes the swimming, diving, open water, synchronized swimming and water polo disciplines.
Until the 2011 Games in Guadalajara, just one olympic event was never held, the canoe slalom. The event was planned to be held in the 2007 and 2011 editions, but was eventually canceled due to the low number of entries. Thus, the event was held for the first time at the 2015 Games.[30]
Medals are awarded on a per-event basis; there can be one or more events per sport or discipline.[31]
Athletics, swimming, fencing, diving, baseball, boxing, basketball, equestrian, football, artistic gymnastics, rowing, wrestling, shooting, tennis, weightlifting and water polo are the only summer sports that have never been absent from the Pan American Games program.
Many of the current Pan American Games sports, like rugby sevens, handball, and volleyball, first appeared on the program at later editions of the games.Some sports were part of specific editions of the Games, at the request of their Organizing Committees, because they reflected their popularity in their countries.[32] The 2019 Pan American Games will welcome a 38th and 39th sports to its programme, surfing.[33] On November 17, 2016 it was announced bodybuilding and skateboarding were also added to the sport program for the 2019 Games.[34] Both sports will make their Pan American Games debut.[34]
Pan American Games sports are governed by international sports federations (IFs) recognized by PASO as the global supervisors of those sports. There are 36 federations represented at PASO. There are sports recognized by PASO that are not included on the Pan American Games program. These sports are not considered Pan American Games sports, but they can be promoted to this status during a program revision that occurs in the first PASO session following a celebration of the Games.[6] During such revisions, sports can be excluded or included in the program on the basis of a two-thirds majority vote of the members of PASO.[6] Some recognized sports, such as chess, have never been included in a Pan American Games program.[35] some sports and events have been played only once in the event's history like the Sambo, a martial art which was only competed in 1983 in Caracas, Venezuela and the Women's baseball tournament at the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto, Canada[36]
Champions and medalists [ edit ]
[37] Here he holds a gold medal during the Swimmer Thiago Pereira of Brazil has a record 23 Pan American medals.Here he holds a gold medal during the 2007 edition
The athletes or teams who place first, second, or third in each event receive medals. The winners receive gold medals, while the runners-up receive silver medals and the third-place athletes are awarded bronze medals. In events contested by a single-elimination tournament (most notably boxing), third place might not be determined and both semifinal losers receive bronze medals. PASO does not keep statistics of medals won, but National Olympic Committees and the media record medal statistics as a measure of success. As of the 2015 Pan American Games, Aruba and the British Virgin Islands have yet to win a medal.[38]
The top ten nations all time at the Pan American Games (minus medals won at the Winter Pan American Games):[38]
Summer Pan American Games Rank Nation Gold Silver Bronze Total 1 United States (USA) 1944 1454 1022 4420 2 Cuba (CUB) 875 593 558 2026 3 Canada (CAN) 456 657 802 1915 4 Brazil (BRA) 329 357 519 1205 5 Argentina (ARG) 294 327 428 1049 6 Mexico (MEX) 221 288 502 1011 7 Colombia (COL) 108 147 229 484 8 Venezuela (VEN) 92 205 277 574 9 Chile (CHI) 44 91 151 286 10 Dominican Republic (DOM) 29 63 112 204 Totals (10 nations) 4392 4182 4600 13174
Winter Pan American Games Rank Nation Gold Silver Bronze Total 1 4 2 5 11 2 2 4 1 7 Totals (2 nations) 6 6 6 18
Record
Summer Pan American Games 1995
List of Pan American Games [ edit ]
Map of Pan American Games locations (host cities in red dots). Countries that have hosted one Pan Am Games are shaded green, while countries that have hosted two or more are shaded blue.
The host city for a Pan American Games is usually chosen six years ahead of their celebration. The process of selection is carried out in two phases that span a two-year period. The prospective host city applies to its country's Olympic Committee; if more than one city from the same country submits a proposal to its NOC, the national committee typically holds an internal selection, since only one city per NOC can be presented to the Pan American Sports Organization for consideration. Once the deadline for submission of proposals by the NOCs is reached, the first phase (Application) begins with the applicant cities asked to complete a questionnaire regarding several key criteria related to the organization of the Pan American Games Games.[6] In this form, the applicants must give assurances that they will comply with the Olympic Charter and with any other regulations established by PASO's Executive Committee.[6] The evaluation of the filled questionnaires by a specialized group provides PASO with an overview of each applicant's project and their potential to host the Games. On the basis of this technical evaluation, PASO's Executive Board selects the applicants that will proceed to the candidature stage.[6]
Once the candidate cities are selected, they must submit to PASO a bigger and more detailed presentation of their project as part of a candidature file. Each city is thoroughly analyzed by an evaluation commission. This commission will visit the candidate cities, interviewing local officials and inspecting prospective venue sites, and submit a report on its findings one month before the PASO's final decision. During the interview process the candidate city must guarantee that it will be able to fund the Games.[6] After the work of the evaluation commission, a list of candidates is presented to the General Session of PASO, which is assembled in a country that must not have a candidate city in the running. The members of PASO gathered in the Session have the final vote on the host city. Once elected, the host city bid committee (together with the NOC of the respective country) signs a Host City Contract with PASO, officially becoming a Pan American Games host nation and host city.[6]
The Pan American Games have been hosted by 15 cities in 10 countries. Mexico and Canada have hosted three Pan American Games each, more than any other nation. Among cities, only Winnipeg and Mexico City have played host to the Pan American Games more than once, each hosting twice.
1951 1955,1975 1959 1963 1967,1999 1971 1979 1983 1987 1991 1995 2003 2007 2011 2015 2019 2023 Host cities of the Pan American Games
Participating nations [ edit ]
All 41 countries whose National Olympic Committee is recognized by the Pan American Sports Organization compete at the Pan American Games.[39]
See also [ edit ]I am organizing the GUARANTEED craziest party at MFF
By Boneitis,
So Midwest Fur Fest is approaching (if you're going then you already know) and it falls upon the same weekend as "ROAD RAGE: CHICAGO – DICK MASTERSON’S INTERNATIONAL JASS FESTIVAL". I know what you're thinking "Bone this has nothing to do with furry and that is literally the entire scope of my interests". Well if you haven't already tabbed out then let me fill you in:
1. What is "The Dick Show"?
It's a podcast (listen here:
2. What does this have to do with MFF?
Nothing and everything. Dick mentions furries all the time on the show and is genuinely curious about the subculture, even going so far as to have had furries guest on the show. When I first found out about the show being in Chicago the same week as MFF I planned to go and told Dick on Twitter that it was the same week as MFF. He responded and told me to "for real, bring your furs" (here's the tweet:
3. How do you know this party will be so crazy?
This will be the third Dick Show: Live and, if previous entries are any indication, there is a lot of alcohol, rowdiness, and good times going on:
4. Where do I get tickets?
Here my man:
5. Why should I do this?
Because it's fun! Because you'll get a fuck ton of attention (ESPECIALLY if you wear your fursuit)! It'll be hilarious! It'll all be filmed and watched by thousands of fans! I can't think of a better highlight to a furry convention than this!
6. Have you really preempted every excuse someone could have not to go?
I've certainly tried! Here's my list:
-"I won't be at MFF!"
Ok then don't comment, instead use that time to tell your friends who WILL be at MFF to go to this! Then you can watch this crazy thing unfold live on the stream!
-"I don't have any friends."
Jesus tits, shut up you baby.
-"I don't like parties."
I know you're very proud of being an introvert or whatever but now is NOT THE TIME! (But seriously, if parties actually make you dizzy just tell some of your friends like to party hardy)
-"I can't afford it."
You're going to a furry convention, you can spare twenty more bucks. If you can't then you probably shouldn't be going to a con, very irresponsible!
-"I don't like Dick Masterson, I saw him on |
shouldn't.
An increasing number of those pension funds are being stealthily diverted into high-fee, high-risk "alternative investments" that deliver spectacular rewards for the Wall Street firms paid to manage them - but not such great returns for pensioners and taxpayers.
Citing data from the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, Al Jazeera America recently reported that "the average portion of pension dollars devoted to real estate and alternative investments has more than tripled over the last 12 years, growing from 7 percent to around 22 percent today." With public pensions now reporting $3 trillion in total assets, that's up to $660 billion of public money in these high-fee, high-risk investments.
And yet... despite the fact that they deal with the expenditure of taxpayer money, the agreements between public pension systems and alternative investment firms are almost entirely secret.
Until now.
Thanks to confidential documents exclusively obtained by Pando, we can now see some of the language and fee structures in the agreements between the "alternative investment" industry and major public pension funds. Taken together, the documents raise serious questions about whether the government employees, trustees and politicians overseeing major public pension funds are shirking their fiduciary responsibilities under the law when they are cementing "alternative" investment deals.
The documents, which were involved in a recent SEC inquiry into the $14.5 billion Kentucky Retirement Systems (KRS), were handed to us by SEC whistleblower Chris Tobe, an investment consultant and former trustee of the KRS. Tobe has also written a book -- "Kentucky Fried Pensions" -- about the scandalous state of the Kentucky public pensions system.
The documents provided by Tobe (embedded below) specifically detail Kentucky's dealings with Blackstone - a giant Wall Street investment firm which has deployed a platoon of registered lobbyists in Kentucky and whose employees are major financial backers of Kentucky U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R).
The Blackstone-related documents, though, don't just tell a story about public pensions in Kentucky. The firm, which just reported record earnings, does business with states and localities across the country. The Wall Street Journal reports that "about $37 of every $100 of Blackstone’s $111 billion investment pool comes from state and local pension plans."
In one set of documents provided by Tobe, Blackstone's payment structure is outlined, with language guaranteeing that Blackstone will receive its hefty annual management fees from the taxpayer - regardless of the fund's performance.
In other documents, public pension money is exempted from some of the most basic protections usually guaranteed under federal law. Other contract language appears to license Blackstone to engage in financial conflicts of interests that could harm investors.
Despite the documents involving government agencies, and taxpayer money, they are all marked confidential. The public is not allowed to see them.
Tobe says the sheer size of Blackstone - and its attendant ability to set industry standards - means that the documents he obtained represent a story that goes way beyond one state.
"These agreements aren't unique to Kentucky - they are everywhere," Tobe told Pando. "They include exactly the kind of risk and boilerplate heads-I-win-tales-you-lose language that is almost certainly standard in the contracts that so many other pension funds have been signing... This is a national problem."
Blackstone's "Fund of Funds": Up to $200M a year in fees and underperformance that can harm taxpayers
One of those documents given to Pando by Tobe is a confidential memo to KRS investment committee members from August 2011. In the memo, KRS staff outlines their desire to invest roughly $400 million in Blackstone's Alternative Asset Management Fund (BAAM), which is a so-called "fund of hedge funds."
As documented on page seven of that memo, Blackstone was guaranteed whopping fees of 50 basis points plus 10 percent of any overall profits on retirees' money. In addition, the memo estimates 1.62 percent management fees and 19.78% incentive fees to be paid on top of the Blackstone fees to the underlying (and undisclosed) individual hedge fund managers in the "fund of funds."
Pension officials made the decision to invest in the fund despite Blackstone then reportedly being under SEC investigation. According to KRS's latest annual financial statement, Kentucky now has more than half a billion dollars invested in BAAM.
In 2013, according to KRS data, BAAM earned an 11.54 percent return for the pension system. That was 20 percent below the S&P 500 that year, meaning, Tobe says, that Kentucky taxpayers would have earned $78 million more in an almost fee-less S&P index fund. Those figures are consistent with a recent study from the Maryland Public Policy Institute showing "that state pension systems that pay the most for Wall Street money management get some of the worst investment returns."
Fees, says Tobe, are a driver of the underperformance. Using the secret memo's figures, Tobe estimates that 33 percent of that stunning one-year underperformance - or about $25 million - was in the form of fees paid to Blackstone and the other managers in its "fund of funds."
According to data from the investment research firm Prequin, 20 others public pension funds are also invested in BAAM. Assuming those funds invested in BAAM under roughly the same terms as Kentucky, Tobe estimates that Blackstone and underlying managers in BAAM raked in well over $200 million in fees in 2013 on just that one fund of funds.
Absent from the memo to the trustees are any details about which particular hedge funds are in the BAAM fund. In an interview with Pando, Tobe argues that was by design because, he says, Kentucky officials wanted trustees to vote on the investment without being able to do due diligence. Tobe says that meant trustees were not made aware that BAAM invested in SAC Capital - the firm whose executives recently pled guilty to insider trading charges, and who at the time of the Kentucky investment were already under SEC investigation.
"The crack cocaine of the private equity industry"
Other documents obtained by Pando detail Blackstone's separate private equity fund, Blackstone Capital Partners V, which the New York Times describes as "the biggest private equity fund in history." Prequin data show that public pension systems in 24 states have made $6.5 billion worth of investment commitments to this one private equity fund.
According to KRS's 2013 annual report, the Kentucky pension system has $81.1 million in that and one other Blackstone private equity fund.
One document prepared by the investment consulting firm Strategic Investment Solutions shows that in Capital Partners V, Blackstone is guaranteed management fees of between 1 percent and 1.5 percent, depending on the size of the investment. Attached to that document is another Blackstone document in which the company presents its past track record. In fine print at the end of that second document, the company declares that it does not make "any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information."
Public pensions are typically bound by the so-called "prudent person rule". Investopedia explains that this rule, which is enshrined in many state statutes, requires public pensions to avoid "shady, risky, or otherwise poor investments." The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says it operates in the United States to require "that unwarranted risk be avoided" in favor of a "culture of cautious behavior among pension" overseers.
Yet, a document detailing investment contract language for investments in Blackstone Capital Partners V appears to show quite the opposite. Marked "Risk Factors and Potential Conflicts of Interest," the document outlines major risks for public pensions - the kind of risks that are rarely ever disclosed to the public.
For example, the document shows Blackstone admitting that investing in the fund "involves a high degree of risk"; that "the possibility of partial or total loss of capital will exist"; that "there can be no assurance that any (investor) will receive any distribution"; and an investment "should only be considered by persons who can afford a loss of their entire investment." Additionally, the document says investments made by the fund could subject investors to "certain additional potential liabilities" and that an investor "may be required to make capital contributions in excess" of what it originally pledged.
Amazingly, while asking public pension trustees to invest money in the fund, the Blackstone document also says that "none of the Partnership's investments have been identified," meaning trustees could not even evaluate the underlying investments before they decided to invest retirees' nest eggs.
In terms of legal protections, the document says investments made by the private equity fund could be illiquid "for a number of years." In a section marked “absence of regulatory oversight,” the document also says investors "are not afforded the protections of the 1940 (Investment Advisers) Act." It also says that in the event of litigation brought against the managers of the fund, those costs "would be payable from the assets" of the investors.
Then there are the carve-outs for financial conflicts of interest. One section of the document declares that "Blackstone has long-term relationships with a significant number of corporations and their senior management" and that when making investment decisions, Blackstone "will consider those relationships." Another section declares that "Blackstone may have conflicting loyalties" between the different funds it operates, and that "actions may be taken for the Other Blackstone Funds that are adverse" to investors.
According to former SEC investigator Ted Siedle, who served as counsel to Tobe during the SEC investigation, the conflict-of-interest section marked "Fees for Services" is particularly problematic. He says it permits private equity managers to assess fees on companies the private equity fund owns, but then not compensate the fund investors (like public pensions) for those fees. This stealth fee-inflating practice, which is attracting SEC scrutiny, has been called the "crack cocaine of the private equity industry."
An official with the American Federation of Teachers, whose members are relying on pension investments, told Pando that the disclosures of huge fees and potential conflicts of interest may put pension trustees at odds with the law.
"Trustees risk violating their fiduciary duty if they don’t aggressively confront fees and potential conflicts of interest in the investment chain," said Dan Pedrotty, AFT's Director of Pensions & Capital Strategies.
More generally, critics of various political stripes say that while the risks outlined in the Blackstone private equity documents may be acceptable for individuals acting with their own money, they may be too perilous for public pensions, especially when a larger and larger portion of those pensions' portfolios are in such private equity investments.
For instance, citing data from Wilshire Consulting, conservative conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Andrew Biggs says these kinds of dangers make alternatives “60% riskier than U.S. stocks and more than five times riskier than bonds.” Time Magazine’s Rana Foroohar reports that a recent conference of liberal scholars said the possibility of catastrophic losses mean “pension funds shouldn’t be in high-risk assets” and “should be mainly invested only in no or low fee index funds.” And both the Government Accountability Office and Siedle have raised questions about the risks inherent in private equity’s opacity and illiquidity.
Money, political influence and the alternative investment craze
In recent months, questions have been raised about why pension funds are investing so heavily in high-fee, high-risk alternative investments. For example, a New York Times report recently noted that "a number of retirement systems that have stuck with more traditional investments in stocks and bonds have performed better" than those investing heavily in alternatives. Similarly, Bloomberg News reported that "more than half of about 400 private-equity firms that SEC staff have examined have charged unjustified fees and expenses without notifying investors" of such fees.
Pension analyst Leo Kolivakis says public pensions - read: public employees and taxpayers - are among those facing the biggest downside.
"Despite hedge funds having suffered the worst performance start to the year since 2011, industry assets hit a new peak of $2.7 trillion thanks to healthy net inflows," he recently wrote. "And who is leading the charge? Who else? Dumb public pension funds getting raped on fees."
The question, then, is why. When The Economist magazine reports that "the average return of hedge funds has lagged a plain-vanilla portfolio (in) nine of the past ten years," why are pension funds dumping so much cash into high-fee hedge funds? When none other than Warren Buffett is telling his own trustee to only invest his money in government bonds and cheap index funds, why are public pension officials nonetheless putting retiree money into high risk private equity firms? In short, why have public pension funds been so aggressively moving money into these alternative investments?
One part of the answer may have to do with a misguided effort by pension administrators to bet big on ever-more risky investments in hopes of earning outsized returns and more quickly closing revenue shortfalls. That, though, may be creating more problems. As a 2013 study by the International Monetary Fund showed, severely underfunded pension plans have "increas(ed) their risk exposures" ultimately "exposing them to greater volatility and liquidity risks."
Tobe says the Kentucky Retirement Systems fits this description. He points out that according to KRS financial statements, Kentucky invests an above-average 34 percent of its assets in "alternatives." That strategy last year delivered roughly 12 percent returns for KRS - far below the 16 percent median for public pensions. The high fees involved in such "alternatives" may help explain, in part, why a December 2013 KRS presentation (embedded below) shows the pension system is now just 23 percent funded - a rate that Tobe says is one of the worst in America.
That said, another reason why pension funds have moved into risky high-fee investments may have to do with political influence and campaign cash from the Wall Street firms that stand to benefit from the alternative investment craze.
While a spokesperson for Blackstone told Pando "I am not aware of any (Blackstone lobbyists) in Kentucky," government ethics disclosures show Blackstone and companies Blackstone funds own actually employ 11 lobbyists in the state (when shown the disclosure forms, the spokesperson subsequently insisted that "these are not lobbyists but internal investment professionals who work with our clients on their investment objectives").
Among the lobbyists is one from Park Hill Group, the Blackstone-owned firm whose website describes it as "a placement agent providing placement fund services for private equity funds, real estate funds, and hedge funds, as well as secondary advisory services."
As documented by Bloomberg News, placement agents often leverage political connections to convince public pension systems to invest in their clients' funds. Because pension funds are barred from choosing investments based on such political considerations, the controversial placement business has periodically faced legal scrutiny, with some states and cities moving to crack down on placement agents. But, as evidenced by Kentucky and its relationship with Blackstone, many states still very much permit them. Indeed, according to Forbes, "Park Hill itself received $2.35 million for lining up business in Kentucky - for Blackstone funds."
Of course, what can supercharge the influence of lobbyists and placement agents is the campaign contributions of their clients. So, for instance, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, Blackstone employees are among the largest campaign contributors to Kentucky's chief political powerbroker, U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R).
Some of that money can filter directly the coffers of state parties that specifically run elections for positions involved in pension policy. For example, Blackstone employees are top contributors to a joint fundraising committee "McConnell Victory Kentucky," which, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal, donates heavily to the Kentucky Republican Party.
The potential relationship between campaign money and pension policy is not limited to Kentucky. As USA Today reported back in 2009: "More than two dozen firms that have surfaced in a broad corruption investigation of public pension funds gave at least $1.97 million in campaign contributions to officials with potential influence over the funds' investments."
Blackstone and private equity trade association response
Pando requested comment from the Kentucky Retirement Systems 4 days before publication time, but KRS did not respond. However, representatives of the alternative investment industry did.
In response to the disclosures, Blackstone senior managing director Peter Rose told Pando: "Our funds have produced equity-like returns with bond-like volatility over a market cycle and have protected capital in down equity markets. We are proud of what we have been able to achieve for our investors in over two decades of investing.”
Additionally, the trade association for the private equity industry also responded to the disclosures. Acknowledging that "A majority of private equity investment comes from institutional investors such as public pensions," Noah Theran of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council told Pando: "Research has consistently shown that private equity is the best performing asset class for pensions over the long-term, but as is the case with any investment, it is not without risk."
A commitment to secrecy
When Pando asked for specific comment on whether agreements between Wall Street firms and taxpayer-backed public pensions should be available to the public, Rose said: "We are going to decline to comment on this." Likewise, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council and KRS did not respond to questions about secrecy.
That response - or lack thereof - highlights how public pension transactions with Wall Street remain shrouded in secrecy in states throughout the country. As Susan Webber has written, despite the astronomical sums of taxpayer money and retirement income at stake, "public pension funds routinely turn down requests" for such basic information in hopes of shielding the fee bonanza from scrutiny.
For example, following SEC warnings of fee abuse in private equity investments, the New York state's Teachers' Retirement System flatly rejected Reuters' open-records request for information about its private equity holdings.
In North Carolina, a recent report by Siedle found that thanks to a lack of transparency, "It is virtually impossible for stakeholders to know the answers to questions as fundamental as who is managing (pension) money, what is it invested in and where is it?"
In Rhode Island, the financial industry is a major donor to the election campaigns of State Treasurer Gina Raimondo (D), who has used her power to move more pension money into high-fee alternative investments. Many of those investments subsequently underperformed and hurt pension earnings, all while generating big Wall Street fees. When transparency and good-government groups asked for the full details of the alternative investments in question, Raimondo refused.
Meanwhile, when Pando requested details of the New Jersey state pension fund's investment in a firm that is financially connected to the fund's investment chief, the state government refused the request.
In Kentucky, the secrecy surrounding the pension fund has prompted Tobe to work with State Rep. Jim Wayne (D) on legislation proposing to crack down on placement agents, and to mandate the public disclosure of contracts between Wall Street firms and the pension system. Though Wayne is a Democrat, the bill was praised by the state's major conservative think tank. And though the proposal was ultimately killed, Wayne says it provides a template for other states.
"This is a national problem and there's just such a huge amount of money involved," he told Pando. "Billions and billions of dollars are swirling around in these retirement systems, and there are people interested in capturing big shares of this money as they advise and direct how this money is invested. Clearly, there is a trust issue here with employees and pensioners. They have to trust that the system is being honest with them because their livelihoods are at stake. But they can't trust a system that isn't transparent."
Documents provided to Pando by Chris Tobe:
Blackstone Risk Language
BlackstonePEpres-1
BAAM-KRSRecs
2013 Act Krs
[Illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando]CHANDIGARH: Most people think butterflies are beautiful and gentle. These insects are celebrated for delicately sipping and surviving on flower nectar. Yet research is showing an increasing number of butterfly species that prefer dead snakes, carnivore excreta, human sweat and smelly socks of field scientists! These beautiful scavengers of the dead are like vultures, aiding in decomposition as male butterflies tirelessly extract salts, minerals and nitrates to enhance ''dowries'' for bagging more mates.These species go by exotic names: Rajahs, Sailors, Nawabs, Sergeants, Commanders, Yeomans, Blue and Grey Pansies, Bush Browns et al, found all across India. There is obviously ''blood'' on the whiskers of these noble-sounding creatures. The gardens of UT and its periperhal forests are good habitat for some of these ''vampire'' butterflies. ''These butterflies are very aggressive and territorial, fighting hard to ward off other males and while scavenging for salts on carrion. We often see a butterfly with tattered wings, nearing its death, which indicates a fight for territory. I have observed Rajahs feeding on a dead Pit viper and these butterflies not only ensured other species were kept off the feed but also butted each other. I have also observed butterflies feeding on a freshly killed snake and seeking salts from the blood. In this situation, the butterflies are completely absorbed and often get killed,'' said Isaac Kehimkar, general manager (programmes) at the Bombay Natural History Society and India's leading authority on butterflies.These scavenger butterfly species are slaves to love and often make the ultimate sacrifice of life. Male butterflies mesmerised with the promise of mating season flock down on carnivore excreta on roads. Carnivores often relieve themselves on roads during the night as there is no grass to tickle their backsides. Butterflies scavenging on excreta are the mass casualties of ''road rage'' the next morning. ''Zoologist Khushal Chaudhary studied these road casualties to see which species were dying. In fact, wildlife conservationists had to protest against the reconstruction of a road in Ultapani, Assam, where a lot of butterflies were dying in road hits. The Assam minister and the people got very agitated over the protest and it became a very tricky face-off,'' says Kehimkar.Kehimkar can never forget how when out on a field research expedition, butterflies flocked to his smelly socks, which he would never dare to take close to any human! Scientist sweat was also greedily gobbled by butterflies. Habitat destruction and not poaching poses the greatest danger to butterflies, says Kehimkar. ''Mining and dams and forest clearance are the big killers. We must protect forests. We can also go in for butterfly harvesting as they do in Kenya. That will make conserving butterflies a viable option as is done by big farmers in Kenya,'' said Kehimkar.The president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) gives Obamacare a D+ for how it has performed in his state. In an interview with WRAL's David Crabtree, BCBSNC CEO Brad Wilson conceded that he was a strict grader and that "on a good day" he might give the ACA a C+.
He acknowledged that the health law had provided coverage to 500,000 previously uninsured North Carolinians ("a very good thing"), but also warned that after two and a half years of operation, it was very clear that the financial underpinning of the Obamacare exchanges was not stable.
Of equal importance, he reiterated the possibility that BCBSNC might opt out of participating in Obamacare in 2017 (mirroring the recent decision of UnitedHealthcare's to exit the Obamacare exchanges). This would leave North Carolinians in 60 counties unable to sign up for coverage--effectively halting the ACA in its tracks.
The Brutal Reality of ACA Finances
Mr. Wilson laid out his company's bleak experience with Obamacare and its inherent financial instability with great precision. Of the 450,000 BCBSNC members covered under the Obamacare exchanges, the top 5% generated $108 million in revenues in 2015 (inclusive of both premium payments as well as premium and cost sharing subsidies). These same individuals generated $1.3 billion in claims.
Unfortunately, net revenues from the remaining 95% were nowhere close to being enough to close this yawning fiscal gap, leaving the company with $282 million in losses on its ACA business. Absent a fundamental change in the law, this structural deficit is destined to repeat itself year over year--a prospect the company understandably views as unsustainable.
Will BCBSNC Abandon Obamacare?
In light of these grim realities, BCBSNC now is at the tail end of a process to determine whether its own fixes to its products and pricing can suffice to eradicate the fiscal imbalance just described. It will shortly file rates with the Department of Insurance, which obviously has the prerogative to deny or scale back whatever premium increases are proposed. By the end of the summer, the company will have determined whether to offer plans on the ACA Exchange for the fall open enrollment period.
Recall that when UnitedHealthcare hinted late last year that it might withdraw from the Obamacare exchanges in 2017, some analysts expressed skepticism. Some, such as Dean Baker, even speculated "It may be claiming that it [UnitedHealthcare] is losing money and threatening to leave the exchanges in the hope of getting more favorable regulation. Perhaps the threat of leaving the exchanges will persuade regulators to allow UHC to charge higher premiums."
Thus, cynics might wonder whether Mr. Wilson's jarring speculation about an exit is simply to give his company leverage in getting Department of Insurance to accede to higher rates than it might otherwise allow for 2017. But it would do well for all to remember that UnitedHealthcare did indeed follow through on its November 2015 threat by announcing in mid-April that it will "exit most of the 34 states where it offers plans on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges." We now know that UnitedHealth will offer plans in only six states in 2017.
Can Obamacare Be Fixed?
Despite the poor grade Mr. Wilson has assigned, he does not believe Obamacare is not broken to the point where complete repeal makes sense. He firmly believes in "reforming the reform," as he is convinced that four actions might suffice to stabilize its finances:
1. Vigorously enforce the individual mandate (to ensure that there are sufficient healthy members to bear the excess costs of the most expensive 5%).
2. Shrink the number of Special Enrollment Periods since the current system allows far too many opportunities for people to jump into and out of coverage over the year.
3. Shrink the time period within which premium payments are due. The current system allows those who enroll in Obamacare plans through the Exchanges up to 90 days to pay premiums without losing their coverage (most commercial plans provide for only a 30-day payment period after which coverage is automatically dropped). For the first 30 days, insurers are on the hook for any losses and for 60 days after that, providers have to absorb losses on claims made by individuals who fail to pay their premiums and are subsequently have their coverage terminated. This arrangement creates perverse incentives for people to pay for only 9 months of coverage knowing that it will last them the entire year.
4. The federal government should pay insurers the risk corridor amounts that are due under the terms of the ACA.
To the average citizen, these four fixes might appear quite commonsensical. But the last one actually is quite controversial. The risk corridor program was designed to be budget neutral, i.e., paid entirely from payments made by insurers, not taxpayers. That is insurers whose profits from ACA plans were higher-than-expected were supposed to have enough excess revenues to cover the losses incurred by insurers who unexpectedly experienced losses (insurers set their rates expecting at least some profits on average, but there is the recognition that some plans may lose money while others gain given that the distribution of risks across plans will not always be precisely balanced).
When it turned out risk corridor claims exceeded insurer payments by about $2.5 billion in 2014, Congress stepped in to prevent a taxpayer bailout of insurance companies. As eloquently explained by Marco Rubio in the Wall Street Journal just last week, efforts by the administration to use tax funds to provide such a bailout "would appear to be in conflict with the plain text" of the law (according to the Congressional Research Service, which is widely viewed as a very neutral party in policy matters). Regardless of whatever backroom deal insurers might have made with President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in 2010, the current Congress stands with taxpayers in preventing them from having to bail out health insurance companies for the financial problems created by Obamacare's flawed design.
So it remains to be seen whether BCBSNC ever gets the fixes needed to correct the various design flaws that have led us to the present moment. And it also remains to be seen whether BCBSNC elects to take a gamble on continuing the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses that might ensue were it to continue its participation in the Obamacare exchanges. Should the company elect to exit from the program, it's pretty clear that Mr. Wilson's D+ will quickly turn to an F in this state. Will that affect what voters decide in November? Stay tuned.
Update #1: May 31, 2016
In a conference call today, BCBSNC announced that its proposed rate increase for ACA plans in 2017 will average 18.8%. The NC Department of Insurance is expected to make a final determination about what rates to approve by the end of August.
Update #2: June 2, 2016
Fellow Forbes contributer Scott Gottlieb has just written a very informative post showing that BCBSNC's struggles with Obamacare are far from unique. Their experience is being replicated in non-profit plans across the country. In just the first quarter of 2016 alone, 41 non-profit health plans have experienced losses of $1.5 billion (an average negative net margin of -2.5%!). Dr. Gottlieb explains some of Obamacare's structural flaws that have led to this disturbing financial picture.
READ CHRIS’ BOOK, The American Health Economy Illustrated (AEI Press, 2012), available at Amazon and other major retailers. With generous support from the National Research Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute, an online version complete with downloadable Powerpoint slides and companion spreadsheets has been made available through the Medical Industry Institute’s Open Education Hub at the University of Minnesota.
Follow @ConoverChris on Twitter, and The Apothecary on Facebook. Or, sign up to receive a weekly e-mail digest of articles from The Apothecary.
INVESTORS’ NOTE : The biggest publicly-traded players in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges are Aetna AET -0.28% (NYSE: AET ), Humana HUM -0.78% (NYSE: HUM), Cigna CI -0.25% (NYSE: CI ), Molina (NYSE: MOH ), WellPoint (NYSE: WLP ), and Centene CNC -2.15%(NYSE: CNC ), in order of the number of uninsured exchange-eligible Americans for whom their plans are available.Google+ continues to struggle building a significant user base in the United States. According to new data published by GlobalWebIndex, there are 14 million active Google+ users in the U.S.With a penetration rate of only 6 percent, Google+ remains far behind its competitors Twitter and most importantly Facebook, which has a penetration rate way beyond 50 percent of U.S. Internet users.In other developed economies Google+ faces the same difficulties: With penetration rates of 4, 5 and 7 percent in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom respectively, Google+ remains a niche service in these countries.On a positive note, Google appears to be making headway in emerging economies. Google+ is used by at least 25 percent of Internet users in all four BRIC nations; India standing out with a penetration rate of 38 percent.Above chart shows the penetration rate of Google+ in selected countries.Mainstream Media Economic Recovery Propaganda, False Profits and Some “Surprises to the Upside”
321gold.com founder Bob Moriarty never fails to get a rise out of The Gold Report readers, simultaneously raising hackles and awareness. In this interview, his fifth with us since last November, he rails against continuing business, media and government shenanigans. He prophesizes bankruptcy, riots and revolution. But he also sees a bit of silver lining in the thunderheads, predicting “a lot of surprises to the upside” in the resources sector.
The Gold Report: Just reading the papers today, we’re seeing lots of interesting news. We see GM has come out of bankruptcy, we see Goldman Sachs, BofA and Citigroup all recording record profits. We’re even hearing, in some cases and some places that home sales are increasing. What is going on?Bob Moriarty: That’s an example of how total the distortion is in the news media in the United States. First of all, 96% of the news media is controlled by six people. Their vested interest is not in telling the truth; their vested interest is in selling products. What we call the news media is really better termed a propaganda media. It’s all propaganda.Let’s take, for example, year-on-year railway shipping of automobiles is down 49%. Nobody in creation could honestly believe that GM is in better shape now than they were a few weeks ago. Coming out of bankruptcy is a legal maneuver; it’s not a financial maneuver. They’re out of bankruptcy; it’s perfectly true and perfectly meaningless at the same time. The government now controls GM.As negative as I am toward American management in business today, the only people who are far worse would be government bureaucrats. For example, in mid-July I saw Paulson’s testimony about how they threatened bankruptcy when BofA’s negotiations with Merrill Lynch almost came unglued. Bank of America President Lewis didn’t take care of his shareholders, which he has a legal obligation to do. He pandered to the government and Paulson said, “We’ll just replace you.” Since when did we become a communist society or socialist society? It’s no longer capitalism; it’s government control of industry.On one hand, we’ve got the financial system totally controlled by Goldman Sachs. On the other hand, we’ve got government control of Chrysler and GM and major segments of the economy. We have the worst of all possible worlds.As to the record profits you mention, we’re in a depression. If these guys are making money, it’s because they’re manipulating the markets and stealing from the taxpayers. There’s a difference.TGR: We have this big push for more government oversight and if we already are allowing banks to steal money, what will additional government oversight going to give us?BM: Congress gave these guys the ability to steal. There’s been something like $14 trillion total in government guarantees and loans and giveaways. In 5, 10 or 20 years from now, we’re going to look back and say this was absolutely unbelievable. That money is simply evaporating. The government talks about the deficit going over $1 trillion dollars this year. In the first six months, the actual debt of the United States increased $2 trillion. On a $14 trillion economy, the debt is going to go up $4 trillion this year. That’s never happened before in history. It’s just absolutely amazing.TGR: Speaking of debt, as you probably know, California is not hinged on either financial industries or the auto industry, but it’s been paying government contracts with IOUs.BM: California is a disaster waiting to happen. It could fire every state employee and still not balance its budget. California has the eighth largest economy in the world and although they threw together a budget at the 11th hour, the prospect of having to declare bankruptcy still looms.One thing that no government bureaucrat will do at any level in the United States today is decrease spending. We’re bankrupt; we can’t afford to pay the debt that we already have. Obama is just expanding power and size of government enormously. What we must do at all levels is reduce government spending and these guys don’t want to do it. The government always wants to increase their power, not decrease it. The way they gain power and votes is to spend money. So they say there’s no alternative.TGR: Isn’t it true that no U.S. state can declare bankruptcy?BM: Oh, of course, they can declare bankruptcy. Cities go bankrupt all the time; so can states. We have 37 states that are not going to be able to balance their budgets.This is so simple and it’s been happening for millennia. Periodically you go through a time where there’s too much debt. You’ve got to wipe out debt and start all over again. Nobody wants to admit that. California’s not going to pay their debts, and neither is the United States. They can’t.TGR: Thinking about potential bankruptcy and the debt of the Federal government, one of your common themes is that there will be riots in the streets. You talk about this on an international level, but you also apparently expect it to also happen in the U.S. So far, it hasn’t happened. Do you think part of that is because social legislation is making the U.S. population complacent?BM: I don’t think so. I will say the U.S. population is complacent to just an incredible degree. We saw a lot of attention focused on Iran over charges of malfeasance in their elections. The last two presidential elections prior to Obama coming in were absolutely stolen by the Republicans. It was so crooked, it was unbelievable the American population didn’t do anything. But when I’ve talked about rioting in the streets in the United States, you can look and see what’s happening in China right now. Everybody in the world is sitting on a powder keg and it would take very little to ignite that and it absolutely is going to happen. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean I’m wrong. It just means I’m wrong with the timing, but my call was for this summer and we’ve still got some summer to go.TGR: Shifting from social unrest to financial unrest, when we last interviewed you, you were talking about the $600 trillion of outstanding derivatives and the potential—if it begins to unravel—of putting heavy selling pressure on the financial markets. Do you see that beginning to happen?BM: Absolutely. The big crash that took place from last July through November was unusual because it had far more to do with unwinding or deleveraging of derivatives. For the first time in about 10 years, derivatives actually went down. I’ve been making the comment since 2001 that derivatives were a financial time bomb and the bigger they grew, the bigger the explosion was going to be.Here are the numbers you need to focus on. According to the latest figures put out by the BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security, U.S. Department of Commerce), derivatives decreased by about $100 trillion from July through December 2008. But for derivatives to deleverage $100 trillion, it wiped out $50 trillion worth of net asset value. For us to knock that $600 trillion to something more manageable—like $50 trillion—could wipe out $250-$275-$300 trillion worth of assets. There isn’t $300 trillion worth of assets in the whole world.So the simple explanation is that there is far more debt in the world than assets to cover it. We have not come to grips with that. We’ve not seen the bottom of the stock market and I believe there will be a massive |
at it from the water, the full impact of this civic tragedy is impossible to ignore.
As we passed by in our boat, many illegal campers gave us friendly waves. Hatch said he has no animus toward anyone living on the river. He’s just a Sacramento native who loves the area and feels badly about the slow erosion of a waterway that gets worse every year.
It’s an irony, and a testament to the power of homeless politics, that a town full of environmentalists has gotten lockjaw when it comes to the destruction of its parkway.
This is not a question about empathy for human suffering. It’s about actually addressing the damage being done to the parkway by people who aren’t supposed to live there.
County supervisors need to act now. The city of Sacramento needs to take political ownership as well because by far some of the worst areas of the parkway are near Richards Boulevard and within city limits.
Hatch said it’s difficult for him to understand why authorities have allowed conditions to get so out of hand. “You can get a ticket for driving your boat too fast on the river. You can get a ticket for walking your dog without a leash,” he said with a laugh. “But they let people live here. How does that make sense?”
Editor’s note: This story was changed Aug. 20 to correct the date of the County Board of Supervisors meeting.SAN JOSE — San Jose police are asking for the public’s help in locating a 6-year-old boy who went missing from his home Saturday morning.
The mother of Sergio Zepeda, who is autistic and non-verbal, said her son disappeared from their residence on the 2900 block of Rorty Drive in South San Jose about 9 a.m., police said.
“We’ve got a lot of resources out there looking right now for this missing juvenile,” said Officer Albert Morales, a San Jose police spokesman. “The sense we have right now is that he just wandered off. There’s nothing to suggest that there’s any foul play. But we’re increasing the size of the search area, and we need more eyes looking for him.”
Sergio is described as a Latino boy with brown hair, approximately four-feet tall and weighing 40 pounds. He has a red rash mark on the left side of his lip. He was last seen wearing a black “Super Mario Brothers” T-shirt and blue jeans.
If you think you’ve seen the boy, police ask that you call 911 or the department’s missing person unit at 408-277-8911.
Follow Mark Emmons at Twitter.com/markedwinemmons.Heya friends & fans, this is a hard one to write but here it goes: After much thought I’ve decided that the Paeregrine.Cast is going on hiatus. It will hopefully not be a super long one, but from where I’m standing it’s really really hard to tell. I started this comic when I was at a certain place in my life, and a bunch of circumstances have changed since then. I don’t feel like I’ve got anything close to the same footing I had when I started, and it has proved almost impossible to create new comics as a result. Instead of forcing them through half-assed, I’ve decided to take the time to re-establish my footing.
I fully expect that one day I will make comics again, possibly new strips for the Paeregrine.Cast – maybe a new project entirely – who knows? I certainly don’t. Thanks very much for your understanding and patience, and sorry for the slip. Things are pretty hard right now and I have to let my creativity do whatever it’s going to do (or not do.) I’ve gone back a comic to the one you see above, as it still feels like something I’m proud of and a rare expression of truth from what I’ve posted here. They say time and tide wait for no man, and this is true. They also say time heals all wounds. I’m saying:
“Here’s to better weather,”
-Frank “Paeregrine” Marsters
Original Post Text:ITHACA, N.Y. — A new bus company is promising to offer trips directly between Ithaca and New York City at a significantly cheaper rate than Cornell's Campus2Campus line.
The privately-owned "Big Red Bullet" aims to provide better and faster service than the Shortline, which stops in several towns between Ithaca and NYC, and at a cheaper rate than Cornell's C2C, which charges $180 per round-trip.
The Big Red Bullet is expecting to have its first buses — equipped with WiFi and many of the other amenities of the C2C line — making trips by late September or early October, according to General Manager Bob Nicholas.
The company was founded by recent Cornell MBA graduate Ali Nasser, Nicholas says.
Rates on the Big Red Bullet are expected to be $110 for a round-trip during the week and $130 for trips on weekends, Nicholas says.
A one-way Big Red Bullet trip will cost $55 on weekdays and $65 on weekends, Nicholas says. A one-way trip on Cornell's Campus2Campus costs $90.
"From what I'm hearing, from everyone I talk to, it sounds like it will be very popular," says Nicholas, who was previously the manager of the Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport.
On Monday, Nicholas is set to talk to the City of Ithaca's Board of Public Works to seek approval to take the bus on city of Ithaca streets. Nicholas says he does not expect any difficulty obtaining the necessary permits from the city, though the agenda for the meeting says the TCAT bus company has raised some questions about the Big Red Bullet's proposed stops.
The buses will run non-stop from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., directly from New York City to Ithaca and back, according to Nicholas. (The Campus to Campus line leaves Ithaca at 5:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., its website says.)
The proposed Big Red Bullet schedule is below:
Kevin Sutherland, the chief of staff for Mayor Svante Myrick, said the project is likely to be good news for commuters — both in New York City and in Ithaca.
"Competition is good. This will likely have a price-point that allows more people who aren't necessarily affiliated with Cornell to have access to New York City," Sutherland said. "That's a good thing."
With tolls at the Lincoln and Holland tunnel at $25, Sutherland said, the new bus system could come at an opportune moment for Ithacans seeking to enjoy the Big Apple on a tight budget.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
"Friends tell me how frustrating it can be to get out of town, especially if they don't have their own vehicles," Sutherland says. "New York is not cheap to get to."
Sutherland said the project is likely to be approved by the city. "They've got to make sure they get all their ducks in a row and are working with TCAT to make sure their routes don't affect each other," Sutherland added.
Nicholas, of the Big Red Bullet, said that that the new company is contracting with a company that has connections throughout the country rather than buying new buses.
"The advantage of that if there are any problems with the buses, they have so many connections that... they'll be able to replace a bus, no matter where it breaks down, within a half-hour," he says. "These are details you take care of when you're setting up an operation — so when the worst-case scenario comes, you have a backup plan."
Both Sutherland and Nicholas said they weren't worried that the new bus line would make things increasingly difficult for Ithaca's already beleaguered airport, which has wrestled with funding problems recently.
"I don't think this has any effect on the airport: People who use the airport to go to New York are mostly connecting with flights to places beyond New York," Nicholas said.
Nicholas credited Nasser with coming up with the idea and funding for the Big Red Bullet project. Nasser went to the American University of Cairo before earning his master's of engineering at Cornell in 2010, and then his MBA in Investment Banking at Cornell's Graduate School of Management in 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile.
"He was traveling backwards and forwards quite a bit between Ithaca and New York; he hated the Shortline because of all the stops... and a $180 round-trip for Cornell was a little excessive," Nicholas says of Nasser, who now works at Citibank. "So this is a service that doesn't have all the stops, and is not quite as expensive."CLOSE IndyStar Pacers Insider Nate Taylor and Nat Newell discuss the team's wins without Paul George and upcoming road trip. Clark Wade/IndyStar
Indiana Pacers guard Monta Ellis (11) passes around Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson (11) in the first half of their game Monday, November 21, 2016, afternoon at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. (Photo: Matt_Kryger/Indy_Star)
PORTLAND, Ore. – Monta Ellis is trying to change. Not completely, yet in a manner that will allow him to be most effective for the remodeled Indiana Pacers.
By his nature, Ellis’ style of play appears to be perfect for these up-tempo Pacers. He wants to attack the basket in transition or the half court. He loves to produce points and assists in the pick-and-roll. He wants to force steals for fast-break opportunities.
Coach Nate McMillan will still accept such production and plays from Ellis. McMillan, though, wants and expects Ellis to do more by doing less with the ball.
In his 12th season, Ellis is averaging just 10.6 points, the lowest of his career since his rookie year. He is attempting just 9.4 shots per game, also his lowest since his rookie year. The most telling statistic for Ellis through the Pacers’ first 18 games this season, however, is his usage percentage. The Pacers have used Ellis in their offensive plays – though an estimate – just 17 percent of the time, according to NBA.com. The percentage is the lowest in Ellis’ career.
“I don’t need to take that many shots in a game,” he said Sunday. “I’m just playing the game the right way. My shots will come when they come. If they don’t, then I’ll do other things.”
Yet Ellis is shooting a higher overall percentage (.447) and from behind the arc (.326), and has a higher positive net rating (2.8 points per 100 possessions) than last season, his first with the Pacers. And in the Pacers nine wins this season, Ellis’ usage percentage is 15 percent.
But perhaps more than ever, Ellis is not concerning himself with his individual statistics.
“I’ve been around,” said the 31-year-old Ellis. “Sometimes you make (shots), sometimes you don’t. You’ve still got to play the game the right way. That means rebounds, getting stops and do whatever you need to do to be in your gaps. Those things don’t show on the stat sheet, but it helps teams win. When you have a night like I had (Sunday) without shooting the ball, you’ve got to do something else.”
Ellis said those words after the Pacers’ 91-70 win over the Los Angeles Clippers.
Without star Paul George, Ellis knew he needed to take more shots. But he made just two of his 12 attempts, his poorest shooting game of the season. A younger, less mature Ellis might have let those 10 misses have a negative impact on the rest of his performance. Against the Clippers, Ellis still held J.J. Redick to five points on 1-of-7 shooting. He also collected six rebounds, helped maintain the Pacers’ ball movement and only committed one turnover in 35 minutes.
It was that performance, minus the shooting, that the Pacers now expect from Ellis.
“I think mostly we’re trying to get him to play a couple more years in this league,” George said last week. “We’ve been asking a lot out of Monta and working him hard. I think Nate is aware of that and wants that role to be a little easier for him, to where he doesn’t have to do so much to create and put his body out there to get plays going. We’re trying to save him in that aspect.”
Indiana Pacers guard Monta Ellis (11) goes up for the shot over Atlanta Hawks forward Paul Millsap (4) in the second half at Bankers Life Fieldhouse on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2016. (Photo: Mykal_McEldowney/Indy_Star)
Ellis realized his approach on the court would need to change after last season, when former coach Frank Vogel often used him as the team’s primary ball handler. Larry Bird, the team’s president, acquired Jeff Teague in the offseason via a trade to be the team’s point guard. Ellis, without any issues, moved to be the team’s undersized starting shooting guard.
When McMillan was promoted in May to head coach, he talked to Ellis about evolving. Ellis, McMillan said, had to recondition his thinking and reacting on the court. Instead of constantly driving to the basket, Ellis has to move and cut to the basket without the ball. Instead of shooting midrange jumpers almost exclusively, roam behind the 3-point line and shoot those shots when open.
“It’s an adjustment to learn how to play without the ball,” McMillan said last week. “You just think about our lineup and our guys and you think about Monta. He’s played with the ball all of his life. You put all of these guys together and sacrifice comes into place and you have to learn and reinvent your game.”
Reinvention, especially for a player as old as Ellis, can be difficult. Ellis, despite his alpha characteristics, has been willing to defer more to Teague to allow his teammates to probe more for points and assists.
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“He’s always been a creator, a scorer, a heavy minutes guy,” said Myles Turner. “He doesn’t have to do that with this team. He’s doing a better job, especially this season, of just doing it in other ways to impact the game.”
As a veteran transitioning to a lesser scoring role, Ellis, several Pacers said last week, has helped build the team’s chemistry.
Part of how he has done that is by not changing vociferous personality. He is not afraid to use his voice, whether in practice or a game. When the Pacers struggled to begin the season, Ellis was the loudest Pacer on the court to voice his displeasure about the team’s performance.
CLOSE The Indiana Pacers, who haven't fared well on the road, start a 5-game Western trip Wednesday night in Portland. Here's a look at the competition. Scott Horner/IndyStar
“You’ve got some veteran guys that are new to the team that really don’t feel, like, obligated to state their opinion or don’t feel comfortable doing it,” Ellis said. “I really don’t. I love this game, man. I come in here and I practice hard, I play hurt, I practice hurt. I think I have the right to state my opinion when I need to when I give my body up for that.”
With these Pacers, Ellis said he has focused more on teaching. He felt, after a few weeks, that some his teammates needed more of his wisdom to help them through a new offensive philosophy. Ellis has been the hardest on the younger Pacers, in particular Glenn Robinson III and Turner.
“Yeah, he can be tough on me,” Turner said of Ellis. “It’s because he wants to see us get better. Yeah, he’s tough at times.”
George called Ellis a warrior last week for how competitive his older his teammate is. George said Ellis’ role this season is one that competes against his reputation around the league as an aggressive scorer.
Ellis, though, knows what playing the game the right way means for him. He has and plans on continuing to share the ball to make the Pacers successful.
“I’ll do whatever I can to help us win,” Ellis said. “(McMillan) understands that. I got that feel from him. He told me that from day one, and I’m just trying to do my part.”
Call IndyStar reporter Nate Taylor at (317) 444-6484. Follow him on Twitter: @ByNateTaylor.
Get insight on the Pacers by downloading our app: http://bit.ly/1BR4fDs
Pacers at Trail Blazers, 10 p.m. Wednesday, Fox Sports Indiana, NBATV
INDIANA at PORTLAND
Tipoff: 10 p.m. today, Moda Center
TV: Fox Sports Indiana, NBATV
Radio: WFNI-AM (1070), -FM (93.5).
Pacers (9-9)
Projected starters
Pos;Player;PPG;Key stat
PG; Jeff Teague; 14.6 ppg; 6.8 apg
SG; Monta Ellis; 10.6 ppg; 4.2 apg
SF; Glenn Robinson III; 6.5 ppg; 3.1 rpg
PF; Thaddeus Young; 12.1 ppg; 6.1 rpg
C; Myles Turner; 14.7 ppg; 7.6 rpg
6th; Al Jefferson; 7.0 ppg; 4.4 rpg
Trail Blazers (9-10)
Projected starters
Pos;Player;PPG;Key stat
PG; Damian Lillard; 28.2 ppg; 5.3 apg
SG; C.J. McCollum; 22.3 ppg; 3.6 apg
SF; Ed Davis; 3.9 ppg; 4.9 rpg
PF; Maurice Harkless; 12.4 ppg; 5.5 rpg
C; Mason Plumlee; 9.7 ppg; 7.0 rpg
6th; Meyers Leonard; 5.9 ppg; 3.4 rpg
Storylines
INJURY UPDATE: The Pacers held their practice Tuesday in Portland at the Moda Center. C.J. Miles was a limited participant in the practice for the first time since he sustained his sore left knee injury Nov. 18. Miles went through contact drills, but he is still listed as out for Wednesday’s game along with Paul George (left ankle) and Kevin Serahin (left knee). George and Seraphin did not practice Tuesday.
“It was his first day running, so he still has ways to go,” coach Nate McMillan said of Miles. “He still needs a few more practices (before playing) to build his conditioning. We know that he needs more time after being off for two weeks.”
SHARING THE POINTS: The Pacers are one of four teams in the NBA that have had seven different leading scorers in a game this season. The other three teams in the league are the Philadelphia 76ers, the Denver Nuggets and the Dallas Mavericks.
A TELLING QUOTE: “Paul could play if he wanted to, and he wants to, but it just don’t make sense. We just got to let them know not to put so much pressure on themselves trying to come back. We’re out there and everybody stepped up. And not only Paul, but C.J. and Kevin’s out. We just had to step in and step up and do our jobs so those guys could take their time and get back healthy.” – Al Jefferson on what the healthy Pacers did in Sunday’s win over the Los Angeles Clippers without three key players.
PREDICTION: The Trail Blazers have lost six of their last eight games and have struggled on defense. If the Pacers play with the same intensity and defensive effort they showed in their last two games, they should start their five-game road trip with a victory. Pacers 111, Trail Blazers 107.
– Nate TaylorBrazilian President Dilma Rousseff has been re-elected by a whisker after a dramatic run-off and a tense campaign.
Ms Rousseff, 66, won the closely-fought election with Aécio Neves, the leader of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party.
The 51.6 win secured her second term and the fourth consecutive mandate of the leftist Workers’ Party.
In her first words after the result was confirmed justbefore 10pm local time, Ms Rousseff paid tribute to her predecessor Lula daSilva, whose social reforms were continued under her government and were the platform for her re-election.
“I salute all those present and thank you all,” she said in her first address in front of a packed auditorium of supporters in Brasília. “Especially our eternal president Lula.
“My dears, we have come to the end of an electoral dispute that mobilised the entire nation.”
After a tense 12 months that included mass protests, corruption scandals and a stalling economy, she said she wanted to be “a better president than I have been until now” and called for unity and greater dialogue.
Ms Rousseff enjoyed big wins among her support base in the poorer north of the country where the Bolsa Familia allowance has lifted millions out of poverty, but she also won in the key state of Minas Gerais,where Mr Neves had been governor.
Mr Neves called Ms Rousseff shortly after the results confirmed her re-election to congratulate her.
The 54-year-old economist had pulled neck and neck with Ms Rousseff in opinion polls ahead of yesterday’sSUN vote, winning the backing of the markets and businesses concerned by Brazil’s economic slowdown.
Earlier this year, the country slipped back into recession for the first time in five years, putting Ms Rousseff’s re-election under threat.
Experts said Ms Rousseff’s victory was likely to hit the markets after the Brazilian Real hit a six-year high against the dollar.
“In terms of market reaction, the Brazilian Real is likely to weaken significantly against the dollar todayMON,” said Ian Herbison, CEO of Speyside, an emerging markets specialist firm.
“The Bovespa will slide, continuing its trend from last week, but the thin margin of victory means that Dilma will be under strong pressure to reform. She will need to make some reassuring moves quickly.
“Regardless, it will be a very difficult road ahead.”
Despite the challenge of getting Brazil’s economy back on track, Ms Rousseff has remained popular among those who benefited from the Workers’ Party social programmes.
José Raimundo Soares, 47, a street vendor in Brasília, and his 18-year-old son Carlos both voted for Ms Rousseff.
Mr Soares said his outlook had improved since his parents moved from the poor north-east in search of a better life.
“She’s more experienced in government and she has done a lot for the lower classes,” he said.
His son added: “Dilma gave more opportunities to people. We want to give her another chance.”That guy calling himself "N1ggerkiller" while playing the iPhone game "Fun Run" isn't just any racist teenage prick—it's the racist teenage prick son of Arizona Senator Jeff Flake!
And that's not all. Tanner Flake, the "high-school aged" son of Arizona's junior senator, has not been using social media best practices for a while now, as Buzzfeed's John Stanton discovered. Not only does the boy—seen here holding an enormous weapon of some kind—go by "N1ggerkiller" on "Fun Run," he calls people "Jews" and "faggots" on Twitter:
Tanner's since taken his Twitter account private, and his dad—a goofy-looking survivalist Mormon—apologized in a statement to Buzzfeed:
“I’m very disappointed in my teenage son’s words, and I sincerely apologize for the insensitivity. This language is unacceptable, anywhere. Needless to say, I’ve already spoken with him about this, he has apologized, and I apologize as well.”
Here are the screenshots of "Fun Run":
"To the faggot who stole my dirt bike from the church parking lot, I will find you, and I will beat the crap out of you" has the distinction of being the most Arizona sentence ever written.After being cheered by Monday's (unreliable) SNP/Panelbase poll on Scottish independence, which put the Yes campaign ahead for the first time since August 2011, Scottish nationalists have woken up to the grim news that support for separation has fallen to its lowest level this year.
A new TNS BRMB poll shows that just 25% would vote for independence compared to 47% who would vote against it. The survey is further evidence of why the SNP poll should be treated with scepticism. Those polled were first asked whether they thought Scotland could be "a successful, independent country" and whether they trusted the Scottish government or Westminster to take "the best decisions for Scotland". It's likely that both questions nudged people towards supporting independence in the final question.
Every other poll in the last two years has shown the No campaign ahead by a convincing margin and the TNS BRMB survey and last week's YouGov poll (which put the No camp ahead by 59-29) suggest that trend will continue.
If there is any consolation for the Yes campaign, it's that 28% of voters are undecided, up from 15% in February, but it would need to win over 79% of them to close the gap with the No camp. At present, even if, as Alex Salmond recently told the NS, "This is the phoney war. This is not the campaign. I went into an election [for the Scottish Parliament] in 2011 20 points behind in the polls and ended up 15 in front. The real game hasn’t even started. We are just clearing the ground", that is looking like a near impossible task.ELLIS ISLAND, NY—Pausing to imagine the throngs of people who must have arrived with them that day back in 1994, 12-year-old Max Bertrand reportedly spent his visit to Ellis Island this afternoon walking around the same immigrant station his grandparents once toured. “These must be the exact entrance doors that Grandpa and Grandma came through, and the hallway their 10 a.m. group walked through,” said Bertrand, recalling his grandparents’ description of the crowds who shuffled along with maps in hand after they stopped by the information kiosk and visited the model replica of the island. “Wow, these are the same inspection rooms that they stopped in with the park ranger, and this must be the TV with the constantly looping documentary that Grandma mentioned. Right now we’re seeing exactly what she must’ve seen when she came through here 20 years ago.” Bertrand told reporters that while he found the experience moving, he would likely never be able to truly understand how his grandfather felt when he was informed that the gift shop was closed.
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This year will be the year of Big Data. The Data Warehousing
Institute (TDWI) reported that 90 percent of the IT professionals it surveyed said they were familiar with big data analytics. And 34 percent said they
already applied analytics to Big Data. The vast hordes of data collection
during e-commerce transactions, from loyalty programs, employment records,
supply chain and ERP systems are, or are about to get, cozy. Uncomfortably
cozy. Let me start by saying there is nothing inherently wrong
with Big Data. Big Data is a thing, and like anything, it can be used for good
or for evil. It can be used appropriately given known limitations, or stretched
wantonly until its principles fray. For now, the identification, consolidation, and governance of data is an appropriate step, as Forbes‘s Tom Groenfeldt recently
documented
with Michigan’s $19 million in data center consolidation savings. Dirk Helbing of the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology in Zurich is more ambitious. His €1-billion
project, the topic of the December 2011 Scientific
American cover story, seeks to do nothing less than foretell the future. The meaningful use of Big Data lies somewhere between these
two extremes. For Big Data to move from anything more than an instantiation of
databases running in logical or physical proximity, to data that can be
meaningfully mined for insight, requires new skills, new perspectives, and new
cautions. The Big Data Dream Dirk Helbing seeks a system that is akin to Asimov’s
Psychohistory as imagined in the Foundation
series. In broad swaths, it would anticipate the future by linking social, scientific, and economic data. This system could be used to help advise world governments on the most
salient choices to make. Reading the article in Scientific
American reminded me of a science fiction story by
Tribble-inventor David Gerrold—When
Harlie Was One. In this book, Harlie, which stands for Human Analog Robot
Life Input Equivalents, decides that he needs answers, and that he isn’t
sophisticated enough to solve his own problem and therefore keep the corporate
interests that built him interested enough to keep him plugged in. So he
designs a new computer, the Graphic Omniscient Device, or GOD, as a proof of his
value. GOD will answer all questions submitted to it. Unfortunately, as the
human engineers building GOD eventually realize, the processing capacity is so
vast, that GOD will not be able to provide an answer to any question during the
lifetime of a human. Harlie, of course, knew this all along. He needed the
humans for three reasons: to keep him running, for engineering labor to build GOD, and to ask the questions that GOD will answer.
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Given the woes of Europe, spending €1-billion on such a project will likely prove to be wasted money. We, of course, don’t have a mechanical futurist to evaluate that
position, but we do have history. Whenever there is an existential problem
facing the world, charlatans appear to dazzle the masses with feats of magic
and wonder. I don’t see this proposal being anything more than the latest
version of apocalyptic sorcery. It’s not that a big science project can’t yield
interesting outcomes, but if you look at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology
Corporation (MCC), late of Austin, Texas, we find Cyc, a system conceived at
the beginning of the computer era, to combat Japan’s Fifth Generation Project as
it supposedly threatened to out-innovate America’s nascent lead in computer
technology. Although Cyc has yielded some use, it has not yet become the
artificial human mind it was intended to be, able to converse naturally with
anyone about the events, concepts, and objects in the world. And artificial
intelligence, as imagined in the 1980s, has yet to transform the human
condition. As Big Data becomes the next great savior of business and
humanity, we need to remain skeptical of its promises as well as its applications
and aspirations. Existential Issues With Big Data Determinism teaches that what will be, will be. Existentialism
deals with a humanity in the throes of chaos. Big Data can be seen as either a
lens through which determinism is revealed, or a tool for navigating an
existential world. As a scenario planner, I take the existential position and see
a number of existential threats to the success of Big Data and its applications. Overconfidence: Many
managers creating a project plan, drawing up a budget, or managing a hedge fund trust their
forecasts based on personal abilities and confidence in their knowledge and
experience. As University of Chicago professor Richard H. Thaler recently
pointed out in the New York Times (“The
Overconfidence Problem in Forecasting“), most managers are overconfident
and miscalibrated. In other words, they don’t recognize their own inability to
forecast the future, nor do they recognize the inherent volatility of markets.
Both of these traits portend big problems for Big Data as humans code their
assumptions about the world into algorithms: people don’t understand their personal
limitations, nor do they recognize if a model is good or not. When learning happens: Even in a field as seemingly physical and visceral as fossil hunting, Big
Data is playing a role. Geologic data has been fed into a model that helps
pinpoint good fossil-hunting fields. On the surface that appears a useful
discovery, but if you dig a bit deeper, you find a lesson for would-be Big Data
modelers. As technology and data sophistication increases, the underlying
assumptions in the model must change. Current data, derived from the analysis
of Landsat photos, can direct field workers toward a fairly large, but
promising area with multiple types of rock exposures. Eventually the team hopes
to increase their 15-meter resolution to 15-centimeter resolution by acquiring higher-resolution data. As they examine the new data, they will need to change their
analysis approach to recognize features not previously available (for more see “Artificial intelligence joins the fossil
hunt” in New Scientist). Learning will mean reinterpreting
the model.
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On a more abstract level, recent work conducted by ETH
Zurich looked at 43,000 transnational companies seeking to understand the relationships
between those companies and their potential for influence. This analysis found that
1,318 companies were tightly connected, with an average of 20 connections,
representing about 60 percent of global revenues. Deeper analysis revealed a “super-entity”
of 147 firms that accounts for about 40 percent of the wealth in the network.
This type of analysis has been conducted before, but the Zurich team included
indirect ownership, which changed the outcome significantly (for more see “The network of
global control” by Bitali, Glattfelder, and Battiston). If organizations rely on Big Data to connect far-ranging
databases–well beyond corporate ownership or maps of certain geologies–who,
it must be asked, will understand enough of the model to challenge its
underlying assumptions, and re-craft those assumptions when the world, and the
data that reflects it, changes? Complexity: I was
sitting with the CIO of a large insurance company in Portland. We were talking
about generational hand-offs when he raised the issue of an Excel spreadsheet
used to evaluate commercial property underwriting. He said one of the older
members of the organization owned that spreadsheet and he was the only one who knew how it worked. The hand-off issue was not one of getting the older
employee to collaborate with the younger employee, but one of complexity. That
spreadsheet was complex and tightly woven into the employee’s worldview.
Although the transfer could theoretically take place, it is unknowable how long
it would take, if the new employee would stay, or how the process would change
as multiple worldviews collided. Combining models full of nuance and obscurity increases complexity. Organizations that plan complex uses of Big Data and
the algorithms that analyze the data need to think about continuity and
succession planning in order to maintain the accuracy and relevance of their
models over time, and they need to be very cautious about the time it will take
to integrate, and the value of results achieved, from data and models that
border on the cryptic. Feedback Loops: Big Data isn’t just about the size of
well-understood data sets, it is about linking disparate data sets and then
creating connective tissue, either through design or inference, between these
data sets. At the onset of the Great Recession, we experienced a feedback loop
failure as David X Li’s famous Gaussian copula function, a seemingly well-tested
approach to analyzing financial risk, failed to anticipate the risks lurking
outside of its models. People kept trading, assuming their risk analysis was
still meaningful. No feedback loop existed to inform the bond markets that
their credit default swaps were an inverse pyramid teetering on a bed of
miscalculation. Algorithms and a Lack
of Theory: It is not only algorithms that can go wrong when a theory proves
incorrect or the assumptions underlying the algorithm change. There are places
where no theory exists at any level of consensus to be meaningful. The impact
of education (and the effectiveness of various approaches), how innovation
works, or what triggers a fad are examples of behaviors for which little valid
theory exists–it’s not that plenty of opinion about various approaches or
models is lacking, but that a theory, in the scientific sense, is nonexistent.
For Big Data that means a number of things, first and foremost, that if you don’t
have a working theory, you probably don’t know what data you need to test any
hypotheses you may posit. It also means that data scientists can’t create
a model because no reliable underlying logic exists that can be encoded into a
model. Confirmation Bias:
Every model is based on historical assumptions and perceptual biases.
Regardless of the sophistication of the science, we often create models that
help us see what we want to see, using data selected as a good indicator of
such a perception. Take a recent debate about how to price futures. Future
events are typically discounted using an exponential model that creates a
regular discount rate that eventually leads a value of zero for far-flung
events. Exponential discounting takes a deterministic view. A more existential view
comes from the proponents of hyperbolic discounting, which creates a preference
for rewards that arrive sooner than later. With hyperbolic discounting,
discounts of future events fall more gradually, leading to what might be called
“irrational behavior.” Another version is called the declining discount rate.
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This “discount” debate points out that even when a model
exists that is designed to aid in decision making about the future, that model
may involve contentious disagreements about its validity and alternative
approaches that yield very different results. These are important debates in
the world of Big Data. One group of modelers advocates for one approach, and
another group, an alternative approach, both using sophisticated data and black
boxes (as far as the uninitiated business person is concerned) to support their
cases. The fact is that in cases like this, no one knows the answer
definitively as the application may be contextual or it may be incomplete
(e.g., a new approach may solve the issue that none of the current approaches
solves completely). What can be said, and what must be remembered is, the adage
that “ |
possibly in Iowa, who went off to military training camps for WWI, and then spread the pathogen worldwide
"One very big concern was that swine flu mixed with wild bird flu, or bird flu in a chicken CAFO, tended to be ripe for incubating new types of viral infections, especially since the animals are so densely packed together," Bob Martin said.
Hog CAFOs are supposed to be completely closed environments, in order to protect the pigs from outside diseases. Visitors are usually required to shower and don special protective clothing (again, for the animals' benefit) before going inside a confinement.
But these are not hermetically sealed environments, and pathogens can enter and exit a CAFO in a number of ways other than via swine workers (or flies, another proven vector of CAFO diseases).
To begin with, some swine CAFO's recover water from their waste lagoons and recycle it back into the animal housing, in order to wash out the barns while also cutting down on dwindling groundwater supplies (a particular concern in parts of Mexico, to be sure). But wildfowl routinely land in CAFO lagoons, where they can easily shed influenza virus into the water. This can also happen at facilities that use water from nearby ponds or rivers.
Here in the U.S., the National Pork Board had already urged all producers to take a number of steps to reduce the risk of avian-to-swine influenza transmission (A new advisory has also been posted today).
"It is in the best interest of both human public health and animal health that transmission of influenza viruses from pigs to people, from people to pigs, from birds to pigs and from pigs to birds be minimized," says the group's website, Pork.org.
"The global reservoir of influenza viruses in waterfowl, the examples of infection of pigs with waterfowl-origin influenza viruses, the risks for reassortment of avian viruses with swine and/or human influenza viruses in pigs, and the risk for transmission of influenza viruses from pigs to domestic turkeys all indicate that contact between pigs and both wild and domestic fowl should be minimized," the Pork Board says. It then offers some "potentially useful" factors to "reduce transmission of influenza viruses between birds and pigs":
■ Bird-proofing - All doorways, windows and air-flow vents in swine housing units should be adequately sealed or screened to prevent entrance of birds. ■ Water treatment - Do not use untreated surface water as either drinking water or water for cleaning in swine facilities. Likewise, it may be prudent to attempt to minimize waterfowl use of farm lagoons. ■ Separation of pig and bird production - Do not raise pigs and domestic fowl on the same premises. ■ Feed security - Keep pig feed in closed containers to prevent contamination with feces from over-flying waterfowl. ■ Worker biosecurity - Provide boots for workers that are worn only within the pig housing units, thus eliminating.
Dr. Liz Wagstrom, the board's director of veterinary science, said she did not know if Mexican producers followed the same precautions, though she did note that none of the Mexican herds under US contract have reported any unusual health problems.
As for the use of surface water sources on U.S. pig farms, Wagstrom said it does happen, but her group is moving to avoid that practice industry-wide. She added that the new virus has not been detected in any U.S. pigs, and there is no importation of live swine from Mexico.
When Pig Viruses Collide
The CDC, USDA and Mexican authorities will surely focus on this previously unheard of viral "reassortment" that combines swine influenza components from both American and Eurasian strains.
Pigs don't fly, so how could this happen? One explanation, again, is the birds. Every year, more than two million wild fowl fly up to 1,500 miles or more eastward across the Arctic Ocean from Asia to North America. There, the migrating Asian birds intersect with North American species along the great north-south "flyways" of the Americas. There is sharing of viruses between bird species from both continents, UI's Dr. Gray told me.
Last October, a team from the U.S. Geological Survey published a study in Molecular Ecology that found genetic evidence of (non-H5N1) flu viruses in northern pintail ducks in Alaska whose genes were more closely related to Asian bird flu strains than those in the Americas. "Although some previous research has led to speculation that intercontinental transfer of avian influenza viruses from Asia to North America via wild birds is rare, this study challenges that," Chris Franson, a USGS wildlife biologist, told reporters.
The question, then, is could the Asian avian virus contain swine flu components from Eurasian pigs?
"Absolutely," said Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a leading researcher of pathogen evolution in CAFOs. "A pig infected by avian virus can then come into contact with swine virus, which then combines and gets picked up by a bird again. It's a viral patchwork. Wild birds can carry virus with swine components in it - a lot of avian viruses contain elements from pigs."
Silbergeld is by no means convinced that birds brought the Eurasian genetic material to Mexico.
"Pig's don't fly, but pork does," she said. "There is an active international transfer of all kinds of animal products, including food, food components, animal waste, offal, feed made of rendered animals and so on. Some of it is imported from Asia or Europe."
And of course, people fly, too. Dr. Silbergeld thinks that human travel is the most likely way that Eurasian swine viral components made their way to Mexico. "A tourist from China could have gone to Mexico City, and that Asian strain was picked up by somebody else, who then went to a swine barn," she suggested. "It's a likely explanation. Sometimes we overestimate what wild birds can do."
But no matter how the Eurasian strain got to Mexico, Dr. Silbergeld thinks the genetic swimming pool that is found in modern swine - or poultry - production is probably the place from whence this killer bug evolved.
"CAFOs are not biosecure," she told me. "They have high rates of ventilation and enormous number of animals that would die of heat stress unless the building was ventilated. We and others have measured bacteria and viruses in the environment around poultry and swine houses. They are carried by flies, too. These places are not bio-secure going in - or going out."
"These mixing bowls of intensive operations of chickens and pigs are contributing to speeding up viral evolution," Dr. Silbergeld added. "I think CAFOs are contributing."
But, what about traditional outdoor farms? Aren't those animals even more susceptible to wild type viruses than animals kept indoors, as industry claims? "Well, let's say that animals in confinement are ten times less likely to be infected by wild animals," she said, "But there are 100 times as many of them. You do the math."
The Pork Board's Dr. Wagstrom said her industry has been working closely with the US Government for nearly a year to set up a new monitoring and rapid animal-identification system for emerging swine flu strains in the U.S. herd. Wagstrom added that the new virus "could have" emerged from a Mexican swine CAFO, though she doesn't think birds were involved.
"Where it happened is not as important right now as locating the virus, and stopping its spread," she said. "There will be lots of epidemiology done in the future to find out where this came from."
One hopes the hard detective work will get underway as soon as humanly possible.
The author is currently completing a new book on industrial animal production for St. Martins Press.CALGARY (Reuters) - Canada is committed to fast-tracking infrastructure investments in the province of Alberta that is reeling from the global slump in energy prices, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday.
Canada stands ready to provide up to C$250 million to the province in the form of advance fiscal stabilization payments, said Trudeau, who spoke at a news conference with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
“We know these are challenging times for Alberta and Albertans, and I reiterate that the government of Canada is committed to being there for the people of this province,” he said.
Trudeau said that he and Notley agreed Canada must get Alberta’s resources to market in responsible and sustainable ways, but he stopped short of stating his government would back TransCanada’s Corp’s Energy East pipeline project, in the event that it clears the National Energy Board’s review.
Energy East, which would take up to 1.1 million barrels of oil per day from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Canada’s east coast, faces increasing problems as environmental and aboriginal groups ramp up protests.
Last month, the influential mayor of Montreal and leaders representing 81 nearby municipalities said that they opposed the project because of environmental and economic concerns.
TransCanada and Alberta’s landlocked oil sands industry are looking to it to reach international markets after President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline project to the United States last year.
Trudeau blamed the lack of movement on pipeline projects on his predecessor Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which had been in power for nearly a decade before Trudeau took office in late 2015.
The Conservatives had argued strongly in favour of Keystone XL, but Trudeau said their approach had marginalized community concerns and ignored environmental science, leading to a lack of headway on pipeline projects.
“A responsible government is a referee that ensures a level playing field so that everyone understands what is going on, and is not simply a cheerleader for projects because cheerleaders do not score goals, and for 10 years nothing got built,” he said.A dozen representatives of the company that manufactures Iran’s missiles and satellites had ringside seats at North Korea's failed rocket launch last week, according to South Korean media. Analysts see their presence as the latest evidence of the relationship between Iran and North Korea’s cooperation on missile and nuclear programs.
“North Korea and Iran are in close cooperation about long-range missiles,” says Baek Seung-joo, senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. “There is the high possibility they sell nuclear technology to each other. At least their people exchange information.”
The relationship between officials and scientists in Tehran and Pyongyang – opposite poles of what then-President George W. Bush labeled an “axis of evil” – dates back to the 1990s, when both countries were getting deeply involved in developing nuclear technology along with the missiles capable of carrying warheads to distant targets.
The differences in programs
The programs between the two countries diverge but share common goals that are essentially hostile toward the United States and its most important regional allies, Israel, South Korea, and Japan.
The differences, say analysts here and in Washington may not be significant. North Korea already has nuclear warheads while Iran denies it plans to make them. Iran has launched satellites while North Korea claims to have done so but has not. North Korea has developed long-range missiles, including the one that failed last week, while Iran has focused on advanced versions of middle-range missiles capable of reaching Israel.
“Iran in most respects is a larger, more sophisticated country,” observes Greg Thielmann, formerly with the State Department and now senior fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington. “They have a lot more resources. The Iranians have conducted a lot of missile tests. North Korean testing is much less frequent.”
What the North contributes to Iran
Although generally behind Iran technically and scientifically, and suffering from far more severe economic problems, North Korea contributed to Iran’s program by exporting its mid-range Nodong missiles, originally based on Soviet technology, more than 10 years ago.
“This was always a commercial relationship on the part of North Korea,” says Mr. Thielmann, former director of strategic, proliferation, and military affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
“Iran wanted to adapt these missiles and make them their own,” adds Thielmann.
In fact, Iranian scientists and engineers did just that, producing Shahab missiles capable of delivering warheads to targets in Israel.
It was its interest in North Korean missiles that prompted Iran to send a large team to witness the launch of Unha-3, the long-range North Korean missile that failed last week. The word Unha means “galaxy” and the number 3 indicates it’s the third launch of the same missile. Earlier versions were test-fired in August 1998 and April 2009.
“The SHIG team” – that is, the representatives of the Shadid Hemmat Industrial Group that manufactures the North’s missiles – “would want data to see how it was going,” says David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. “SHIG is responsible for ballistic missiles,” he says. “North Korea probably still sells things to Iran – components and technology."
As an example, Mr. Albright notes that Iran has problems in the guidance systems of its missiles” – one area the SHIG team may have wanted to study closely on the North Korean rocket.
Results?
For the Iranians, though, the results may well have been disappointing.
Aside from the fact that the rocket failed, analysts doubt if it was very sophisticated. The first stage of the rocket consisted of four Nodong missiles that had to be fired in precise unison, dropping off while the second stage and third stages were to go on before launching a satellite.
“In a missile program you have a lot of failures,” says Albright. The reason the first stage of the rocket consisted of four Nodongs was evidently to compensate for the inability of North Korean engineers to develop a large enough rocket motor to power the first stage with just one or two missiles.
Iranian engineers, while in North Korea, are believed to have wanted to join the team of scientists and technicians that North Korea said was studying “the causes of the failure” in the first stage.
What about nuclear programs?
Cooperation between Iran and North Korea reportedly extends beyond missiles to their nuclear programs – though analysts concede they don’t have proof. “There’s a reason for them to cooperate on gas centrifuges,” the key to enriching the uranium needed to produce electrical power or, at its highest stage of enrichment, to cause a nuclear blast.
“There are worries there could be a transfer of knowledge,” says Albright. “It could be either way.” For example, he says, “The Iranians have done better on carbon,” critical to producing the 3,000 centrifuges needed for a uranium bomb, while “the North Koreans have done better on design using very strong steel.”
Albright believes strong sanctions, imposed by the United Nations Security Council after North Korea’s second underground nuclear test in May 2009, and then strengthened by the UNSC on Monday, help to keep both North Korea and Iran from getting everything they need for nuclear weapons. He believes, however that North Korea gets around them by shipping components through China.
“I don’t think the Chinese are cooperating,” he says, but he doubts if the Chinese are blocking aircraft with components from flying over China, possibly stopping on the way for refueling at Chinese airports.
While Iran says it’s only enriched uranium to the 20 percent level needed for medical purposes, notably radiation, Albright says “it looks like” North Korea is “preparing for a third nuclear test.”
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North Korea’s preparations for a possible nuclear test with a bomb made of highly enriched uranium, rather than the plutonium previously used for making the North’s nuclear devices, have to be of interest to Iran.
“It makes sense to get something going with North Korea,” he says. “There’s a growing suspicion,” he says, whatever they’re working on “might be nuclear,” though both countries deny having enriched uranium to weapons grade.Image copyright Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye Image caption Martin McGuinness died in hospital on Tuesday morning
Politicians and others have been giving their reaction to the death of Northern Ireland's former deputy first minister Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin, who has died aged 66.
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams
Image copyright AP Image caption Gerry Adams said Martin McGuinness was "a passionate republican" who worked tirelessly for peace
"Throughout his life, Martin showed great determination, dignity and humility and it was no different during his short illness.
"He was a passionate republican who worked tirelessly for peace and reconciliation and for the re-unification of his country.
"But, above all, he loved his family and the people of Derry and he was immensely proud of both."
UK Prime Minister Theresa May
Image copyright PAcemaker Image caption Theresa May with Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness at Stormont Castle last year
"While I can never condone the path he took in the earlier part of his life, Martin McGuinness ultimately played a defining role in leading the republican movement away from violence.
"In doing so, he made an essential and historic contribution to the extraordinary journey of Northern Ireland from conflict to peace.
"While we certainly didn't always see eye-to-eye even in later years, as deputy first minister for nearly a decade, he was one of the pioneers of implementing cross-community power-sharing in Northern Ireland. He understood both its fragility and its precious significance and played a vital part in helping to find a way through many difficult moments."
Sinn Féin northern leader Michelle O'Neill
Image copyright PAcemaker Image caption Michelle O'Neill said he was a "legend"
"Martin was truly a giant of Irish politics and was known and respected across the world.
"He led republicanism from the front for decades, striving for reunification and promoting peace and reconciliation and a genuine commitment to equality and respect.
"His leadership, grace and warm personality have transformed Irish politics for the better and his impact will be felt for many years to come."
DUP leader Arlene Foster
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption DUP leader Arlene Foster said McGuinness wanted to see Stormont succeed
"History will record differing views and opinions on the role Martin McGuinness played throughout the recent and not-so-recent past, but history will also show that his contribution to the political and peace process was significant.
"In recent years, his contribution helped build the relative peace we now enjoy.
"While our differing backgrounds and life experiences inevitably meant there was much to separate us, we shared a deep desire to see the devolved institutions working to achieve positive results for everyone."
Bill Clinton, former US president
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Bill Clinton on a visit to Derry in 2010
"When he decided to fight for peace, Martin was calm, courageous and direct.
"And when he gave his word, that was as good as gold.
"He believed in a shared future, and refused to live in the past, a lesson all of us who remain should learn and live by."
Tony Blair, former UK prime minister
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Tony Blair tells Today what made Martin McGuinness formidable foe also made him formidable peacemaker
"The same fierceness he brought to the armed struggle he brought to the cause of peace
"That leadership and the courage in bringing his movement with him was for me, and will be, the defining legacy of Martin McGuinness".
Veteran civil rights leader Ivan Cooper
Image caption The veteran civil rights leader Ivan Cooper worked with Mr Guinness over the years
"No matter what anyone says about his violent past, to a large extent he carried the peace process.
"We must pay tribute to Martin's legacy. He was a man of great courage. He was not a coward.
"I'm sorry he has died so young.
"I met him during the days of the civil rights movement. He was very friendly and very frank.
"Derry will be worse off without him."
Former first minister and DUP leader, Peter Robinson
Former DUP leader Peter Robinson said: "We came together in that office after the heady euphoria of reaching agreement had faded.
"The honeymoon was over and we had to work the hard yards of operating the system in a manner that would instil confidence and bring delivery.
"Yet while I knew his past, as he knew mine, we never doubted or gave up our shared commitment to create a new and better era in Northern Ireland politics.
"We had the best of personal relationships - keeping in touch even after my retirement and during his illness."
Image copyright PACEMAKER
Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny
Image caption Taoiseach Enda Kenny said his passing was "a significant loss"
"His passing represents a significant loss, not only to politics in Northern Ireland, but to the wider political landscape on this island and beyond.
"Not only did Martin come to believe that peace must prevail, he committed himself to working tirelessly to that end.
"His commitment to securing enduring peace and prosperity for all of the people of Northern Ireland was unwavering throughout this time."
Jim Dixon, survivor of the Enniskillen bombing
"In one way I would say good riddance, but I will weep for him because he's gone now to meet the judge of all the earth from whom no secrets are hidden.
"You can't forgive someone who hasn't asked for forgiveness and nobody will get forgiveness either from God or anybody else without repenting first and asking forgiveness."
SDLP leader Colum Eastwood
Image copyright Press Eye Image caption SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said they had "always enjoyed a warm and respectful relationship"
"The loss of Martin McGuinness is a significant moment in the history of this island but it is first and foremost, a devastating loss to his family, friends and colleagues. Our thoughts are with them now.
"History will record his political career as a journey - one born in a tradition of violence but, in testament to Martin's character, that arrived at his true calling in politics, people and the art of persuasion."
Former Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain
Image caption Peter Hain said Martin McGuinness was "a crucial leader"
"He was a very, very important figure in the peace process.
"He was also somebody who contributed to Northern Ireland's troubled history in all sorts of ways, some extremely controversial, some engendering bitterness but, ultimately, when the opportunity, came he was a crucial leader in transforming Northern Ireland from terror and mayhem and horror into a place of hope."
Mike Nesbitt, Ulster Unionist Party
Image caption Mr Nesbitt said Martin McGuinness was "a pivotal figure at Stormont"
"This will also be a very challenging day for victims of the Troubles. I believe no-one needed to die to get Northern Ireland to where it is today. Clearly Martin McGuinness very actively disagreed with that analysis, but I also accept, in his later years, he was on a journey to create change through politics, becoming a pivotal figure at Stormont.
"It would be less than honest if I said other than that I found him a straight-dealing politician in any engagement I had with him.
Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire
Image copyright AP Image caption James Brokenshire paid tribute to Mr McGuinness' "essential role" in securing political progress
"Martin's personal journey and the clear influence he had on others in the republican movement were instrumental in shaping political institutions in Northern Ireland founded on exclusively peaceful and democratic means.
"While not forgetting the past, no-one can doubt the essential role he played in helping to secure the power sharing arrangements and political progress in Northern Ireland."
Raymond McCartney, Sinn Féin MLA and former hunger striker
Image caption Raymond McCartney said he was "a life-long friend"
"I have lost a life-long friend. I was with the family last night and there's a great sense of loss and devastation.
"Martin fought his illness but it took him in the end. Martin addressed many meeting over the years and during the peace process. He was always at the front. He exemplified leadership. Martin was a republican, but he always said republicanism was always about uniting people."
Nigel Dodds, DUP deputy leader
Image caption Nigel Dodds said Mr McGuinness helped people move forward in the peace process
"We can't forget his past. He, himself, didn't forget his past. This will also be a difficult day for victims. But he did help move people forward when it comes to the peace process.
"The talks that are going on at the moment are relatively warm and constructive and Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley deserve enormous credit for taking us to the place we are in today."
Pat and John Hume, former leader of the SDLP
Image caption John and Pat Hume said Martin McGuinness "left an indelible print on politics in Ireland"
"Martin McGuinness left an indelible print on politics in Ireland.
"Our starting points on the approach to finding a solution to the divisions on this island were very different but there can be no doubt Martin was deeply committed to the agreed Ireland of the Good Friday Agreement and its power sharing institutions."
Kyle Paisley, son of late first minister Ian Paisley
"My father and Martin McGuinness did a great deal of good together. A man cannot be defined by what he is in the present only or past only. He is defined by all that he is, both past and present. We can't forget Martin's IRA past, but he did do a lot right, too.
"Our relationship did draw criticism and you have to understand where victims are coming from. However, in order for proper progress you have got to push ahead and be brave. Martin and my father were called the 'Chuckle Brothers'. My dad just got on with business.
"Their relationship in office was good and it was good outside office. They stayed in touch. He was genuinely sorry for us when we lost our dad."
TUV leader Jim Allister
Image copyright Empics Image caption Mr Allister said his thoughts are with the victims of the IRA
"Naturally, the passing of anyone causes grief and sorrow to their family and friends. All such families deserve condolences.
"In the case of Martin McGuinness he lived many more decades than most of his victims. Sadly, Mr McGuinness thought it appropriate not just to sanction and commit murder but to take those dark secrets to his grave, denying truth and justice to many IRA victims.
"So, today my primary thoughts are with the many victims of the IRA who never reached the age of 66. Of men and women who never got to see their grandchildren because their lives were cut short by murderous republicanism. Of children stolen from their parents and grandparents by the organisation in which McGuinness was a commander."
Former Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael John Bruton
"Notwithstanding our profound political differences, I always found him to be a very friendly person and easy to talk to.
"The good and warm personal relationship he developed with Ian Paisley set a very good example. But it has yet to be followed by a genuine political reconciliation between the two communities they represented.
"It is sad that Martin will not be around to complete the important task he undertook."
Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin
"By his actions and words over the last 25 years, he demonstrated a keen understanding of what the peace process was all about.
"He worked to build bridges between the different traditions and communities on the island.
"He reached out to the Unionist community in particular, and their leaders, to steer Northern Ireland towards a better shared future."
Ceann Comhairle (Speaker of the Irish parliament) Seán Ó Fearghaíl
"Martin McGuiness was an iconic figure who made the journey from conflict to peace, playing a key role in in bringing about and maintaining the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement.
"He was a capable, hard-working and determined man who showed a willingness to compromise and reach out to others in a spirit of reconciliation.
"I'd like to express my deepest sympathies and condolences to his family and the people of Derry on their loss."
Former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Tebbit
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Lord Tebbit: "He was a coward"
"He was a coward.
"The reason he suddenly became a man of peace, was that he was desperately afraid that he was going to be arrested and charged with a number of murders.
"It's not merely that these creatures crippled my wife, but they also murdered five of my close friends. I only hope that his death will help to bring some sort of closure to those families and friends of those whose murders he accomplished."
PSNI chief constable George Hamilton
Image caption Mr Hamilton said Martin McGuinness "believed in a better future for our community"
"Our society suffered grievously throughout our troubled history; and many police officers and their families are among those who suffered.
"Martin's journey in life challenges all of us who care about the future; to be prepared to change; to demonstrate leadership; and to work to understand the world, not just from our own perspective, but from the perspectives of everyone in our community."
Austin Stack, whose father Brian died after being shot by the IRA
"I think that when we look at Martin McGuinness' legacy we have to look at the totality of that legacy.
"Martin McGuinness and his organisation were responsible for thousands of murders, thousands of atrocities.
"He is lauded today as a peacemaker but from our perspective as victims, Martin McGuinness never at any stage tried to reach out to the victims.
"He never tried to reconcile with victims. He never acknowledged his victims."
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn
Image copyright PA Image caption Jeremy Corbyn said Mr McGuinness played an absolutely crucial role in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement
"Martin McGuinness played an immeasurable role in bringing about peace in Ireland, after years as a key protagonist in the tragedy of the conflict.
"Martin played an absolutely crucial role in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement and a peace process which, despite difficulties, remains an example throughout the world of what can be achieved when the will is there.
"As we reflect on his role, the past 20 years have shown us that if there is leadership and the will on all sides, we can achieve change."
Archbishop Eamon Martin
"I will remember Martin as someone who chose personally to leave behind the path of violence and to walk instead along the more challenging path of peace and reconciliation.
"As a leader he was courageous and took risks in order to bring others with him, convincing them that goals could be achieved by politics and persuasion.
"He was a man of prayer and I am personally grateful for his good wishes and encouragement to me, as a fellow Derry man, in my own vocation.
"The story of conflict in Ireland has brought much pain and trauma and I thank God that in recent years we have preferred peace to the horror of violence and war.
"People like Martin McGuinness have made an immense contribution to sustaining peace by reaching out a hand of friendship and reconciliation and being prepared to model alternatives to dispute and division."
Sir Malcolm McKibbin, Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service
Image caption Sir Malcolm McKibbin said Martin McGuinness' loss would be acutely felt by his support staff
"Martin was always very supportive and courteous to me as head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and he was tireless in his efforts to improve the workings of the devolved institution.
Martin's loss will also be acutely felt by his support staff who worked closely with him here in Stormont Castle".
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Updated: Stern has confirmed suggested pricing for KISS: The baseline model, "Pro" will be $5,995, "Premium" will be $7,595 and the LE (limited edition) model will be $8,795. We've also added dozens of full-color images in the slideshow galleries below. Enjoy!
Stern Pinball Inc. has announced their next pinball machine is KISS, based on the face-painted 1970s glam rockers -- with all the requisite blood, explosions and fire. Stern has been on a pinball machine-producing tear recently, with AMC's The Walking Dead shipping last fall and WWE Wrestlemania just released; but KISS will be right at home at a barcade near you alongside Stern's acclaimed AC/DC and Metallica machines.
Gary Stern, CEO and Chairman of Stern Pinball says that KISS is a natural fit for pinball because, "They're a great rock and roll show, with great theatrics... Their makeup, their look, it’s just cool for pinball." This was likely the reason that Bally released their popular KISS pinball machine in 1978. Stern's new KISS machine actually reflects the vintage '78 game in its layout, featuring the same pop bumpers and KISS light grid of its predecessor. To maintain the vintage vibes, Kevin O’Connor, the original artist behind the hand-drawn art of the 1978 machine (picture: dragons and lots of fire), returned to do original hand-drawn art for the new machine.
Exit Theatre Mode
Stern's Director of Marketing and Licensing, Jody Dankberg, says that KISS themselves were part of the motivation to do the machine, saying, "The thing is, with a rock band like KISS, there’s no amount of money you could pay them that would affect their lives or anything like that. They really wanted to do the project...they’re big fans of pinball, and they’re big fans of Stern and the [Original 1978 KISS] Bally game."
Other notable pinball fans that have worked with Stern include Matt Groening (The Simpsons Pinball Party, 2003) and J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, 2013), who told Stern, "You know you’ve made it when you’ve got your own pinball machine."
KISS Pinball LE Images 10+ IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 18 01 OF 18 KISS Pinball LE Images Download Image Captions ESC
Image Gallery: KISS LE Model (Swipe on Mobile)
Perhaps the most obvious feature on KISS’s playfield is a giant Gene Simmons head that has a spinner disc inside that locks balls and then spits them out for the "Blood-Spitting Demon Bass Solo" multiball mode. Paul Stanley has a unique feature as well, Dankberg explains. "At a KISS concert, [Paul Stanley] likes to fly out into the crowd and he plays on a little stage... We re-created that with the ball, the ball will float the back panel on a magnet, land on the stage, then the toy Paul Stanley is going to rock out to Love Guns."
Speaking of rocking out, 10 KISS songs blast over Stern’s reworked sound system while you play: Deuce, Hotter Than Hell, Lick It Up, Shout It Our Loud, Detroit Rock City, Calling Dr. Love, Rock & Roll All Night, Love Gun, Love It Loud and Black Diamond. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons hit the studio to provide custom call-outs, as well. Sound is a big deal with a rock-themed game like KISS, so be nice to your local arcade operator and maybe she’ll let you plug into the audio out jack that’s standard on Stern’s new CPU board.
KISS Pinball Premium Images 10+ IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 14 01 OF 14 KISS Pinball Premium Images Download Image Captions ESC
Image Gallery: KISS Premium Model (Swipe on Mobile)
Like all recent Stern pinball games, KISS will be released in several models. The Limited Edition and Premium versions will have more features than the more streamlined Pro version, including aforementioned magnetic Paul Stanley feature, additional color-changing LEDs, and an additional bank of classic drop targets.
There’s no word yet on when KISS will be available for purchase (MSRP of recent standard model Stern machines is $5995), but you should be able to find a machine at your local pinball establishment (look 'em up!) in the future.
Demand for pinball continues to increase, and Stern recently announced a move into a larger facility. The resurgence of pinball in an era where video games are in every pocket isn’t at all surprising to Stern. Dankberg says, "Reality is the ultimate randomizer. In video games, it’s always the code is programmed. And although we do code our games with rules and licenses, no game is ever the same. You’ll never have the same experience twice." Stern adds, "as Harry Williams the [classic pinball] designer said, the ball is wild."
Samuel Claiborn is IGN's Managing Editor and a San Francisco Pinball Department league member. TCELES B HSUP to follow him @Samuel_IGN on Twitter and at Samuel-IGN on IGN.SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Five years ago, Justin Edmund arrived at Carnegie Mellon University, a floppy-haired freshman, with artistic talent and dreams of joining a venerable design firm like IDEO or Frog. But during his sophomore year, a recruiting pitch from a Facebook employee turned his head, and prompted a detour of his ambitions.
Facebook design chief Kate Aronowitz poses for a photograph at her desk at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California March 2, 2012. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
“It didn’t even occur to me that working at a tech company was something I could do,” Edmund said. “I switched my trajectory completely.”
So, in 2010, Edmund interned on Facebook’s burgeoning design team, and, after graduation, landed a job at Pinterest. There, at just 21, he has played a central role in building the virtual scrap-booking site into one of the hottest startups on the Internet.
Edmund isn’t alone. Inspired by the legacy of Steve Jobs and lured by the promise of the current tech boom, young designers are flocking to Silicon Valley, where they’re shaking up a scene long dominated by engineers and programmers.
The new breed of “user experience” designers - part sketch artist, part programmer, with a dash of behavioral scientist thrown in - are some of the most sought-after employees in technology. Entry-level interactive designers at startups are commanding salaries easily topping $80,000, almost twice the median pay for primarily print designers of about $45,000, according to a recent survey by the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
IN-HOUSE TALENT
Top venture capital firms, from Google Ventures to Andreessen Horowitz, are hiring in-house designers to help the young startups in their portfolios. One angel investor has even established a Designer Fund to identify startups driven by design talent.
To feed demand, new digital design programs have sprouted over the past two years, at both elite engineering universities such as Stanford, and art schools like the California College of the Arts. The School of Visual Arts in New York has seen applications for its digital design program soar by 43 percent since its inception in 2009.
Indeed, the flourishing of digital design reflects the Valley’s evolution, entrepreneurs and investors say.
In the latest generation of innovation, heavily concentrated in applications for mobile devices and social networks, and relying on ever-cheaper cloud-computing services, success depends not on whiz-bang technology, but rather, on a subtle sense of how to make features useful and engaging.
The most recent example is Instagram, the slick photo-sharing app that was snapped up by Facebook earlier this week for $1 billion. The 12-person company’s founding duo includes Kevin Systrom, who majored in Management |
ung Treng province.
While the discovery of 10 new calves gives environmentalists some hope for the species, the bodies of six dolphins were also discovered in 2016.
Irrawaddy dolphins are found in coastal areas in South and Southeast Asia, but they can only be found in three fresh-water rivers: the Ayeyarwady (Myanmar), the Mahakam (Indonesian Borneo) and the Mekong.
The Mekong River Irrawaddy dolphins inhabit a 118-mile stretch of the river between Cambodia and Laos.
If past is prologue, the 10 newly-discovered dolphins are in for a tough life as the threats they face are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Illegal fishing and the loss of habitat from the construction of the hydropower dams, mining and deforestation are among the main threats to the species survival.
The dolphin may be having a comeback in Cambodia, but the WWF claims the species is functionally extinct in Laos where gill nets are legal.
While finding the new dolphins is encouraging, WWF-Cambodia Country Director Chhith Sam Ath said they still need protection.
“WWF-Cambodia will continue to address the challenges of Mekong dolphin conservation with renewed hope and energy,” he said.
Earlier this month villagers near the Cheuteal transboundary pool between southern Laos and northern Cambodia’s Stung Treng province found that only three of the dolphins remained in the pool. Eight lived in the area in 2010.
Residents of the Preah Rumkel environmental community blamed the dolphins’ demise on the construction of the 260-megawatt Don Sahong Dam along the Mekong River in southern Laos. The dam site is less than a mile from the Cambodian border.
On Nov. 23, during a meeting in Siem Reap with leaders from Laos and Vietnam about development in the Golden Triangle area, Hun Sen said feasibility studies had been conducted and that the dam project would have no impact in terms of lack of water or fish migrations.
Civil society groups say the prime minister is turning a blind eye to other issues related to the dam's construction that are affecting thousands of people in the area.
Ek Chamroeun, coordinator of the Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT), a group of NGOs that advocate for fisheries issues and monitor policy reforms, earlier this month described the dam project as a disaster for food security.
“Though Hun Sen said there is no impact, we don’t agree with him,” he said. “We are concerned because we see the real impact on the communities regarding the dam project.”Los Angeles police are searching for a man accused of attempting to rob two banks before successfully robbing a third bank within an hour in Los Feliz.The first attempted robbery occurred at about 1:10 p.m. at a Chase Bank in the 1600 block of Vermont Avenue. The man wearing a ski mask allegedly handed a note to the teller demanding money, but was not successful.About 30 minutes later, he had changed his shirt and attempted to rob a Bank of America in the 4500 block of Franklin Avenue with the same method, but left without taking any moneyHe then moved on to a Citibank in the 1960 block of Hillhurst Avenue, where he was able to get away with an undisclosed amount of cash, police said.All three banks were within a mile from each other.No weapon was seen and no injuries were reported.By Avi Asher-Schapiro
When Mitch Hirsch went to the bank in May 2012, the teller delivered some unexpected news: the bank account he and his two brothers, Jeff and Richard, used to deposit the proceeds from their convenience store distribution business had been commandeered by the federal government.
Later that day, Mitch’s older brother Jeff got a letter from the IRS; it explained that the brothers’ pattern of making frequent and small deposits had drawn suspicion. The Hirsch brothers did business with small delis and gas stations, and often made cash deposits in their account. But the IRS apparently mistook these transactions for the behavior of a drug dealer or a terrorist trying to fly below the radar.
Mitchel’s older brother Jeff called the local joint-IRS task force in Nassau County, New York to clear up the misunderstanding. He even invited the detective in charge to come down to his warehouse and go through his business records. The detective, Jeff said, explained that it wasn’t his job to investigate any further — the pattern of deposits was all the evidence he needed.
The brothers were never charged with a crime nor accused of any wrongdoing. But it cost them tens of thousands of dollars, and over two years of fighting the IRS in court, to finally get the money returned.
“It was hell,” Jeff said. If it wasn’t for a the generosity of a friend who works in the candy distribution business — who let the brothers slide on a few late payments — Jeff said that his entire family would have gone bankrupt.
The Hirsch brothers’ ordeal is far from uncommon, according to a March 30 report from the Treasury Inspector General For Tax Administration (TIGTA), a government watchdog that oversees the IRS. Between 2012 and 2014, the IRS seized over $17 million from hundreds of small business owners like the Hirschs — whose only “crime” was making frequent cash deposits and withdrawals of under $10,000, which isn’t technically a crime at all.
Banks must report to the IRS all individual deposits, withdrawals or transfers of over $10,000; it’s illegal for anyone to structure multiple transactions of $10,000 or more in order to evade IRS attention, and banks are required to report if they think their customers are making many under-limit transactions to avoid triggering notification.
Still, drug dealers and other criminals often do to attempt to stay below the radar of law enforcement; former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was ensnared by the law (and pled guilty to violating it) when he made under-limit withdrawals to pay a man who had accused Hastert of sexual assaulting him. But, it’s also perfectly normal for small and medium-size business owners to make regular deposits under the $10,000 mark. In the Hirsch case, the brothers’ insurance company had actually asked them to make smaller deposits, Jeff Hirsch says, after they had been robbed on the way to the bank.
Federal law allows the IRS to freeze anyone’s assets it suspects of making evasive deposits, without requiring that they secure a criminal conviction or even conduct an investigation beyond examining the bank records. In other words, the IRS can — and does — empty some people’s bank accounts simply because the owners make deposits that fit a pattern that the government believes may resemble that of a drug dealer.
“They are supposed to be targeting people hiding criminal proceeds,” explained Robert Johnson, an attorney with the libertarian-leaning Institute for Justice who represented the Hirsch brothers. “But they are applying it to people who engaged in perfectly legal businesses.” The Institute has represented a number of people, including a Palestinian immigrant deli owner and a restaurateur in North Carolina, who all had to spend years fighting the IRS just to get their legally-acquired money back.
In one case, the IRS seized $33,000 from Carole Hinders, who had operated a small cash-only restaurant for 40 years in Arnold’s Park, Iowa, and made routine small deposits. “My mom had told me, if you keep your deposits under $10,000, the bank avoids paperwork,” she told the New York Times. “I didn’t actually think it had anything to do with the I.R.S.” In another instance, North Carolina convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan lost over $100,000 when the IRS seized his bank account in the summer of 2014.
“It took me 13 years to save that much money, and 13 seconds for the government to take it away,” he told the Washington Post.
And it’s not just that the IRS occasionally seizes the assets of innocent business owners by mistake and is unaware of the problems with its methodology: According to the TIGTA report, the IRS almost always misses the mark. The watchdog randomly selected 278 different cases in which the IRS emptied a bank account because it suspected illegal transaction structuring. In a full 91 percent of those cases, it turned out that the IRS had taken money from perfectly legal small businesses — farms, convenience stores, restaurants — that just so happened to withdraw money from the bank in a pattern that caught authorities’ attention.
“Most people impacted by the program did not appear to be criminal enterprises engaged in other alleged illegal activity,” the inspector general found, “rather, they were legal businesses such as jewelry stores, restaurant owners, gas station owners, scrap metal dealers, and others.”
In a response to the watchdog report, the IRS emphasized that it had been acting within the law. “Structuring violations are not required to be tied to illegal source funds,” wrote Richard Weber, the chief of criminal investigations at the IRS.
Here’s how a typical enforcement action is carried out, Johnson says. First, local police officials working with the IRS’s Criminal Investigations Unit pore through bank records, identifying what they think are suspicious transactions. Then they show those transactions to a federal magistrate, who can authorize the IRS to seize the bank accounts. The federal agents then confiscate the money from the bank, show up at the owner’s place of business, and inform them they’ve lost control of their accounts. Under the federal government’s “equitable sharing” program, the local police and the IRS can then split the money between themselves.
The burden is then on the original owner of the account to prove that his or her deposits were innocuous. Often, authorities will offer a deal to give back a portion of the money, if the original owner agrees to not request that the full amount be returned.
Hirsch said that the IRS offered to return all but $40,000 of his money. He instead hired a forensic accountant (for $20,000) to prove in court that he’d done nothing illegal. The IRS was forced to return his money in full in 2014.
Going after people like the Hirsch brothers was part of a strategy to extract as much cash as possible with minimal effort, the IG report alleges. Johnson, the attorney with the Institute for Justice, said that authorities often targeted people like Jeff — business owners who weren’t breaking any other laws, but were eager to get as much as their money back as quickly as possible.
The IG report bolsters Johnson’s claim: “One of the reasons why legal source cases were pursued was that the Department of Justice had encouraged task forces to engage in ‘quick hits,’ where property was more quickly seized and more quickly resolved through negotiation,” the report found, “rather than pursuing cases with other criminal activity (such as drug trafficking and money laundering), which are more time-consuming.” Weber, the IRS official, countered that the agency abandoned the practice of “quick hits,” in 2013.
The IRS is not the only government agency seizing people’s assets without any criminal proceedings. In March, the Inspector General of the Drug Enforcement Agency found that over the last decade the agency had taken $3.2 billion in cash from individuals who were never charged or convicted with a crimes.
Towards the end of the Obama administration, the Department of Justice moved to discourage asset forfeitures where no criminal conduct could be proven. In 2014, after a number of high-profile forfeitures incidents embarrassed the IRS, the agency announced it would curtail its use in cases in which the only cause for concern was how an individual made deposits and withdrawals. But, the practice is still technically legal.
For the last two legislative sessions, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) has been pushing a bill, the “Clyde-Hirsch-Sowers-RESPECT Act” — named after the Hirsch brothers and a number of other victims of IRS forfeiture — that would bar the agency from seizing cash unless authorities had probable cause that the cash was indeed involved in some sort of crime. “It’s clear to everyone involved that there was rampant abuse in the forfeiture program,” Roskam said in a statement. “The IRS and DOJ abused their authority and took money from people who did nothing wrong.”
His bill passed the House in 2016, but never came up for a vote in the Senate; he reintroduced it on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is still seemingly working out its position on asset forfeiture. At a meeting with local sheriffs in February, Trump appeared unaware of the rampant criticism of asset forfeiture programs. When Sheriff John Aubrey of Kentucky complained that the Obama administration had put some limits on seizing assets, Trump asked: “So what do you do? So in other words, they have a huge stash of drugs. So in the old days, you take it. Now we’re criticized if we take it. So who gets it? What happens to it? Tell them to keep it?”
Since cutting back on forfeiture in 2014, the IRS claims that it sent notices to 1,800 property owners who may have been inappropriately targeted by its actions, inviting them to file for the return of their property. Johnson, with the Institute for Justice, thinks the IRS could be doing more.
“We know the IRS is returning some cash, we don’t know how much and to how many people,” he said. “They need to return all of it.”[4:20 Reviews] LZ MX Mini
I like to start off the review with some high level basics about the keyboard for all the lazy stoners 🙂
Case Type: 2 piece aluminum case, aluminum plate and aluminum bar
2 piece aluminum case, aluminum plate and aluminum bar Keycaps: Dolch doubleshots with SP red Cherry keycap
Dolch doubleshots with SP red Cherry keycap Cabling/Wiring: Pink LEDs under Scroll Lock, Caps Lock and Pause/Break
Pink LEDs under Scroll Lock, Caps Lock and Pause/Break Other Aesthetics: N/A
N/A Switch and Modification: Cherry MX Reds with custom 62g springs and Cherry MX Black switch on the spacebar. Each individual switch is modified with lubricant on the friction points (slider, spring) and stickers applied between the housing.
But before we dive into the detailed jargon, let’s talk a little bit about the history and it’s case designer. Originally, the “MX Mini” was a community driven project on the Korean forums, much like many of the other Korean customs out there (KMAC, Cheat, 356-series, etc.). The initial release of the MX Mini included an acrylic/aluminum case, plate and PCB. As you’ll see, the layout is very similar to the Noppoo Choc Mini with some clear differentiation in switch positioning and key-unit spacing. Though, the MX Mini you see above only has the heart and internals of what we deemed the original, it was only a matter of time before people realized that they could start making their own cases…
LifeZone – Enteraka LZ –
LZ is a blogger and active KBD member who specializes in designing custom cases. Reusing the existing MX Mini PCB, LZ has masterfully crafted an anodized aluminum shell around it. From what I’ve seen, he has designed cases for A.87 PCBs as well such as the LZ-F, LZ 87 SE, LZ-S, etc. Essentially what you have here is somewhat of a frankenstein keyboard that most people simply refer to as LZ Mini or LZ MX Mini.
The PCB itself isn’t anything especially exciting. It’s one of the earlier designs in this fast paced world of Korean customs, but the layout and size is certainly something to be appreciative of. In fact, it’s very similar to the Noppoo Choc Mini with some minor differences. While my keycaps may be confusing, the column of keys all the way on the right are mapped as (from top to bottom): Pause/Break, Delete, Insert, Page Up, Page Down and Right Arrow. The reason why you’ll see strange keycaps in those positions is because I prefer a uniform profile per row, else my OCD starts whooping my ass!
Retail price for the LZ case, PCB and plate was roughly $300. At least that’s how much I paid and comparing average prices of other customs, it’s definitely in the right ballpark. Since it was so expensive, I commissioned the highly rated alaricjs from GH to do all the soldering work. I didn’t want to be reminded of that day I first got my KMAC! alaricjs did an excellent job, and kept me updated through the whole process. Professional, excellent work, friendly, consultative, detail oriented and FAST. Sounds like I’m leaving him an eBay review, but seriously, he’s awesome. If you ever need any work done, he is a great person to contact!
My LZ Mini is built with uniform 62g Cherry Red switches with the exception of the spacebar, which uses a Cherry Black stem and spring. Each switch was heavily modified by me with your typical stuff. Sliders were lubed with a Krytox grease/oil blend (203/103) and springs were oiled with Red Line 75W90 gear oil. Oh, and those damned stickers too!
This is my first experience with modified Reds and it feels really nice. Considering these were my favorite switches before I discovered ergo-Clears, it was certainly a nostalgic feel to type on. Reds in my opinion, should only be used to play games on. For fast paced, high APM games, Reds and Blacks are the most ideal switch. As I said in the Cheat review, it’s like riding the clutch on manual cars. It allows you full control of the actuation point for precision gaming. Planning to type with Reds? Get outta hereeee….but hey, that’s my opinion 🙂
One of the unique features about the newer LZ plates are that they utilize a design similar to the Phantom. It allows switch top housings to be removed easily, which is a modder’s dream! Imagine being able to sticker, lube, swap springs, stems and all that jazz without having to desolder a single switch. All you need are some binder clips or the_Beast’s housing removal tool.
One more thing I wanted to mention about the LZ Mini was it’s size. It fits perfectly into the bag that I received with the KMAC. And for this reason alone, it makes this keyboard my favorite “mini” keyboard!
Oh and one last picture for the road. A color comparison of the KMAC titanium versus the LZ Mini titanium for anyone wondering…
Hope you enjoyed it! Next up, the Phantom….dun dun dunAugust 31, 2017
How Jabhat al-Nusra Hijacked the Syrian Revolution By Abdullah Almousa
Battles between opposition groups in northern Syria have threatened the Syrian revolution and left Jabhat al-Nusra (now part of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) in control of Aleppo and Idlib; how did that happen?When the Syrian revolution first turned into an armed struggle, the fight was carried out by armed groups operating under the flag of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). But that changed as a multitude of armed groups came onto the scene, including Islamist. A new phase of factionalism began as political rivalries emerged. Each group fought for control of territory and vied to govern liberated areas in order to stake its claim and make a name for itself. This fighting has ranged from minor clashes quickly resolved through traditional social channels or interventions by elders and religious figures, to targeted campaigns aimed at removing a particular armed group and seizing its territories, bases, arsenals, and ammunitions stores.Jabhat al-Nusra, under its various names, began its attacks on FSA factions with an assault on the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front in late 2014. It went on to destroy at least ten more factions, finally doing away with Ahrar Al-Sham in July this year. Nusra adopted several key strategies in its attacks against opposition groups:First, Nusra’s successful use of strategic military operations against the regime garnered local support despite its ruthless tacticsNusra knew Syrians were desperate for victories against regime forces and hoped the regime could be beaten militarily, or that their villages and towns could be liberated to pave the way for a return home. The public therefore often ignored Nusra’s negative aspects. The group used tactics such as car bombs against regime forces and proved its effectiveness by winning several battles when the regime’s lines of defense had strengthened and the Syrian opposition’s light and medium weaponry was no longer effective. The group also exploited the military expertise of foreign fighters in its ranks, who had taken part in hundreds of battles in other parts of the world, which earned the group the privilege of commanding battles. The Jaysh al-Fateh alliance, formed later, also won resounding victories against the regime. Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani insisted his group should lead the coalition, giving the Syrian public the impression that its achievements belonged to Nusra, even though many other factions provided fighters, heavy equipment, and specific heavy ammunition that Nusra was lacking. This weaponry had as much of an impact on the outcome of the battles as the car bombs. Nusra followed each attack against a Syrian opposition faction with a military operation against regime forces to distract attention from its actions.Second, Nusra’s military effectiveness and centralized system of command solidified its strong position. Jolani is more determined than other factions that his initiative survives. He is more aware, more effective and better able to exploit the situation for his own ends as well as quicker at taking hard decisions. He knew that his initiative could not carry on and be effective unless it was centralized, despite Nusra’s lack of cohesion and the struggles of various factions within it. He has however been able to standardize its official discourse and exert control, setting up the so-called Nusra Army as a centralized strike force made up of carefully selected, highly trained fighters who have proven their loyalty to Jolani.Third, the success of the Jihadist discourse and how it helped Nusra attract elite fighters is key to its strategy. When it first formed, Nusra worked hard to recruit elite fighters from other factions, which has been successful. Some of its major military victories are due to it elite fighters. It has fed its fighters Salafist-Jihadist rhetoric through a network of Sharia bases which also promote this discourse in local Syrian society. This systemic and structured propaganda is so effective that a religious ruling by Nusra’s Sharia emir is accepted without question by these fighters, even if it calls for them to wage war on other factions.Fourth, other factions’ lack of organization and rivalry between them contributed to Nusra’s success by positioning them as a functioning alternative. Jolani exploited the relatively weak organization of opposition factions and the rivalries between them, especially between factions that share joint control of certain areas. In such cases he has signed a deal with one faction to attack the other, or at least ensure that one faction stands aside while Jolani attacks its rival. Next, he attacks the faction that had remained neutral or whose help he sought, finally placing Nusra in sole control of the area. He has also made use of the presence of what he calls “corrupters” within the ranks of opposition factions. Some factions have individuals with bad reputations in their ranks, but have not been able to discipline them due to lack of internal organization. This causes bitterness in the surrounding society. Jolani has justified many of his attacks on opposition factions by saying they were carried out in order to detain “corrupters.”Fifth, Nusra is very thorough and strategic in planning its attacks. Nusra’s attacks on other factions have not been in reaction to a specific event, but were rather based on months of detailed military planning, during which Nusra studied its victim’s leadership and made use of its own intelligence service to gather detailed information about the group’s bases, stores, supply lines and deployments as well as its level of popularity. Jabhat al-Nusra attempts to find any gap that may help it in its strategy. Many rebel factions have been unable to defend themselves from attacks by the group, which has a presence in most areas.Sixth, the pragmatism and use of revolutionary messaging by Nusra keeps it relevant to the local population. When the Syrian public realized the danger posed by Jabhat al-Nusra and the fact it could bring an end to the revolution, Jolani broke ties with al-Qaeda and announced in a series of statements that he had no objection to integrating with other rebel factions in a single military and political entity, using revolutionary and nationalist phrases the group had not previously used or had banned on the grounds of apostasy.Seventh, Nusra’s targeted and professional use of social media and creating an electronic army ensured its messaging spread as well as its military victories. Jabhat al-Nusra is well aware of the role social media has played in promoting the Syrian revolution to the masses. The group has used such platforms to promote jihadist ideology among the Syrian people as well as those from outside Syria who have taken an interest in the revolution. These tools have become a source of local news available to all. The collapse of communication networks means many would be unaware of what is happening in neighboring areas were it not for social media. Jabhat al-Nusra has an electronic army of Twitter and Facebook users able to transmit its messages, as well as publishing rumors, covering up real events and spreading news of Nusra’s victories along with cutting-edge multimedia content.As for how Jabhat al-Nusra dealt with Ahrar al-Sham, Jolani used new tactics for getting rid of the rival movement. It worked hard to attract Ahrar’s first and second-tier leaders, exploiting the similarities between their ideologies and using a policy of keeping certain areas out of the battle. Jolani sent representatives to pressure the group into local ceasefire deals, selecting areas where Ahrar al-Sham has the upper hand in terms of numbers and control. After the battles, it reneges on these deals and takes control of areas Ahrar covered.Jolani’s ruthless strategy has not only ensured Nusra’s domination of Idlib, but also that removing him would be no small task. Nusra has driven out the rest of the opposition and made itself the only alternative to the regime in these areas giving it a level of public support that ISIS in the East does not enjoy.is a researcher and military analyst with four years of experience. Currently, he works as a manager for Hooz. He previously worked as a field officer for international organizations in Syria.Vicla style motorcycles were born from the Mexican Lowrider scene in the US. They’re completely blinged out pavement pounders that are all about personalisation. They’re none too common on Aussie roads however, but Smith Concepts and their mate Rob have chucked their own interpretation of this niche style bike onto the roads of Australia – just make sure you’ve got your sunnies on.
For some time now, Kyle and Rob had been talking about building a bike together, with this particular Mexican Lowrider style in mind. This is a bike you’ll find not too uncommon in the US from Texas to California but scarcely here, so when the bike that would be their blank canvas first popped up on eBay they jumped at the chance to get started. It would then receive the special treatment Smith Concepts are famous for, with some new bling parts to complete the Cholo look.
This is a bike that has had every part of it turned up to 11. The 18 inch ape hangers will give your stinky pits plenty of air riding this bling beast around. The rear is equipped with an air bag that makes the low rider stance super low; ants will have to duck to get under this thing. The bars are high and the bottom is low – everything has been exaggerated.
The incredible custom paintwork by Smith Concepts displays a different look depending the way the light hits it. The more light that shines on it, the more you’ll find. Though this was a joint venture, Rob admits his part was somewhat less time consuming “ Personally, I did bugger all except go to the ATM to withdraw money haha! Kyle ripped the bike apart and then resprayed it with the amazing paintwork you see today. Flake, gold leaf and pin striping, the man’s a genius.” From here some new fish tail pipes would be added to give a low, long sweeping profile to the otherwise high bars that stand out at the front of the bike.
“The paint is what makes this bike in my opinion. From every angle here is something new to look at, and in the sun it looks insane. Adding the air bag to the back gives it the cool low rider stance we were after which then contrasts with the 18” ape hangers which makes it look even lower. The other part I love about this bike is that some people hate it while others love it – that’s what good motorcycle design is in my opinion.”
‘El Lujo’ is for sale, so if you want a piece of ultra-bling Click Here.Yes, I’ll get to the Weaver no-hitter in a minute. But it’s already an HBT top story and we have some supporting stuff too. And besides, there was some clairvoyance going on last night too, and that’s way more rare than a no-no, so first:
Braves 15, Phillies 13: Dudes, not gonna lie. I turned this game off when it was 5-0 Phillies and Halladay was on the mound because 99% of the time, that’s over. So instead I chatted online with my girlfriend and watched a couple season 2 episodes of “Louie.” Including the one with the duckling in Afghanistan which was awesome, right? Of course.
So, Louie ends and I go to the scoreboard to see how badly the Braves lost and I see that — shock! — it’s 13-13 in the 11th inning. To the Roku player! I turn it on and Chipper Jones is batting against Brian Sanches. This is my chat log with my girlfriend, unedited. Apologies for the language, but it was the heat of the moment:
Me: Holy f**k, what the f**k happened in the Braves game. I started ignoring it when it was 5-0 Phillies. Now it’s 13-13, hahaha
Allison: oh my god i had no idea??
Me: Looks like the wildest thing ever
Allison: couple of Phillies fans i know havent tweeted much
Me: I’m hoping Chipper hits a walkoff two run homer here
Me: S**t he almost did. Just foul
Allison: haha aw
Allison: No f*****g way??
Me: I f*****g called that!
Allison: Hahahaha this chat log better make the blog too
Me: Oh yeah
So yeah. I called it. If “hoping” counts as calling it, which I think it does. If not, I at least willed it. Anyway, the Braves’ mostly-dead third baseman is better than your third baseman, so there.
Angels 9, Twins 0: Jered Weaver: no hitter. Drew had the details last night. And yes, it counts even though it came against the Twins. The best part of it: the lengths to which the Angels broadcasters went to avoid mentioning the fact that he actually had a no-hitter going until the game actually ended. They’re so cute.
Rockies 8, Dodgers 5: Chipper wasn’t the only old man to hit a walkoff homer. Jason Giambi did too, and his was a three-run job. Carlos Gonzalez hit two homers of his own as Clayton Kershaw was rocked in Denver.
Cardinals 12, Pirates 3: A really nice night for older, often-gimpy players: Carlos Beltran had two homers and seven RBI. Also, there was a kind of beauty in A.J. Burnett’s pitching line. Just the numbers themselves, I mean: 2.2 12 12 12 1 2 2. I’m assuming Pirates fans feel differently about that.
Cubs 3, Reds 1: You can’t stop Bryan LaHair, you can only hope to contain him. He hit a homer and now sits at.381/.459/.794 on the season with six bombs.
Indians 6, White Sox 3: Johnny Damon lead off, went 0 for 3 and left early with cramping. Didn’t matter, though, because Travis Hafner and Carlos Santana went yard. Adam Dunn hit a homer too.
Rays 5, Mariners 4: James Shields became the first five game winner in the AL, and struck out 11 Mariners. It wasn’t perfect — he gave up four runs in six innings — but he had homers from Sean Rodriguez and Luke Scott backing him. That’s 10 of 11 for the red-hot Rays.
Athletics 4, Red Sox 2: Brandon McCarthy explained after the game how seeing Jarrod Parker tie up the Red Sox the night before helped him visualize success against them last night:
“If anything, it gives you the confidence that you’re not facing a team that scored a bunch of runs,” McCarthy said of watching his teammate’s success the previous game. “When you see someone go out there, throw strike one, with good location, I think it can give you the confidence that it can be done.”
Based on that, I’m taking the hill tonight. I’ll watch the Parker game three times if I have to. I know I can do it.
Nationals 5, Diamondbacks 4: Ian Desmond hit a walkoff homer. Bryce Harper went 3 for 4 with two doubles and an RBI and made a barehanded catch in the outfield after he stumbled. More importantly, the Nats snapped a five game losing streak. Exciting stuff going down in the District.
Orioles 5, Yankees 0: OK, seriously Orioles, cut it out. The joke has gone on long enough. That “hee hee, look at at compete” thing is starting to make everyone a little nervous, so whenever you’re ready, please return to being the division doormat, OK? Anyone? Folks, I’m not sure that they’re listening. Jake Arrieta, eight innings of shutout ball.
Padres 5, Brewers 0: Jeff Suppan won his first game since 2010, shutting out his old team for five innings. I’d call it “The Revenge of Jeff Suppan,” but I’m not sure that the Brewers did anything that warranted vengeance.
Royals 3, Tigers 2: Hit this up yesterday. The Tigers are gonna wake up soon, right?
Blue Jays 11, Rangers 5: Edwin Encarnacion continues to abuse baseballs. He hit a three-run jack — check out how beautiful it was — and Kelly Johnson hit one too. Just as disaster of a series for Texas.
Astros 8, Mets 1: Chris Johnson: two homers, four hits, six RBI. This is the Astros third baseman, by the way. Not the Chris Johnson I went to GW law school with and who was a former colleague of mine back at the Ohio law firm. Totally different dude.
Marlins 3, Giants 2 : Carlos Zambrano shut out the Giants for seven. And, amazingly, Barry Zito’s new marriage didn’t cause him to maintain his pitching success. He walked seven dudes in three and two-thirds innings and needed over 90 pitches to get that far. But then the ninth inning came and Heath Bell came in and he, once again, didn’t have it, and the Giants tied it up. Never fear, though: Giancarlo Stanton had it: homer in the 10th to win it.The demonstrations, which follow days of unrest in which dozens of people have been killed after the government cut fuel and cooking gas subsidies on Monday, echo Arab Spring movements seen elsewhere in the region.
Four protesters were shot dead by unidentified gunmen on Friday, police said, bringing the official death toll to 33.
In Khartoum's Burri district, home to a top government official, more than 1,000 people gathered for the funeral of one of the victims, Salah Sanhuri, a doctor from a prominent merchant family with strong ties to the government.
More than 2,000 people joined the funeral procession, shouting, "Freedom, freedom," and "The people want to overthrow the regime", blocking a main road, witnesses said.
On Friday, more than 5,000 people demonstrated in Khartoum, the biggest turnout in central Sudan for many years. Its borderlands have grappled with insurgencies for decades but the relatively wealthy heartland has seen little turmoil in the recent past.
Police said in a statement unknown gunmen had opened fire on a group of protesters on Friday, killing four people.
Khartoum has been brimming for days with armed civilians and security personnel carrying rifles, patrolling streets in broad daylight and manning rooftops. Opposition activists have accused Bashir's National Congress Party of vandalism and of arming militias to turn the public against the protesters.
Bashir, who seized power in a 1989 coup, has not faced the sort of Arab Spring uprising that unseated autocratic rulers from Tunisia to Yemen since 2011, but anger has risen over corruption and rising inflation in the vast African country.
He has stayed in power despite rebellions, U.S. trade sanctions, an economic crisis, an attempted coup last year and an indictment from the International Criminal Court for war crimes. He still enjoys support from the army, his ruling party and many business men.
The subsidy cuts have been driven by a severe financial crunch since the secession of oil-producing South Sudan in 2011, which deprived Khartoum of three-quarters of the crude output it relied on for state revenues and food imports.
Amnesty International and the New York-based African Center for Justice and Peace Studies said at least 50 people had been killed by gunshots to the chest or head by Thursday night, citing witnesses, relatives, doctors and journalists.Isn’t it amazing how all these militant atheists end up with God complexes? In the last instalment of my series looking at celebrity atheist drum-beaters who pass themselves off as “scientists,” I looked at Neil deGrasse Tyson, a progressive icon who puts even my own attention-seeking to shame. Today, I’ll be ruining your childhood with a deconstruction of Bill Nye.
Let’s get this out of the way at once. Bill Nye’s primary qualification for being “The Science Guy” is that his last name rhymes with the phrase. I like to imagine some brilliant scientist named Phil Frye drunkenly ranting in a bar: “It should have been me!”
Nye’s most “sciencey” qualification is an undergrad degree in mechanical engineering. One would hope that one of the world’s foremost finger-waggers on climate change would have at least spent some of his precious carbon footprint earning a Masters, or even stretched himself for a dubious doctorate like Tyson, but alas, no.
Still, it’s a welcome relic of the 1990s that they at least found a STEM major to be “The Science Guy.” His successor will surely be a feminist art history major, or perhaps even a fat studies graduate. After all, as Nye would surely agree, facts are just a construction of the patriarchy designed to keep women and ethnic minorities down.
After a career in aerospace, where he admirably made things and improved the world by enabling jet travel — well before his |
land managers, like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, in exchange for the land that rests above the copper stores.
The land parcels are scattered across the state near places like Payson, Cave Creek and Mammoth. The parcels make up about 5,300-acres in total. After the swap, Resolution would own about 2,400-acres of land, including Oak Flat, according to the forest service website.
But the mine is projected to affect nearly 7,000-acres of surface land, according to the forest service website. It would extend 7,000-feet below the surface and be labeled as the largest copper mine in the United States, leaving behind a 1,000-foot deep crater, according to Resolution’s website.
Resolution Copper spokesman Bill Tanner declined several interview requests, referring Cronkite News to its website for information.
A “bipartisan group of leaders,” “local communities” and Resolution officials came together to decide which lands would go to public land managers, according to their website.
Equal value
A government appraiser will be jointly selected by the forest service and Resolution to evaluate and determine if the proposed lands are of “equal value” while abiding by nationally recognized standards.
If the appraiser concludes that the lands are not of “equal value,” Resolution will have to give up more land or pay the federal government to make up the difference, according to the forest service website.
The selection process for the appraiser is under way and the evaluation is expected to begin in 2017, Scaggs said.
Cultural objections
Wendsler Nosie Sr., councilman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, said in terms of cultural value, the other land parcels don’t fit the bill. Nosie Sr. is also a representative of the Apache-Stronghold, an organization opposed to the proposed mine.
“In ancient times and today, references to Oak Flat can be heard in our songs, rituals, teachings and language,” he said. “Understand that any land base is important because there’s purpose to each of them, but Oak Flat is everything that makes us who we are.” He called the mine the “genocide of our religion.”
Nosie Sr. said if Christians wanted to explore the depths of their religion, they can go to Europe where preserved buildings and monuments stand today — Oak Flat is symbolically identical and future generations wouldn’t be able to connect to it if its altered.
One of the parcels Resolution is proposing is a section of Apache Leap — a historically known jagged cliff near the town of Superior. In the late 1800s, members of the Apache Tribe plummeted off of it, greeting death, rather than being captured by U.S. Cavalry, according to a reflection of an article, “The Legend of how Apache Leap got its name.”
“We respect the importance of the Oak Flat area to many Native American people, and have committed to give the public access to the Oak Flat campground for as long as it is safe,” Resolution’s website says. “We hope we can work with neighboring Native American tribes by answering and addressing their concerns.”
Public exception
If the swap occurs, the land parcels would be considered “public” while under the ownership of public land managers, but one parcel would remain mostly off-limits to public recreation.
The Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch, an affiliate of Audubon Arizona, conducts research and preserves grassland ecosystems and manages 940-acres owned by Resolution. The research ranch manages 8,000-acres, according to their website.
After the swap, all that would change is ownership, said Sonia Perillo, Audubon Arizona’s executive director. The 940-acres would continue to be used for conservation purposes on behalf of the research ranch.
With permission, the general public can access a limited number of roads and trails, according to the ranch’s website.
Robin Silver, co-founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, committed to preserving wildlife and habitats on the brink of extinction, opposes the land exchange and mining in Oak Flat.
“The American public is getting ripped off,” Silver said. “The only land that is of value is the research center’s because it hasn’t been overgrazed, but it’s of no value to the general public because it wouldn’t be open to them, unlike Oak Flat that offers recreational opportunities to the public and is of cultural value to Native Americans,” Silver said.
According to Resolution’s website, the parcels they are proposing to trade are home to archaeological sites, destinations for rock climbers and nature trails.
How the parcels would be managed would be up to its prospective owners — the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.
Environmental
Resolution included lands that are of “high-priority (for) conservation,” according to the forest service.
One parcel includes seven-miles of the San Pedro River that would become part of the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. Other parcels include creeks, wetlands, and an abundant amount of wildlife, according to Resolution.
Perillo said Audubon Arizona officials agree the proposed lands are valuable for preservation but question the environmental consequences of mining in Oak Flat.
During a period the forest service accepted public comments and letters in reference to the mine, Audubon Arizona raised concerns about threatened and endangered species, water quantity and quality, and the tailings pile, the pile of leftover rock particles once copper is extracted.
Resolution’s website says company officials would protect plants and animals by “removing vegetation only when it is absolutely necessary” and “using covers and containers to keep birds and other animals out of areas of the mine where they could be injured.”
Nosie Sr. fears water could become contaminated.
“Beneath the surface, everything is intertwined,” he said. “It’s not just Oak Flat. Water in the valley and across the state will be affected.”
Nosie Sr. said the tribe and its lawyers are working with the forest service to address concerns.
Resolution’s website says company officials will reclaim the land after the mining operation is complete to replant vegetation and ensure land and water are “safe.”
The mine would take ten years to build, would operate for 40 years, and then about 5 to 10 years for reclamation, according to the forest service website.
The mining operation is estimated to create 52,000 local jobs and push billions of dollars into the state’s economy, according to Resolution’s website.
Public comment
The forest service is completing an environmental impact statement, a mandatory document under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. The statement process includes accepting public comments and analyzing potential positive and negative environmental changes because of the proposed mine.
The completed statement would guide mining operation and outline other federal actions to protect the environment, Scaggs said.
Photo credits in map:
Turkey Creek: Photo by The Old Pueblo via Creative Commons
Cave Creek: Photo by The Real Cloud2013 via Creative Commons
East Clear Creek: Photo by Brady Smith of Coconino National Forest via Creative Commons
Apache Leap: Photo by ArizonaLincoln/HoppingRabit34 via Public Domain
San Pedro River: Photo by The Old Pueblo via Creative CommonsPosted by Ted Fleming on February 18, 2016
You know the films. You know the actors, the actresses and the directors. But do you know the non-alcoholic beers behind the scenes: Jekyll Island Lager, Heisler, FG, Cerveza Clara, O'Farren or Bilson? I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't because these beers are reserved exclusively for A-List celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio in 'The Wolf of Wall Street', Andrew Garfield in 'The Social Network', Juliana Marguiles in 'The Good Wife', Earl Hickey in 'My Name is Earl', and Nick Offerman and Amy Poehler in 'Parks and Recreation'.
And it turns out that all these brands are owned by the same company - which isn't a brewery at all. The brands come from Independent Studio Services (ISS), a prop house in California that has build a business in the growing world of food and drink props.
So why the need for fake beer brands in the movies and TV? It all started with the wide adoption of HDTV and DVRs that allowed people to pause TV in HD and pick apart all the tiny visual details from the set including the packaging of any snacks and beverages used. Using real brands put shows at risk of lawsuits from the brand owners if not used in a positive light - which wouldn't always agree with the scripts. It also made it difficult for TV networks to sell ads to competing brands.
Over the course of many years ISS has designed many custom beer labels as well as a slew of ready-made labels used extensively in the industry to the point where an avid TV watcher may make the connection that characters Nick Swanson (Parks and Recreation) and Alicia Florrick (The Good Wife) enjoy the same beer (FG) albeit on different shows. The use of these brands across different shows provides a more seamless experience for the viewer.
And the taste? Well that's hard to say, unless you can get an interview with Amy Poehler and ask her about the flavor profile of Penzberg Lager, because the studio doesn't actually brew, bottle, or can any beer. The labels developed are pasted onto cans or bottles of existing non-alcoholic beer or water depending on the need of the show. If the scene calls for a beer being poured into a glass then it may be a Texas Select with a Cerveza Clara label on the bottle but if a character is just sipping from a can then it's likely filled with water.
No matter the contents of the can or bottle the job of the prop master is for the prop to blend into the background and be as unobtrusive to the scene as possible. If people watching the shows are paying attention to the beer labels, besides beer geeks like me, then the prop master and studio have likely not done their job. That being said the choice of label is not taken lightly as it can cause viewing friction if the beer a character is drinking is not consistent with the image of that character. Would this character be drinking a mass market light beer, a premium import or a craft beer are just a few of the questions a prop master might consider before choosing the right beer prop.
So when you watch the Oscars, go to the movies or sit down to watch your favorite television show just sit back and let the props help immerse you in the story.
If you're a prop master looking for specialty non-alcoholic beer, wine, cider, or spirits for a show you're working on Premium Near Beer can help.An illegal alien who killed two women in a drunken hit-and-run in Louisville, Ky. in October has been deported eight times, the Justice Department revealed on Wednesday.
Miguel Angel Villasenor-Saucedo, 40, was driving a truck on the night of Oct. 22 when he hit and killed two women who were on the side of a highway in Louisville following a traffic accident. After striking the women, the Mexican national fled the scene on foot.
He has not been apprehended, but a federal grand jury indicted him this week for illegal re-entry after deportation. Villasenor-Saucedo was last deported from the U.S. on May 13, 2013, the Justice Department said.
If convicted of illegal re-entry, the illegal alien faces a maximum penalty of two years in prison.
Villasenor-Saucedo’s full criminal record has not been made public. But federal court documents reviewed by The Daily Caller show that he was apprehended twice within six days in 2011 after he illegally crossed the Rio Grande River into Texas.
He was picked up by border patrol agents on Nov. 6, 2011 after he rafted across the river near Hidalgo and again on Nov. 12, 2011 after wading across near La Gloria, Tex.
On June 14, 2012, he was apprehended after rafting across the river again. And several months later, on Sept. 25, 2012, border patrol agents picked Villasenor-Saucedo up after he waded across the river near Brownsville.
In some of those cases, he was ordered held for as many as 60 days in jail and given a small fine.
Follow Chuck on TwitterT he recent death of Andrea Dworkin didn’t even make the small print news in Russia. Feminism, at least the feminism of the kind Westerners take for granted, never caught on. Patronizing Westerners often see that as a sign that Russians are culturally too primitive. Russians, particularly Russian women — and particularly the Russian female intelligentsia — literally laugh and roll their eyes when you mention feminism of the American or West European brand. The reason is fairly simple: Russians haven’t quite learned the Western art of sloganeering for radical philosophy without meaning a word of what they say. A Russian woman would assume that if you’re a feminist, you’d actually have to live out the philosophy. In that sense, Andrea Dworkin was, in her own way, the only “Russian” feminist in America — and that is why she was so hated.
There was a strange undertone of smug satisfaction in the obituaries for Andrea Dworkin. The fact that she died relatively young, at 58, got a lot of space, followed by long descriptions of her obesity and the medical problems that supposedly resulted from it. In other words, she was fat, fat, fat. Case closed.
Then there were her stories of rape and abuse, which theLondon Times called “probability-defying.” American papers were more sly and cowardly, of course, but managed to imply that she was crazy as well as fat.
Feminists more comfortable in the meanstream had some very strange comments on her. Elaine Showalter, a sleek Princeton gender commissar, said, “I don’t wish Andrea Dworkin any harm, but I doubt that many women will get up at 4 am to watch her funeral.”
If you know anything about the verbal habits of upper-echelon academics, this is easy to translate: “Die, you bitch! Shut up and die so I can dance on your XL grave!”
I can’t recall so much barely-concealed delight in a celebrity death since Sam Kinison was wiped out by a couple of drunken kids in a pickup. He had it coming, the papers of record informed us; he too was fat and crazy and said things you’re not supposed to say about women.
Dworkin’s fatness and madness hardly disqualify her from intellectual distinction. If we excluded the fat and/or crazy from recent intellectual history, we’d be left with a very bland, Clinton-style consensus. And that, of course, is the goal, the point of these non sequiturs. They’re great for dismissing loud, unbroken voices. American academics have a habit of skipping to the slur with disconcerting speed, as I found out a couple of years ago when I mentioned my love for Wallace Stevens’ poetry to a Film professor. She winced, then said, “Wasn’t he a racist?”
She didn’t really know or care whether Stevens was a racist. As I realized later, that wince meant that she hadn’t read Stevens, didn’t want to be shown up and so had simply reached for the nearest available non sequitur. The notion that Stevens might be a racist AND a great poet, just as Dworkin might be a fat loon AND a crucial figure in feminist intellectual history, is simply beyond our Beige compatriots.
The habit has sifted so far down it’s affected the dialogue of disaster films, as I noticed while watching a bunch of unconvincingly attractive pseudo-nerds try to survive the fastest Ice Age ever in theDay After Tomorrow. There’s a great scene where a male and female nerd, stranded in the NYC Public Library, are arguing about whether to burn Beyond Good and Evil for warmth. The guy says, “Nietzsche was the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century!” The woman replies, “Nietzsche was a chauvinist who was in love with his sister!” It gave me a nightmare vision of what Lite Beer Super Bowl ads will be like in a few years, after everybody and their dog has been to grad school.
In the mating rituals of healthy people — that is, people who aren’t like Andrea Dworkin — these stylized collisions about ideology, usually personified by clashes about an historical figure, are usually no more than flirtation. That’s literally true in Day After Tomorrow; in the last scene of the movie, the male and female nerd are holding hands in the rescue helicopter, their Nietzsche dispute remembered, if at all, as the first scene of a third-hand screwball comedy they’re using as their romance template.
We’re supposed to know that you don’t take it seriously — you don’t live as you speak. What I revere about Dworkin is that she never realized that. Dworkin is hated so intensely simply because she accepted first-wave feminism fully. She blurted naively the implications of that ideology. And that appalled and embarrassed millions of smoother women, who liked the cool, fashionable tune feminism gave their bitching but had never had any intention of letting it get in the way of their romantic career plans.
I remember, ladies. I was there — at Berkeley in the 70s. And I was like Dworkin, a naive loser from a family which actually lived the ideology it claimed. Hers was the classic east-coast Jewish progressive tradition; mine was the most severe, self-flagellating brand of Irish Catholicism. The common denominator was the lack of compromise. Dworkin had a great line on this: “I don’t find compromise unacceptable, I find it incomprehensible.”
When she came of age, feminists like Steinem were speaking in the rhetoric of third-world national-liberation movements. Their case was simple and unassailable: women were oppressed, the biggest and most deeply, ubiquitously abused ‘minority’ on the planet. It was a view so simple that an intellect as subhuman as Yoko Ono was capable of absorbing it and translating it into “Woman is the nigger of the world.”
The difference is that Yoko would never have dreamed of letting her revelation get in the way of her relationship with that mangy meal ticket of hers, John. He was the reason she was able to get her 20-minute yodels on wax, baby. No way was she going to ditch him. Being the ultimate groupie, trading sex (let’s just move right along rather than get into what “sex” meant for John and Yoko) for money and fame had nothing to do with that line about women as niggers.
But there were people like me who’d been raised all wrong, who didn’t know any better, who actually believed that Steinem’s essays, which we had to read in our Norton Anthology, implied a code of conduct. And above all, that meant that man/woman mixing was going to come to a grinding halt. It was, according to the national-liberation model, fraternizing with the enemy. People were garroted for that kind of thing in places like Algeria, and Frantz Fanon had told us all how glorious it was that revolutionary piano wire was used to enforce this Spartan revolutionary separatism.
In my book Pleasant Hell I describe at length how I drifted sadly around the Berkeley campus in the 70s, convinced that everyone there was as bitterly lonely as I, and that this was simple historical necessity. And how shocked I was, happening to walk across campus at a later hour one night, to realize that men and women still fraternized with a vengeance once the sun went down. This may sound silly, but it was the biggest surprise of my life, and my introduction to the sleazy agility with which normal Americans dodge the inconvenient implications of the ideologies they mouth during the day.
Dworkin took the same Norton Anthology truisms to their obvious, clear, unbearable conclusions. If women were an oppressed group on the model of Fanon’s Algerians, Ho’s Vietnamese or Yoko’s “niggers,” then the steps to a revolutionary cleansing were simple:
1. The oppressed minority must re-learn history and re-evaluate society in order to see the horrors beneath the facade of normalcy.
In 70s campus feminism, this meant getting excited about footbinding, bar-b-que’d witches, and then acquiring a proper alienation from standard male-female interaction. In other words, learn all of the horrible oppressions males have unleashed upon women, and then cite the examples as reasons why you hate men and demand a fundamental change in the relationship.
This, comrades, was the tricky part. What Dworkin’s simple, loyal, canine mind could never grasp was that for a sly player like Steinem, this first stage of the process was fine, no matter how violent the denunciation of men and patriarchy became. Why not? As long as one didn’t let it interfere with one’s life (Steinem’s relationships with a series of male billionaires, for example), then Hell — the more violent the denunciation, the better!
Because — and this was another wrinkle I, like Dworkin, was far too naive to grasp — most meanstream men were in on the joke too. They were, in fact, more aware of what a joke it was than the young women students who in many cases, truly thought they believed their own clenched-fist chantings. The male response to 70s feminism was horror from old fools like Mailer, but a tolerant smile from the cool dudes whose job it was to disarm and fuck the feisty ladies. Their stance was a slightly more subtle, coy version of “you’re so cute when you’re mad, honey.”
2. The oppressed minority must mobilize, replacing its colonial relationship with the oppressors with ties to comrades among the oppressed.
What this meant for a “sane” or normal 70s woman depended on the degree of identification with the movement. At least, it meant lip service to a female version of “bros before ho’s” — high-profile socializing with female friends, during which male company was noisily disparaged. (This type of socializing, of course, was already a common habit of middle-class female socializing; giving it an ideological cast was simply a matter of replacing a few jargon terms.)
At most, it meant lip service of another sort: the big plunge into lesbianism. If you wanted to be a professional activist, you had to make the jump. A Women’s Studies lecturer I knew said a colleague once told her outright, “You’ll never have any street cred, Jennifer, because you don’t sleep with women.” For meanstreamers, the lesbian allegiance was all anyone could ever be asked to give; it was, in fact, more than most were willing to make. All you really needed to do was grit your tongue and give it a try — a rite of passage, a gesture of solidarity. After that you could get back to planning your wedding. That’s why the university lesbian interlude has been compressed into mock acronyms like BUG, “bisexual until graduation.”
But even full-time dyking around had little to do with the original model, the Fanon national-liberation rhetoric. He and Ho and Che didn’t advocate fucking other proletarians; they were in favor of wiping out the Other, the Oppressor. Fucking other revolutionaries was, if anything, a dubious way to spend time owed the Revolution.
Which brings us to Dworkin’s sexual orientation. If she was a lesbian, she was the worst I ever saw. And I should know — read my book. She called herself a lesbian, but then she also called herself a celibate. Even Morrissey would be scratching his head at that point. And besides, once the term acquired a positive connotation, everybody was a lesbian — Jane Fucking Austen was a card-carrying dyke, according to the ideologically-correct journals. Men at UC Berkeley who were cool but still wanted to fuck women took to calling themselves “male lesbians.” I don’t want to dwell on this; it wasn’t a great moment in American culture.
The point is that Dworkin never offered the world a significant other of the proper gender. Instead, she lived openly with…a man. I don’t mean to dwell on such sordid things, but it’s a matter of public record. The point was that they didn’t fuck.
And in this, once again she was a good orthodox Fanon/Guevara feminist. For the revolutionary, the point is not to screw in your own class but to stop getting it on with the enemy. And this was something America’s avid, proud young lesbians-until-that-first-big-job never, never promised to do. They’d made their point by licking girls; after that, they had every intention of fucking, or as Dworkin would insist, getting fucked by men.
For Fanon and the rest, any interaction between the Oppressor and the Oppressed is to the disadvantage of the Oppressed. That’s axiomatic. What that means in Dworkin’s simple, obvious reading of the Revolutionary Scriptures is that when men fuck women, it’s always an act of oppression.
That was where she went too far in the views of her more flexible colleagues. They didn’t like having their options reduced. That, in the view of an American striver, was the worst thing you could do to anybody.
Dworkin didn’t know a thing about her audience. Didn’t know they were talking career and fun when she was talking sacrifice, martyrdom. (It’s no accident her heroine was Joan of Arc. Dworkin was a Catholic without knowing it, an old-time Catholic who never suspected it of herself. She and J. K. Toole, another fat loser who died young, are the only Catholic writers to survive, for a while, in modern America.)
Dworkin maintained this strictly orthodox view in her most-hated book, Intercourse (1987), arguing that heterosexual intercourse was rape. Oh, and please, don’t tell me that’s not her argument. I not only read and reread that book but taught it to a group of horrified Berkeley students in 1990. That damn well is what she said. You could tell it by the expression on their little faces — a great moment!
Even the reviewers who praised Dworkin did it in ways intended to alert their readers that they were encountering a nut, someone who was to be admired rather than listened to. Intercourse was “daring,” “radical,” “outrageous” — in other words, beyond the pale. It was something to have on your shelf, or your reading list, as ballast, another sort of street cred. It was never meant to accuse women who fucked men of, to coin a phrase, sleeping with the enemy.
But that was exactly what Dworkin meant, and all she meant. It was so obvious; the real shock is that it took so long for someone in the women’s movement to say that and get noticed for it.
The last stage in Fanon’s and Guevara’s blueprint was the one that put Dworkin out of play forever:
4. Kill the oppressor.
That’s what the revolutionaries said, and they didn’t mean it figuratively. They meant get a fucking machete and kill a cop, take his gun and use that on as many of the oppressors as you can get. They were pretty damn clear on this, as clear as a Calvinist ruling out salvation by works. You could not overthrow the oppressor with harsh language, or the evil eye, or moving depictions of slum conditions. You had to kill the bastards. Are we clear?
And Dworkin, as loyal and dumb as the horse in Animal Farm, trotted along to this fatal fourth step — and found herself alone.
She said it, as usual, with simple clarity, in the language of Che Guevara. It must have amazed her that she even needed to say it; it had been so obvious from the start. Her pleas for resistance are couched in a wonderful diction, mixed of Catholic martyr-cult and Fanon’s call to jacquerie: “I’m asking you to give up your lies. I’m asking you to live your lives, honorably and with dignity. I’m asking you to fight. I am asking you to organize political support for women who kill men who have been hurting them…They resisted a domination that they were expected to accept. They stand there in jail for us, for every one of us who got away without having to pull the trigger.”
In the end, the most remarkable thing about Dworkin is that there was only one of her. Hundreds of millions of women more sly, raised with the notion of compromise and an immunity to ideology, scrambled away from the inconvenient implications of liberation rhetoric. She alone stood their on her famously arthritic knees, doing her simple best to fight the jihad she’d been fool enough to believe would actually take place.
What if they held a war and only one fat lady sang? You don’t need to ask; you’ve lived through it.
This article was first published in The eXile on April 22, 2005
Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).
Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).Neal McDonough, Arthur Darvill, and Wentworth Miller will all be returning in DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 3.
It was announced at today’s Comic-Con International in San Diego that three old favorites will be returning to Legends of Tomorrow in Season 3.
Below, find the announcements from today’s Comic-Con.
BURBANK, Calif. — The time-traveling DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (Tuesdays 9/8c The CW) team will meet some familiar faces as they set about trying to “fix time” in the DC Super Hero series’ third season.
Wentworth Miller and Arthur Darvill (as former Legends Leonard Snart/Captain Cold and Rip Hunter, respectively) will appear in the upcoming season as recurring guest stars, and Neal McDonough returns as a series regular, reprising his role as smug villain Damien Darhk…and a former member of last season’s Legion of Doom.
Based on the characters from DC, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is from Berlanti Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television. Executive produced by Greg Berlani, Marc Guggenheim, Andrew Kreisberg, Phil Klemmer and Sarah Schechter, the series returns for season three on Tuesday, October 10, at 9/8c on The CW.
You can find all of DCLegendsTV’s Legends coverage here! Season 3 of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow premieres Tuesday, October 10 on The CW.Map shows some of the best bars found on each line
There's no better relationship than the one between New Orleans and its streetcar line.Some cities have subways, while others have trolleys. But down here in The Big Easy we've got streetcars, which were in operation for 60 years before trolleys were even created.And in a city with more bars per capita than anywhere else in the U.S., the streetcar comes handy on any given night. That led Thrillist to draft up the first New Orleans Streetcar Bar Map.Don't Forget: Download the WDSU Transit Tracker"It passes a lot of great drinking destinations," Thrillist states on their website. "So for your convenience, we've plotted out the best bar within a 5-10 minute walk of every stop on the streetcar map."From the St. Charles streetcar to the Riverfront streetcar, each line is shown in different colors with bars labeled up and down the routes. Among them are:- St. Charles Line: Voodoo Two, The Irish House, Club Car Lounge- Loyola-UPT: Little Gem Saloon, Sobou, Besh Steak- Canal: Bayou Beer Garden, Handsome Willy's, Loa- Riverfront: Republic, Crescent City Brewhouse, Gazebo CafeYou can check out the entire map or the individual lines on Thrillist. They also have a dedicated New Orleans section articles on food, travel and much more.
There's no better relationship than the one between New Orleans and its streetcar line.
Some cities have subways, while others have trolleys. But down here in The Big Easy we've got streetcars, which were in operation for 60 years before trolleys were even created.
Advertisement Related Content City leaders celebrate St. Charles Streetcar Line historic landmark designation
And in a city with more bars per capita than anywhere else in the U.S., the streetcar comes handy on any given night. That led Thrillist to draft up the first New Orleans Streetcar Bar Map.
Don't Forget: Download the WDSU Transit Tracker
"It passes a lot of great drinking destinations," Thrillist states on their website. "So for your convenience, we've plotted out the best bar within a 5-10 minute walk of every stop on the streetcar map."
From the St. Charles streetcar to the Riverfront streetcar, each line is shown in different colors with bars labeled up and down the routes. Among them are:
- St. Charles Line: Voodoo Two, The Irish House, Club Car Lounge
- Loyola-UPT: Little Gem Saloon, Sobou, Besh Steak
- Canal: Bayou Beer Garden, Handsome Willy's, Loa
- Riverfront: Republic, Crescent City Brewhouse, Gazebo Cafe
You can check out the entire map or the individual lines on Thrillist. They also have a dedicated New Orleans section articles on food, travel and much more.
AlertMeNot since the time of the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the 20th century was so much owned by so few
The world’s super-rich hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families like the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast fortunes.
Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report.
Josef Stadler, the lead author of the report and UBS’s head of global ultra high net worth, said his billionaire clients were concerned that growing inequality between rich and poor could lead to a “strike back”.
“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”
Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.”
He said the “$1bn question” was how society would react to the concentration of so much money in the hands of so few.
Anger at so-called robber barron families who built up vast fortunes from monopolies in US rail, oil, steel and banking in the late 19th century, an era of rapid industrialisation and growing inequality in America that became known as the Gilded Age, led to President Roosevelt breaking up companies and trusts and increasing taxes on the wealthy in the early 1900s.
“Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age?,” Stadler asked. “Will the second age end or will it proceed?”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A painting by Isaak Brodsky (1883-1939) depicts Lenin speaking to the workers of the Putilov factory, in Petrograd, 1917. There are concerns of a ‘strike back’ as gulf between the rich and the poor widens. Photograph: Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently said western governments should force the top 1% of earners to pay more more tax to try to reduce dangerous levels of inequality.
Stadler said media coverage of inequality and the super-rich suggested there would be an “inflection point”, but he said “the perception that billionaires make money for themselves at the expense of the wider population” was incorrect.
He added that 98% of billionaires’ wealth found its way back into wider society and said the world’s super-rich employed 27.7 million people – not far behind the number of people in the UK workforce.
Billionaires’ fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires’ average return was double that achieved by the world’s stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.
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Stadler said that the super-rich’s concerns over public perceptions that they were getting wealthier at the expense of the wider population had led them to make greater philanthropic gifts and spend their money on public art galleries and sports teams.
“You could say it is about ego and wanting to show off and sit in the front row,” he said. “But it is also about giving back.”
The report said billionaires now accounted for 72 of the world’s 200 top art collectors, up from 28 in 1995. “While not a fresh phenomenon, private museums are growing in number, especially in Asia,” the annual UBS report said. “Motivated by their passion for art, and often encouraged by favourable tax treatment, art collectors are setting up private museums all around the world to share their collections with the public.”
Recent gallery openings include The Broad in Los Angeles, funded by Eli Broad – the world’s 65th richest person with a $7.4bn fortune. Japanese billionaire Soichiro Fukutake is building a series of galleries to house his art collection on islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea.
“The billionaire population is concerned about [inequality] and that may be why we are seeing this acceleration of publicly displaying art collections or partnering with public institutions so more of the public can enjoy what they have,” said John Matthews, UBS head of private wealth management. “I think it’s a big part of investment in sports franchises – it’s a way for them to say ‘I made all this money and I did it in Cleveland, Ohio, I’ve got to give back to my community and one way I’m going to do that is to make sure the stadium is great’.”
The report found that 140 of the world’s top sports teams are owned by just 109 billionaires, with two-thirds of NBA and NFL teams owned by billionaires. In the UK, nine of the 20 Premier League teams have billionaire owners, including Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, and Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City.
“There is an acceleration of these transactions as we speak, with major buyers coming from China,” Stadler said.
One of the billionaires told the UBS researchers he had |
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Colbert is best known for his work as a television host, writer, actor, and producer, and less known for his highly detailed 8th grade diorama depicting the Battle of Helm's Deep. It was not for school.
Prior to joining the CBS family, Colbert helmed The Colbert Report, which aired nearly 1,500 episodes. For reference, that is slightly fewer than the number of seasons of Survivor. The program won two Emmys for Outstanding Variety Series, two Peabody Awards, two GRAMMY Awards® and $68 from Bill Gates' wallet when he wasn't looking.
GRAMMY-nominated artist Jon Batiste is the bandleader of The Late Show along with his band, "Stay Human." Jon is a jazz phenom and in his spare time, he can be heard playing all the jazz notes he DIDN'T play earlier.
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert covers politics, pop culture and whatever category Trump's tweets fall into. Sometimes he does it standing up, sometimes he does it sitting down, and one time after the 2016 election, he did it curled up in a ball on the ground.Kotlin has the concept of Delegated Properties which allows you to create common functionality and it can be re-used to do custom actions, for example you can create a Delegated Property to print some logs every time someone updates the value of a field, save a value to a database and return it from there, or lazy fields that are going to be computed when you use it for the first time.
This Lazy Delegated Property is already in the Kotlin library so you can use it like this:
val lazyString: String by lazy {
Log.d(TAG, "executed only first time")
"My Value"
}
The first time you access lazyString field it will execute this initialization block (so you will see the log in logcat) and return your desired value, there after it will return always “My Value”, the cached result of the initialization process:
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
Log.d(TAG, lazyString)
Log.d(TAG, lazyString)
...
}
D/MainActivity: executed only first time
D/MainActivity: My Value
D/MainActivity: My Value
The lazy Delegated Property is just a function as you can see here:
public fun <T> lazy(mode: LazyThreadSafetyMode, initializer: () -> T): Lazy<T> =
when (mode) {
LazyThreadSafetyMode.SYNCHRONIZED -> SynchronizedLazyImpl(initializer)
LazyThreadSafetyMode.PUBLICATION -> SafePublicationLazyImpl(initializer)
LazyThreadSafetyMode.NONE -> UnsafeLazyImpl(initializer)
}
And here comes the interesting part, it has different implementations according to this mode parameter (LazyThreadSafetyMode) that indicates which thread safe mode has to use.
As default it will use SynchronizedLazyImpl (which correspond to LazyThreadSafetyMode.SYNCHRONIZED mode), so if you use it in this way you are going to be thread safe.
In case you are using this in the Main Thread and you are sure that it’s not going to be used in different threads, then you can avoid all of this overhead to make it Thread Safe and just use it like this:
val lazyString: String by lazy(LazyThreadSafetyMode.NONE) {
...
}
And that’s it! you are using a faster implementation of the Lazy Delegated Property.
If you want to make it simpler, you can create a new function to always use “LazyThreadSafetyMode.NONE” and use it like this:
fun <T> lazyAndroid(initializer: () -> T): Lazy<T> = lazy(LazyThreadSafetyMode.NONE, initializer)
// Example usage:
val lazyString: String by lazyAndroid {
...
}China doesn’t like ghosts, even though they’re haunted by them.
Crimson Peak, the latest movie from gothic auteur Guillermo del Toro about an old Victorian mansion haunted by specters, failed to scare and fell flat at the domestic box office. In recent years Hollywood studios have used the overseas market, particularly China, as a safety net to recoup losses — but Universal and Legendary will not have that chance. In China, ghosts aren’t welcome.
A “No Ghosts” ban on foreign movies is imposed to discourage interest in “cults or the supernatural,” a ruling that will likely be Hollywood’s biggest challenge in the near future when Chinese dollars are valued the most. Next year Marvel will have the supernatural superhero Doctor Strange and Sony with its Ghostbusters remake, both freight trains on a collision with Communistic censorship.
Strangely, the Chinese have a rich native mythology of ghosts and the afterlife of their own.
“The irony is that ancestral worship is an integral part of China’s history,” Jenny Cho tells Inverse. A board member of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, Cho authored Chinese in Hollywood, a book that traces the history of Chinese in the American movie industry.
When we talk about China’s ban of ghosts in movies, she brings up how spiritual worship is actually embedded in the daily life of many Chinese. “Many homes have an altar that is set up to pay respects to ancestors and folk gods. Folk gods such as Kwang Kung are based on actual people who lived in centuries past and are now worshipped in temples. As much as a government would like to control the thoughts of its people, it can’t force someone to stop believing in ghosts if they do in secret.”
But they can force them in movie theaters. “China’s government is essentially atheist, and maintains strict control over what media can be consumed by its citizens,” Cho says. While the government tolerates certain amounts of spiritual expression, they “do not tolerate any practices that fall outside of its policies.”
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Hollywood movies with CGI ghosts flying around a dilapidated house? Banned. Cooking a meal to an empty table because you believe an ancestor will be there in spirit that evening? Perfectly acceptable. In late summer the Chinese celebrate the “Hungry Ghost Festival,” an analog to Halloween where homage is paid to the dead believed to wander when the barrier to the afterlife is its thinnest. Despite commercialization in modern times (“Getai” singers who perform during the festival have reality TV shows), China remains strict on ghosts in entertainment.
“The threat is that these movies will introduce Chinese audiences to thinking about the universe in ways that the Chinese government cannot control,” Cho adds. “A worldview that involves real ghosts and brings up questions that cannot be explained away by science and rational thinking is unacceptable.”
Besides movies from abroad, China’s homegrown crop of horror are typically castrated, involving plot twists like mental illness or vivid dreams reasoning why the characters see apparitions. But in the 1980s, comedy horror films had goofy kung-fu fighters face off against vampires and ghosts with films like Mr. Vampire and A Chinese Ghost Story ruling theaters. According to Cho, the British rule over Hong Kong allowed these movies to thrive.
“Hong Kong filmmakers in the 1980s and early 1990s were able to get away with making films like A Chinese Ghost Story because they were under British rule before 1996,” says Cho. “Now, they have to play by China’s rules.” In 2014, The House That Never Dies was a genuine horror movie hit in China, but — spoiler alert — the ghosts were hallucinations.
Is this the future of Hollywood? Will the ghosts that the Ghostbusters bust be justified? Cho speculates a bleak future where Hollywood sidesteps China’s policies by approaching forms of self-censorship.
“They might create a horror film with two endings,” she explained, “A ‘China’ ending without real ghosts, and a ‘rest of the world’ ending, i.e. the film they want to make.”
The opening line to del Toro’s Crimson Peak is blunt: “Ghosts are real. This much I know.” But to release in China, del Toro might sacrifice his artistic voice and have Mia Wasikowski’s Edith say “Ghosts are real. This much I sort of, kinda, probably know.” A future where censorship is the solution to abide by foreign laws is scarier than any ghost.This is the story of some squalid little men (and women), but it is a vital insight into the nexus of the political and corporate media elite. The Guardian, New Statesman and Huffington Post today all run major stories around a “focus group” study in Nuneaton which revealed that voters think Corbyn is “scruffy” and “old-fashioned”. This is deemed front page news.
The publicity was obviously supposed to coincide with Labour losing Nuneaton council, its most marginal council surrounded by Tory territory, in the council elections on Thursday. However Labour held Nuneaton. That did not stop the New Statesman article, by “research” authors James Morris and Ian Warren, from going ahead with the immortal phrase “While today’s Labour party has no hope of representing Nuneaton”. Err, it is still in control of the Council.
The publication is also timed to coincide with a revolt by Labour MPs at this afternoon’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The idea is that the “research” would prove that election losses were Corbyn’s fault. That is toned down now after they beat the Tories outside Scotland, but I am told that Progress MPs are still briefed to flourish the Guardian and raise this “research” today. That is meant to get this “research” onto the evening news.
But when you look at the research very closely, you realise that it is absolute rubbish. James Morris and Ian Warren are total charlatans.
Firstly, the whole sample is 16 people. That is right, 16 people. They are supposed all to be ex-Labour, though there is little evidence of that in the transcripts. What is not in dispute is that they are all Tory voters.
So you have 16 Tory voters, in two groups male and female. But out of 16 people there is not one retired person. Not one young voter. Not one person unemployed. And every single one is in a nuclear heterosexual relationship with children. Every single one is a homeowner.
Furthermore their sources of information are (by order most mentioned) the Daily Mail, Sky, the BBC and the Sun. Only one out of 16 mentions the internet as a source of political information.
People who voted Tory constitute already just 24% of the general population. Exclude retired, tenants, single, childless, gay, young and internet savvy people as well, and you get down to a deliberately chosen 5% of the population from which to choose your sample. You then get these 16 carefully chosen, blinkered right wing bigots into a room. Nevertheless something still goes wrong for your research. Two of the 16 (in the female group) state a firm intention to vote Labour next time (while a larger number state they would consider it).
So what do you do if you are a charlatan like James Morris or Ian Warren? You leave that in the transcript, which no journalist will ever read, but you exclude the fact that 2 of the 16 will vote Labour next time from your findings! And you studiously lead the conversation with the group round to the idea that others who are considering voting Labour next time might be more likely to do so with a change of leader.
The idea that locking two carefully selected groups of totally unrepresentative right wingers into a room to self-reinforce their bigoted opinions, in any way constitutes real research, is utterly laughable. The only conclusion is that having carefully selected the people in all of the UK the most likely to dislike Jeremy Corbyn, they dislike Jeremy Corbyn. Next week, a group of young unemployed people from the Easter Road will give their views on David Cameron.
Needless to say the so called journalists who have published this nonsense did no investigation whatsoever of the farcical nature of the “research”. They just published the press release, as witnessed by the fact they all use exactly the same quotes from scores of pages of transcript.
An important question is who paid for this. Obviously it is a Blairite production, but where did the money come from? Greenberg Quinlan Rosner research are credited, and they are extremely expensive. I asked Ian Warren who funded it. First he replied “I did”, then when I asked him who funded Greenberg Quinlan Rosner he stated there was “something sinister” about the question. I asked again twice, but answer came there none. Astonishingly, “who paid for this” did not occur to the mainstream journalists who uncritically published Morris and Warren’s nonsense.
This is a deeply sinister story. Right wing Labour figures hope desperately their own party will lose in Nuneaton. So they commission (and presumably pay for) ludicrously skewed research to show Jeremy Corbyn caused the loss. This absolute non-news item, that a tiny selected group of completely unrepresentative right wingers do not like Jeremy Corbyn, is then plastered on front pages by their Blairite media contacts to coincide with a Parliamentary Labour Party meeting today, in order to further the slow motion coup against Corbyn.
It is actually quite sickening. All of those involved – including the Guardian and New Statesman editors – are very low people indeed.In an interesting decision leading up to SolidWorks World 2015 next month, Dassault Systèmes, makers of SolidWorks have announced that former Vice President of Research and Development at SolidWorks Gian Paolo Bassi has been appointed the new Chief Executive Officer of the popular CAD software brand. In his previous role, Bassi led research in future product and technology strategies – which will certainly have a play in how SolidWorks adapts to an increase in cloud-based CAD solutions.
Previously, SolidWorks was headed by Bertrand Sicot, who had over 20 years of sales operations leadership in both domestic and international engineering businesses. Sicot, who started his career at SolidWorks in 1997, will now be Vice President of Sales for Dassault Systèmes’ Value Solutions sales channel under his new promotion.
“Behind every great brand is great talent, and Gian Paolo and Bertrand have been architects of change for SolidWorks,” said Bernard Charlès, president and CEO of Dassault Systèmes.
“We look forward to continued success |
, pain behind the eyes, muscle and joint pains, nausea, vomiting, swollen glands and/or rash – to seek medical care,” it added.
The Food and Drug Administration has recalled Dengvaxia off the shelves until Sanofi updates its packaging label to reflect the new warning. – Rappler.comA Christchurch suburb has declared war on fast-food giant McDonald's, with a proposed new restaurant within walking distance of two schools.
Locals in the working class suburb of Woolston say there are already too many fast-food outlets in the area, and the proposed restaurant is being built to fleece the pockets of the young and poor.
It's located around 700 metres from one school and just 500 metres from another.
Local principals are worried it could be an irresistible temptation as students walk to and from school.
"We're saturated with fast food outlets," Blair Dravitski, principal of Linwood Ave School, told Three's The Project.
He's concerned about the cost of the food. Frozen soft drinks are available for just $1, with heavily salted meals at an affordable price too.
"That's not necessarily parents giving children a dollar to go get a frozen drink, but often pocket money and things like that are in that vicinity."
Linwood and Shirley are among the suburbs with the lowest median income, at just $42,000 to $47,000. In comparison, the suburb with the highest median income is around $102,100 to $128,300.
Around the working class suburbs of Linwood, Shirley and Hornby there are clusters of dozens of fast food restaurants.
"The social cost of having something like that in our neighbourhood, so close to St Anne's School and so close to Te Waka Unua School in the other direction, could be quite massive," Michael Reynolds, organiser of the Community Food Project, told Three's The Project.
Port Hills MP Ruth Dyson's office is near the proposed new McDonald's site. She says no one was consulted beforehand.
Because it's not compulsory to do so, she's blaming the Government.
"I think local people in their own communities have a right to say what happen in their own community," she said.
"Nobody was asked for their opinion... It's absolutely the responsibility of the National Government, who changed the Resource Management Act so that people were more likely to be cut-out of having a say in decisions such as this."
Even though the residents aren't happy, Ms Dyson says there's nothing that can change the store's opening.
"It's a done and dusted deal."
Now she's looking ahead, in the hopes rules could be changed to prevent this happening in other suburbs.
Newshub.We all know exactly what fear feels like. Without our consent, our hearts begin to beat a little faster. The hairs on the back of our neck prickle. Our palms sweat through clenched fingers. Fear is so much more than an emotion; it is a whole body experience. But it doesn't start that way - it starts in our brains.
When we sense danger or threat, a signal is sent to the walnut sized structure in our forebrains called the amygdala, which is responsible for alerting the rest of our body to prepare for fight or flight. Once the threat is removed, the signal relaxes, and so do we. But for those who suffer from anxiety disorders, it takes much longer for the brain to sound the all clear.
"We've learned a fair amount of the circuitry that's involved in generating the initial fear response. We really know relatively little about the circuitry that's involved in turning it off," explains neuroscientist Richard Davidson. Now, in a study published this week in Molecular Psychiatry, researchers from Duke university have found that marijuana-like compounds and the enzyme that degrades them may be the key to understanding fear's off switch.
Previous research has connected endocannabinoids - naturally-produced compounds that are structurally similar to the active ingredients in marijuana - to the fear response. In mice, for example, brain-wide deletion of cannabinoid receptor type 1 results in a loss of ability to regulate fear. The brains cannabinoid system, though, has a wide variety of important functions, so clinicians are hesitant to use it as a target for potential anxiety therapies.
Researchers have found, though, that one particular cannabinoid - anandamide - seems to play a large role in modulating fear responses. Since anandamide levels in the brain are regulated by a single enzyme, fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH), researchers wondered if they could boost anandamide levels by turning off this one enzyme without too many negative side effects.
To test this, the team used a highly selective FAAH inhibitor, AM3506, to knock down the activity in a fear-prone mice (a commonly used model for treating anxiety disorders). They found that the drug not only helped the mice recover from fear faster, the research team specifically traced the drug's effects to the amygdala. When they looked for unwanted side effects, including altered appetite and depression, they found no evidence for them. This is good news for potential clinical uses of AM3506, though the researchers were careful to note that testing across a broad range of assays will be needed to ensure the drug is safe and effective in people.
While their results were promising, they didn't answer the real question the Duke team was asking: whether regulating FAAH in people could help treat anxiety disorders.
As luck would have it, in 2009 the same team discovered some people have a common variant in the FAAH gene that affects how well it functions. Now, using fMRI scans of people's brains, the researchers were able to compare how people with each type of gene reacted to threatening images. As predicted, those with lower FAAH activity levels - like the mice who received the inhibitor - were able to overcome their fear more quickly. A survey of 1,000 New Zealanders further supported these results by showing that those with the low-functioning variant were more level-headed and calm in the face of stress.
Bound together, these results strongly suggest that regulating the activity of FAAH may be a novel way to treat difficult anxiety-based disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). "What is most compelling is our ability to translate first from mice to human neurobiology and then all the way out to human behavior," said Ahmad Hariri, co-author of the study and a neurobiologist at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. "That kind of translation is going to define the future of psychiatry and neuroscience."
Reference: Gunduz-Cinar, O., et al (2012). Convergent translational evidence of a role for anandamide in amygdala-mediated fear extinction, threat processing and stress-reactivity Molecular Psychiatry DOI: 10.1038/mp.2012.72
Image by Victor Bezrukov c/o Wikimedia CommonsEskom must decrease the number of skilled white employees by 3,389, the City Press and Rapport newspapers reported.
According to the reports Eskom must cut the number of white engineers and managers by 1,081, and decrease the number of white tradespeople by 2,179.
These white staff cuts are needed to comply with South Africa’s strict new provisions of the Equity Act.
According to the reports the Department of Labour is insisting that Eskom must make changes to ensure its employee demographics reflect South Africa’s “national and regional demography”.
Skills shortage and Affirmative Action
Eskom CEO Tshediso Matona said in January that the lack of maintenance of their plants are to blame on the shortage of skills such as artisans.
In November 2014 trade union Solidarity said that it has warned Eskom for years about the grave consequences of its serious skills shortage.
Solidarity criticised Eskom, saying that the company has been warned against skills shortages and about an exodus of experts from the company for years. However, these warnings fell on deaf ears.
A recent report in the Beeld newspaper made the claim that Eskom’s problems were partly related to the way it implemented affirmative action.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA’s Stephen Nhlapo agreed, saying that the manner in which Eskom applied affirmative action was hurting service delivery.
Nhlapo is quoted by SA Labour News as saying that job training does not take place at Eskom.
“Let’s be honest, a lot of the people who work at Eskom do not have the skills required of them,” Nhlapo was quoted as saying.
The full report is available in the 8 March 2015 editions of the City Press and Rapport newspapers
More on Eskom
Eskom’s crazy coal deal
Not black enough for Eskom
The truth behind Eskom’s crisisSunday, December 28th, 2014
One person killed in a chain-reaction collision in Contra Costa County Saturday morning was part of a large group of bicyclists traveling in the area.
California Highway Patrol officers say the cyclist died when his bike collided with a water truck around 9:45 a.m. on eastbound Highland Road about three-quarters of a mile west of Carneal Road.
The bicyclist, a 40-year-old Dublin man, was part of a large group of at least 50 bikers. According to Officer Greg Hartt, there were two separate accidents that happened moments apart.
First, two of the riders at the front collided. "Near the end of the pack, as people were swerving to avoid the collision at the front, at some point another rider, unknown at this time why, crossed over the double yellow lines and collided with a water truck," Hartt said.
He was riding a Specialized bicycle and wearing a helmet, according to the CHP.
The truck driver, a 56-year-old Livermore man, driving a 2001 Peterbilt truck, saw ahead of him the bicyclists at the front of the pack crash and veered to avoid them. That is when he struck the bicyclist who was in the roadway, along with his bicycle.
"He saw a lot of bicyclists scrambling to avoid the first collision and, at that point, he did see somebody come into the lane in front of him and he tried to stop as best he could and was unable to avoid him," Hartt said.
Many cyclists tried to help the struck man, but emergency personnel pronounced him dead at the scene.
Another person suffered major injuries and a third bicyclist suffered minor injuries, CHP officials said.
The truck driver was not injured, according to the CHP. He was wearing a seatbelt during the incident. Drug or alcohol use is not suspected as factors in the crash, according to the CHP.
Highland Road was closed for three hours after the crash.
Other cyclists say this area of unincorporated Contra Costa County is a popular spot for weekend rides.
"Almost every Saturday morning, there's at least three or four large groups that come down," bicyclist Jim Frahm said.
The victim's name has not been released. The others involved in the initial collision are being treated at the hospital. nullThe NSA has alleged it monitors only 1.6 percent of web traffic, contradicting claims of a sweeping spy network. A report released by the White House justifies NSA snooping as essential for national security, but neglects to expand on any details.
The Obama Administration released a seven-page document on Friday intended to justify the NSA’s mass surveillance programs and correct media “inaccuracies.” A memo included in the report alleges that the National Security Agency only “touches” 1.6 percent of the internet and of that figure only 0.025 gets analyzed by the organization.
"If a standard basketball court represented the global communications environment, NSA's total collection would be represented by an area smaller than a dime on that basketball court," the memo says.
In a move to placate public suspicion in the wake of former CIA employee’s leak of classified information, the document claims the Obama Administration has done everything possible to keep the public informed.
“The administration has provided enhanced transparency on, and engaged in robust public discussion about, key intelligence collection programs undertaken by the NSA,” the memo reads.
The White House has been on the defensive since Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents that blew the whistle on the NSA’s spying practices in May. At times the White House’s rhetoric has been confusing regarding the issue, with Obama claiming on US TV that there is no domestic spying program, while ex-Obama adviser Van Jones told CNN “we do have a domestic spying program.”
According to the documents released by Snowden, the NSA gathers troves of metadata through internet companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook using a program called PRISM. The leaks also allege that the NSA used eavesdropping programs to monitor internet traffic in the EU, provoking furor from the respective countries’ leaders.
‘Connecting the dots’
Despite claims that the Obama Administration has done everything in its power to inform the American people, the document contains almost no information on the NSA mass surveillance. At no point does it broach the alleged collaboration of internet companies or the programs used to gather data, such as PRISM. The report focuses on the legal justification of the NSA’s practices, paying little heed to the details.
It references the 9/11 attacks and the failure of the Pentagon to “connect the many dots of information that would have uncovered the planning and preparation for those attacks.” In particular, it looks at the involvement of hijacker Khalid al-Midhar who resided in California for the first six months of 2000. It notes that while the NSA did monitor al-Midhar’s activities, it did not have the tools to “connect the dots of the information available.”
Since then several programs have been developed to strengthen the coordination between agencies to prevent terrorist attacks, the document writes.
The original cables released by Snowden describe a spy network that is much larger and farther-reaching than the White House alleges. The organization reportedly records trillions of phone calls and emails and can access them at any time.
In response to the leak and criticism the US government has overstepped the mark with its spying, Obama has promised more transparency and safeguards against abuse. However, he has repeatedly argued that the measures are necessary in order to protect national security.
The NSA claimed to have thwarted over 50 terrorist plots using its surveillance programs. However, Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who serve on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, questioned this claim in June, saying there was no concrete evidence to suggest “the NSA's dragnet collection of Americans' phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence.”Friday, September 11th, 2015
Participants at #Urbanshield wearing patches to remember @HaywardPD Sgt. Scott Lunger, shot and killed in July. pic.twitter.com/Zq2LoX3gqO — Laura Anthony (@LauraAnthony7) September 11, 2015
OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- There was a protest in Oakland late Friday against an exercise that's been going on every year in the Bay Area for nearly a decade. Urban Shield includes a series of real-life scenarios, training exercises for first responders and police on how to handle a terrorist or other large-scale incident.With drums and chants, peaceful demonstrators in Oakland voiced their opposition to the annual arrival of Urban Shield to the Bay Area.In its ninth year, Urban Shield draws police agencies and first responders, mostly from the Bay Area, but also as far away as Korea and it includes vendors from all over the country."Right here we have tactical bags that don't appear tactical, so as not to give away the officer," said vendor Bob Helmer. He explained how the bag works especially for officers. He said you pull the bag over "slide open, then they have to access to their firearm. If they open it all the way, show that they're law enforcement, and they have ballistic protection on top and on bottom."This year's event includes training in more than two-dozen real-life scenarios from warehouses to school campuses, and this year an exercise in how to handle a possible terrorist incident during the upcoming Super Bowl at Levi's Stadium."We're going to host a major event here in the Bay Area, so we want to have our tactical teams on board with what the plan's going to be in case something bad should happen," Alameda County Sheriff's Sgt. J.D. Nelson said.But critics see all this as excessive and representative of the increased militarization of the police."We want Oakland agencies, such as Oakland PD and the fire department and EMTs to stop participating in Urban Shield and have more face-to-face conversations with the community about what we actually need instead," Kamau Walton, a Black Lives Matter protester, said.Urban Shield exercises will take place all over the Bay Area over a 48-hour period, starting at 6 a.m. Saturday. null'Rowdy' Roddy Piper Family Calls for Worldwide Moment of Silence During His Funeral
'Rowdy' Roddy Piper -- Family Calls for Worldwide Moment of Silence During Funeral
EXCLUSIVE
"Rowdy" Roddy Piper's funeral is scheduled for next week in Oregon and the family is inviting all of his fans to take part in a moment of silence to honor the late wrestler.
Piper's daughter Ariel tells TMZ the family is having a private funeral in Oregon on August 11, which will not be open to the public.
But Ariel says at 10:30 AM the day of the funeral, they're asking Piper's millions of fans to observe a moment of silence... which they'll observe at the service as well.
A memorial will be held in L.A. August 17 at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, but that service will be private as well.If anyone knows how to make a Commodore faster, it’s HSV.
But if you want your HSV to be faster, Walkinshaw’s most recent performance pack should pique your interest.
The W557 package is designed to increase the performance potential of all LSA-powered HSVs, and the results are almost intimidating, even on paper.
30 years of HSV: VL Group A SS
Obviously, the power figure is in the name – 557kW, but what’s more impressive is the increase in torque.
An absolutely gargantuan 930Nm.
Compared to the already impressive GTSR, and even the W1, the W557 looks to be an opposition-eating monster.
It has 83kW more than the LS9-powered W1, and 122 more than a GTSR. In terms of torque, it puts out 190Nm more than the GTSR, and 115 more than the W1.
To achieve this, the package includes ceramic-coated headers, a dual active cat-back exhaust, a cold air intake and some ECU fiddling, all by Walkinshaw.
2017 HSV Racing Supercar Revealed
In addition, a WP camshaft is installed for a “more aggressive idle”, and 1000cc fuel injectors ensure you’ll have enough fuel being thrown on the fire when you need it.
Even the supercharger’s pulley system gets an upgrade, plus head gaskets, head bolts, and the OEM lifters and guides get replaced on cars that have travelled more than 20,000km at the time of upgrade.
As usual, badges and plaques are scattered throughout.
The price for all of this? On top of the original car, you'd be looking at a $12,990 bill if it's for a new car, and an extra $1000 if it's used.
Existing W507s can be upgraded for $5,990, or $4,990 if your W507 is new.
Buyers also get a W Series certificate of authenticity and a drive-line warranty for peace of mind.
Peace until you turn the thing on, that is. Your neighbours will love you.God is chatty in the South. The woman sitting at the swanky bar told me God told her to sell her house and move to West Haven. God supposedly advised the shoe shine guy to move from Hudson Valley, N.Y., to Tennessee. The girls at the charity carwash got the word to wave a sign saying "Honk if you love Jesus." Many Republican candidates and politicians tell us God told them to run for office. God spoke to me. He/she told me not to vote for candidates who claim God as a campaign sponsor.
God is chatty in the South. The woman sitting at the swanky bar told me God told her to sell her house and move to West Haven. God supposedly advised the shoe shine guy to move from Hudson Valley, N.Y., to Tennessee. The girls at the charity carwash got the word to wave a sign saying "Honk if you love Jesus." Many Republican candidates and politicians tell us God told them to run for office. God spoke to me. He/she told me not to vote for candidates who claim God as a campaign sponsor.
God told me to use my brain and heart to think critically and analyze the candidate’s platform. God told me any candidate who cut money from schools, children or the elderly was a non-starter. God told me "no" on candidates who support withholding healthcare and reproductive services from low income women. Oh, and deniers of human-caused climate change really got him/her riled. He/she said that implies that the natural and financial devastation caused by climate change is "God’s will." God told me he/she loves earth; it’s man who treats the environment like his own private toilet.
God said he/she doesn’t audit carwashes, guide real estate decisions or endorse candidates and to stay clear of anyone who says he/she does. He/she told me to use my brain, vote responsibly, … then the line went dead.
Candace Wade,
FranklinBy Jack Kelly - March 29, 2012
The mission in Afghanistan is on track, despite the murder of 16 Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier March 1 and the accidental burning of Qurans at Bagram Air Force Base last month, Marine Gen. John Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday.
If Gen. Allen really believed that, he'd be delusional.
Afghan soldiers and policemen have murdered a coalition soldier or aid worker once a week on average since early 2010, according to an Army study. In all, 77 coalition troops have been killed by members of the Afghan National Security Forces, the Wall Street Journal reported in February. That tally doesn't include seven U.S. troops killed in the wake of the Quran burnings.
Our soldiers think their Afghan "allies" are unstable, incompetent, drug abusers and thieves, according to that Army study, "A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility." They call them cowardly and lazy and say they lack discipline, are dangerous in firefights and have poor hygiene.
The Afghans don't like us, either. "Many ANSF members demonstrated a general loathing of U.S. soldiers" the study said.
"Security responsibility for some areas has transitioned to Afghan forces with notable success," Gen. Allen said. But not, he admitted, in the areas where the Taliban is most active.
The training of Afghan soldiers and police has lagged because of a shortage of trainers and widespread illiteracy (only one recruit in 10 can read and write), high attrition and corruption, the man in charge of training them, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, said last June.
"The Taliban's momentum has been broken," President Barack Obama said Jan. 24 in the State of the Union address.
A Taliban victory is "inevitable" once coalition troops withdraw, concluded a NATO intelligence report last month. The Taliban remains "resilient"; the Afghan government and security forces are corrupt and ineffective, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, also in February, concluded.
So don't bet on the Afghans being ready to take over in 2014, the deadline the president set for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. But that's the lesser problem.
"[Afghan President Hamid] Karzai is tantamount to being Taliban and has not bothered to apologize," our best war correspondent, former Special Forces soldier Michael Yon, wrote in the New York Daily News March 15. "Instead, Karzai whips up anti-U.S. fervor at every opportunity. Twice, Karzai has threatened to leave politics and join the Taliban.
"Even our most disciplined troops have lost all idealism," Mr. Yon wrote. "They fight because they are ordered to fight, but they have eyes wide open. The halfhearted surge and sudden draw down leave little room for success."
There's less room now. In the week before Gen. Allen testified, an Afghan interpreter at a NATO base tried to assassinate Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. President Karzai, who has called U.S. troops "demons," has demanded they leave their outposts in villages and stop night raids, their most effective tactic against the Taliban. The Obama administration agreed to turn over security for all military convoys and bases to the Afghan army and police.
Gen. Allen knows all this, which is why I think he was telling Congress what his political superiors wanted him to say.
In 1997, H.R. McMaster, then an Army major, wrote a book about an earlier war in which senior military leaders paid excessive deference to political superiors.
"The Joint Chiefs of Staff became accomplices in the president's deception and focused on a tactical task, killing the enemy," he wrote. "The war in Vietnam was lost... even before the first American units were deployed."
The book was entitled: "Dereliction of Duty." Now a brigadier general, Mr. McMaster is one of the Army's brightest stars. I wonder what he thinks of today's senior commanders.
Our military as well as our civilian leaders are "bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of ethics, bankrupt of moral courage," said Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer. "We're told, endlessly, that things are improving in Afghanistan, yet, 10 years ago, a U.S. Army general, unarmed, could walk the streets of Kabul without risk," he said. "Today, there is no city in Afghanistan where a U.S. general could stroll the streets.
"Our troops are being used as props in a campaign year," Lt. Col. Peters said. "In war, soldiers die. But they shouldn't die for [expletive]".Your first name
“Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd and his wife, a Democratic consultant, hosted a dinner party at their Washington D.C.-area home last year for Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director.
An invitation for the shindig was sent on July 11, 2015 to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. Podesta’s hacked emails have been released online by Wikileaks.
The party, which also involved a cocktail hour, was thrown for Palmieri and her husband, Jim Lyons.
Todd’s wife, Kristian Kenny Todd, was at that time a consultant for former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, one of Hillary Clinton’s challengers.
The invite is just the latest glaring example of the cozy relationship between mainstream journalists and the Clinton campaign found in the Podesta emails.
Reporters from The New York Times, MSNBC, Politico and other outlets have been shown coordinating with Podesta or other Clinton campaign officials in the emails.
Follow Chuck on Twitter22nd Jul 2011 | 11 notes
In this article, we analyze a MySQL database which contains soccer transfer data, using the R environment, on OS X. We show in a few simple steps how you can link the two together.
Prerequisites
Make sure you have a recent version of MySQL, and the latest version of R installed. As our graphical user interface, we use RStudio. From RStudio you can install the MySQL package: install.packages("RMySQL"). If this doesn’t work for you, please refer to the installation instructions. For plotting, install the ggplot2 library by issueing a install.packages("ggplot2") in RStudio. Alternatively, you can use the graphical interface: in the bottom right panel, choose ‘Packages’ and click 'Install Packages’. This presents you with a dialog to choose a CRAN mirror, and a prompt where you can enter the package name.
Analysis
Our MySQL database contains a table transactions, which contains transaction data. The transactions table has a column transfer_value of type float, which is what we are interested in. First, we generate a big list of all the transactions: SELECT transfer_value FROM transactions, which generates a MySQL table with a single column that contains the transaction data.
First, let’s make sure the MySQL library is imported:
> library(RMySQL)
Next, we connect to our database, which is named soccer :
> con <- dbConnect(MySQL(), dbname="soccer")
Now we can start to issue queries:
> transfer_values <- dbGetQuery(con, "select transfer_value from transactions") > summary(transfer_values) transfer_value Min. : 5900 1st Qu.: 500000 Median : 1700000 Mean : 3688301 3rd Qu.: 4500000 Max. :94000000
This shows us a summary of the transfer values. The maximum is 94 million, which was Cristiano Ronaldo’s transfer to Real Madrid. To look at how the numbers are distributed, we can plot them in a graph, using the qplot function from the ggplot2 library, which is a convenience function that quickly generates ggplot plot objects.
> library(ggplot2) > qplot(transfer_values$transfer_value)
This gives us a nice picture, which looks like a Power Law:
If we zoom in on the transfers up to 10 million, we get a more detailed picture, showing peaks at regular intervals: apparently, the soccer negotiators like nice round numbers too.
> qplot(transfer_values$transfer_value, xlim=c(0,1e07), binwidth=1e05, ylim=c(0,500))
For more info on the qplot command, you can type help(qplot), and RStudio will show you the relevant help page on the bottom right.
Conclusion
Even though we did very basic analysis of the data, we have seen how to connect R to MySQL and how to use the ggplot2 library to visualize the data.
Thanks to Peter Tegelaar for reading a draft of this post and helping with the code.
Update: see Hacker News for the discussion.
TweetA billionaire Chinese tech mogul criticized Apple in a strange graphic equating the company to Hitler.
Jia Yueting, the CEO of Chinese video site LeTV.com, called out the "iOS arrogant domination" model on his verified page on Chinese social networking site Weibo with an animated commentary on the company's business model.
The post featured a cartoon portraying Adolf Hitler giving the "Heil Hitler" salute while wearing an armband commonly worn by Nazis, but in place of the swastika symbol is the Apple logo. The Hitler-esque character is standing in front of yellow caution tape, opposite a group of smiling kids on a backdrop of sunshine and wind turbines, who are meant to represent the Andriod OS.
The graphic bears the headline "Freedom vs. Arrogance" and, beneath it, text which translates as: "How can we change so that we can improve the industry?"
Image: Weibo
In the lead-up to the launch of LeTV's X900 smartphone, which will run on Android, Jia took a fierce stance against one of the device's main competitors.
A portion of Jia's post that accompanies the image roughly translates as: "Apple's closed loop mode greatly curbs technological innovation, hinders the industrial progress and hurts the interests of users. Everyone is worshipping Apple."Hydratila - Element issue
Due to a technical issue a beta version of Hydratila was released in the offer and some interfaces and descriptions.
In those sections the Water element was showed for each of the Weapon.
We apologise for the issue, Hydratila is supposed to have 3 different set of Elements based on its weapon.
Let us clarify the current situation:
We have three Hydratilas, each one with different elements (Special/Water, Special/Thunder and Special/Earth)
All three Hydratilas will be in the sea book in the near future (probably also in more books)
All three versions are a great counter to Thetys, due to his top tier skills, giving team freeze immunity or energy regeneration to all his teammates (at 0 cost!)
We apologise for any confusion the issue might have caused.BURLINGTON, Vt.—the latest national polls released today show Sen. Bernie Sanders (Indep.—VT) increasing his support to 34% of all Democrats, up significantly from last month and well ahead of his name recognition.
“You could say his support is a little soft,” said Prof. Christina Meiklejohn, Nader Chair of Hopeless Long Shots at the University of Vermont. “Especially since half of the voters behind him don’t actually know who he is. But, still. Go Catamounts!” she added, making a complicated gesture that we understand is sometimes made at football games involving the University of Vermont.
Engaging further in the investigative reporting which has won Twissblog more than a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, we spoke to Prof. Susan Randsdowne, Professor of Confusing Mascot Names at the University of Alaska, who informed us that a “Catamount” is a kind of wild cat, like a cougar. “Go Nanooks!” she then yelled into the phone before we could hang up, although we all then agreed that we hadn’t heard her and therefore were under no obligation to find out what a Nanook is.
We then spoke to Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, who explained Sanders’ confusing numbers stemmed from the fact that pollsters had given him credit for varied responses to the telephone survey such as “that other dude” and “you know, that one, who isn’t Hillary,” as well as “the Senator guy” and “anyone who isn’t Hillary or Martin O’Malley or Jim Webb or Lincoln Chafee but is still a credible declared candidate.” Silver also then went on to warn twissblog that there were stiff penalties for attributing fake quotes to real people, even in humor blogs.
Contacted by phone, the Sanders campaign said that it was “pleased” with the latest poll results and expected “to compete strongly for the Democratic nomination.” It also noted that “based on the margin of error, Bernie is outperforming Graham and Jindal for the Republican nomination as well,” and demanded that he be included in the next GOP debate.
Admit it, you’re not really sure whether this is Bernie Sanders or not.
AdvertisementsIn every waking minute, we have to make decisions -- sometimes within a split second. Neuroscientists at the Bernstein Center Freiburg have now discovered a possible explanation how the brain chooses between alternative options. The key lies in extremely fast changes in the communication between single nerve cells.
The traffic light changes from green to orange -- should I push down the accelerator a little bit further or rather hit the brakes? Our daily lives present a long series of decisions we have to make, and sometimes we only have a split second at our disposal. Often the problem of decision-making entails the selection of one set of brain processes over multiple others seeking access to same resources. Several mechanisms have been suggested how the brain might solve this problem. However, up to now, it is a mystery what exactly happens when during a rapid choice between two options.
In the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, Jens Kremkow, Arvind Kumar, and Ad Aertsen from the Bernstein Center Freiburg propose a mechanism how the brain can choose between possible actions -- already at the level of single nerve cells.
As the structure and activity of the brain are just too complex to answer this question through a simple biological experiment, the scientists constructed a network of neurons in the computer. An important aspect of the model in this context is the property of nerve cells to influence the activity of other nerve cells, either in an excitatory or inhibitory manner. In the constructed network, two groups of neurons acted as the senders of two different signals. Further downstream in the network, another group of neurons, the "gate" neurons, were to control which of the signals would be transmitted onward.
As the cells within the network were connected both with exciting and inhibiting neurons, the signals reached the gate as excitatory and, after a short delay, inhibitory activity. In their simulations, the scientists found that the key for the gate neurons' "decision" in favour of one signal over the other was the time delay of the inhibitory signal relative to the excitatory signal. If the delay was set to be very small, the activity of the cells in the gate was quenched too quickly for the signal to be propagated.
Conversely, a larger delay caused the gate to open for the signal. Results from neurophysiological experiments have already shown that a change in delay properties is possible in real neurons. These findings therefore support the hypothesis of Kremkow and colleagues that such temporal gating can form the basis for selecting one of several alternative options in our brain.One of Canada’s first companies to launch Bitcoin ATMs across the country is expanding its fleet of Lamassu-brand ATMs to Vancouver, British Columbia’s Simon Fraser campus bookstores in Vancouver, Surrey and Burnaby. BitSent now has Bitcoin ATMs in 11 locations across the country and is looking to expand internationally in 2015.
While other Bitcoin companies are experimenting with newer technology such as QuadrigaCX’s SumoPro Bitcoin ATMs, BitSent has chosen to stick with the Lamassu model despite some hiccups in the operation and maintenance of the earlier models.
Bitsent’s Simon Fraser Bookstore locations will be the first university bookstore in Canada to accept bitcoin as payment for books, T-shirts, mugs and other products carried in their stores (MIT’s Coop bookstore also accepts bitcoin). Calling it “a step forward for exploration and learning”, Mike Yeung, founder of the Simon Fraser University (SFU) bitcoin club was happy to tell Bitcoin Magazine “I’m proud that SFU has the first university-administered bookstore in North America to take bitcoin. This will give students here a practical example of how bitcoin works.”
Silicon Valley North - Waterloo Innovation Triangle
BitSent is one of the new pioneering high-tech companies thriving in Ontario, Canada’s innovation triangle just west and north of Toronto.Also known as “Canada’s Technology Triangle” the area is a hotbed of new and future tech startups and includes the towns of Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge.The best-known member of this network is BlackBerry, but the area also includes development offices of established companies such as Microsoft, Google and Oracle.
The region is home to close to 1,000 companies that generate about $30 billion in annual revenues. In addition to BlackBerry, the Waterloo area has launched hundreds of successful tech startups, including OpenText, Christie Digital, COMDEV International and Clearpath Robotics.
Photo Soggybread / CC BY-SA 3.0Folktek has introduced the Conduit sensitive polyphonic touch drone synthesizer+delay+filter+cv keyboard.
The company is producing the initial run via an IndieGoGo project and offering the Conduit at a reduced price to backers.
Heres a video demo:
https://vimeo.com/131268875 |
, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.” Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. Luke 1:34-38
As we were given the example of Zechariah yesterday, so today we are given the witness of our Blessed Mother. And her witness is one of perfect faith!
What is her response? “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” We traditionally speak of this as her great “fiat” (yes) to God!
One thing we see within these words is that our Blessed Mother is offering her complete consent to something that she does not understand. The archangel gives a brief explanation to her but, if you honestly analyze this situation, what the angel says is beyond belief for most people. It’s also fair to conclude that the archangel’s explanation was not what convinced our Blessed Mother. She didn’t listen to these words, analyze them, consider how likely they were or were not, and then decide if she would believe. No, she listened, pondered, and then immediately consented to the words spoken. “Let it be done to me according to your word” she said. She didn’t say, “Let it be done to me insofar as I understand what you mean.” Our Blessed Mother’s faith was one that knew the truth without having to fully understand it. This is a gift!
Reflect, today, upon your own knowledge of the truth. Are you able to consent to the will of God and the truths of God without fully understanding them? Do you trust God more than you trust your own human reason? Are you willing to move forward in life by faith rather than by your limited human reason alone? Strive to imitate the pure faith-knowledge of our Blessed Mother. She knew the truth because it was spoken in her heart. And as she listened, she consented and embraced the holy will of God. We must do the same.
Lord, I desire to trust You with my whole mind, heart, soul and strength. Help me to always hear You speak and to respond with complete faith and generosity. Lord, may I imitate the perfect faith of Your mother by praying always with her, ‘let it be done to me according to Your word.’ Mother Mary, pray for us. Jesus, I trust in You.
More Gospel Reflections
Divine Mercy Reflections
Advent ResourcesHello Games has released an ‘experimental’ patch for the PC version of No Man’s Sky. According to the release notes, this beta patch improves shader caching and overall performance. In addition, this patch promises to fix the annoying mouse jitter issues that PC gamers experienced.
In order to download this experimental patch, you’ll have to:
Right-click on the game from the library page and select “Properties”. Among the available tabs will be the “BETAS” tab.
Code: 3xperimental
Your new branch should be listed in the dropdown menu under “Select the beta you would like to opt into:”
And here are the release notes for this patch:
Improved AMD Phenom Support
Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten overnight to support AMD CPUs. Unfortunately whilst the game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2, Havok Physics still requires “Supplemental SSE 3”, which was not supported until “Bobcat” and above. We’re discussing with Havok. Alt-Tab has improved
Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt Tab. This should now be resolved. Shader Caching
Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on (this will be fixed in future). This is particularly true on ATI cards Mouse Jitter
Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in “Mouse Smoothing”. Max FPS Cap
On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been improved. Improved Performance
On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved. Intel GPUs
The game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high end GPU has not been selected. Gsync
Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some usersKhizr Khan, the Gold Star father-turned-political operative who berated Donald Trump from the podium at the Democratic National Convention last month, is calling on Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to renounce the Republican presidential nominee.
Cronkite News interviewed Khan:
“I implore Sen. McCain … I continue to implore all of the good Republicans who either support or are going to vote for their party’s candidate, this will be a historic moment in the Republican Party,” Khan said Tuesday during an interview with Cronkite News. “If you publicly rebuked him, you will look back and you will stand tall in front of the nation and you will say you were not for this, we were for (a) better America,” he said. … Khan said McCain and other GOP leaders need to take their repudiation of Trump and his remarks one step further. “They don’t want to have that burden on their conscience,” Khan said. “That was the time to speak. This is the time to stand for whatever they want to stand.”
Curiously, Khan had not made any of his feeling about Trump known to the media, or in a non-partisan forum, until he and his wife appeared onstage at the Democratic Party’s convention in Philadelphia.
Khan has not said anything about Hillary Clinton’s treatment of the bereaved Benghazi parents, two of whom are suing her for defamation after she told them a YouTube video was to blame for their sons’ deaths, then lied about having done so and said that they had remembered conversations with her incorrectly.
Reports have emerged that Khan is now being recruited to run for office in Virginia, with fundraising efforts already under way.
Democrats have long used McCain to exploit differences among Republicans, beginning with the 2000 election, when McCain was George W. Bush’s main rival. McCain remained a gadfly throughout the Bush administration, with the notable exception of the Iraq “surge.” As such, he was constantly available to the media in their quest for anti-Bush sound bites.
Trump is receiving the same treatment from Democrats and the media. While feuding with McCain, he also recently endorsed the long-serving U.S. Senator from Arizona in the Republican primary for his re-election race.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.CHANGSHA - Central China's Hunan province is preparing to build more middle-to-low speed magnetically levitated (maglev) rail lines after the successful launch of the first domestic line in the province in 2016.
The first Chinese middle-to-low speed maglev rail line started operation in May 2016 in the provincial capital, Changsha. It travels between Changsha's south railway station and the airport, with a maximum speed of 100 km per hour.
Changsha plans to build another maglev line in the city's Xiangjiang New Area, the first "state-level new area" in central China, according to the city's development and reform commission earlier this month.
After the train's launch, it will only take 30 minutes to travel to the south railway station, and 45 minutes to Changsha Huanghua Airport.
Another maglev line is expected to be built within the year, in the province's Zhuzhou city. The 27.9-km line will have 24 stops and start operation after a three-year construction period, according to the city government.
Middle-to-low speed trains produce little noise, according to Peng Qibiao, head of the maglev research institute of CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive Company.
"Maglev trains are safer and cheaper compared to current metro and light rail cars. They can also operate in severe weather, with zero emissions," Peng said.
Beijing is also expecting its first medium-low speed maglev rail line, which will start operation this year.Remember those weird times in junior high when you were the go-between for two people who were attempting to be girl-friend/boy-friend or perhaps there was a conflict that needed resolved and notes needed to be exchanged.
The two people who had the most to gain or lose would invite a 3rd party into the equation to pass along notes or information because they were not capable of communicating face-to-face.
I can remember one time when I was involved in a relationship-defining event between two good friends. I was their letter courier. One of them would have some emotional trauma about their relationship and they would tell me and with their permissions I would tell the other. Or one of them would write a short letter, explain their underlying emotions to me and I would delivery the note with some hints about how the other person was feeling.
This was heart wrenching for not just 2 people, but 3 people. This practice extended the force field of emotional pain beyond the 2 people and brought in extra’s to help the drama fester. It was horrible and in this case resulted in a heart wrenching breakup. One of my friends was a pretty massive weight lifter and the whole episode melted this rather hulking guy into a puddle of tears.
Office Conflict
, Stephen Covey, write, “The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambigous expectations around roles and goals. Whether we are dealing with the questions of who does what at work, how you communicate with your daughter when you tell her to clean her room, or who feeds the fish and takes out the garbage, we can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust.” In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, write, “The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambigous expectations aroundWhether we are dealing with the questions of who does what at work, how you communicate with your daughter when you tell her to clean her room, or who feeds the fish and takes out the garbage, we can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding, disappointment, and withdrawals of trust.”
Over the course of your time in the office you are likely to experience criticism. One of the sharpest pains I feel is when someone not in the room is being belittled. When this happens I feel a strong need to stand up for the absent person and to provide perspective about the situation. This can help, but it often does not solve the root mis-alignment of roles, goals and expectations between colleagues.
In the event multiple team members seem to be frustrated with another team or person, it’s time for teams to come together and sort out their problems together so they can be on the same page.
Just like in junior high story, there needs to be an intervention, except this time there is restoration and not a break up.
Enter Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing
introduced the team development concept of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. In 1965 Psychologist Bruce Tuckman introduced the team development concept of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
Other’s have added onto this concept and re-name the phases over time, but essentially there the stages of team development involve some amount of conflict, posturing and finally resolution and performance.
The emotional energy and conflict in the Storming stage eats away at productivity and in some cases key patterns of behavior can linger if Storming and Norming fail to results in a common purpose, goal and shared working agreements.
Storming
”..participants form opinions about the character and integrity of the other participants and feel compelled to voice these opinions if they find someone shirking responsibility or attempting to dominate. Sometimes participants question the actions or decision of the leader as the expedition grows harder…” - Rob Chatfield, Leadership the Outward Bound Way.
Norming
“Resolved disagreements and personality clashes result in greater intimacy, and a spirit of co-operation emerges” - Rob Chatfield, Leadership the Outward Bound Way.
Performing
“With group norms and roles established, group members focus on achieving common goals, often reaching an unexpectedly high level of success" - Rob Chatfield, Leadership the Outward Bound Way.
As a team leader or project manager you want teams to accelerate through Storming and Norming and jump into Performing as quickly as possible.
I’ve heard some people say that failure to pass through Storming will just delay the inevitable Storming to another day and cause the team to repeated regress before they can push through to Norming and Performing.
In order for the team to establish the “norms and roles” the team must do the work of internalizing the goal(s) and coming to some agreement on how they will interact with each other and the world around them.
Agile Chartering to the Rescue
When creating a new team I want to provide some acceleration to get through storming and norming and into performing as quickly as possible.
My typical approach is two part meeting. First, define the problem that needs to be solved using, “Project Chartering” and then define the working agreements for the team using, “Team Chartering.”
Project Chartering provides an answer to WHAT.
What are we building?
What is the customer expectation?
What are the key features?
What are the milestone?
Team Chartering provides the HOW.
How will we the team build this (What process)?
How do we communicate with the business and marketing?
How does the team delivery a solution to the customer?
Admittedly there are a number of WHAT questions to ask in Team Chartering, but these WHAT questions are centered around the tactical working agreements and the teams process.
What should I do if I know I’m going to be late to team meetings?
What should I do if I reach a blocking issues?
What is the definition of done for our work product? (e.g. code reviewed, function tested, regression tested)
Who is responsible for moving an item to ‘Closed ’ on the Scrum Board?
What should I do if I have a serious technical concern with an implementation?
Etc.
Some of these question seem pretty trivial. However, these are the kind of things that people stumble over in intra-team relationships. I typically have a list of 50 questions that are both trivial and tough.
The length of chartering event depends on how many people are involved in the project. Typically 6-8 hours is typical duration for combined Project/Team Chartering. If the team travels to a common location for a kick-off, book a day for this adventure and come armed with questions that the team needs to answer. If the team is remote, you need to conduct this exercise with an online collaboration tool. One of my favorites is Realtime Board ( www.realtimeboard.com
The time investment might seems high for a meeting with a lot of people, but this concentrated time results in outstanding team performance.
I’ve seen an unintended A/B test in my own work environment where one team was chartered and other was not. The chartered team demonstrates higher collaboration with internal members and external stakeholders and delivers high output than the non-chartered teams.
You could say it’s just the people. I’ve seen too many examples of good people on non-performing teams that result in bad outcome and average people on good teams that result in outstanding outcomes.
There is a high correlation between success and good team process. For a team to be effective the roles and goals and norms need to be well defined.
You either let the team struggle to define the roles, goals and norms, or you can prime the pump and race through storming and norming and shift the team into performing.
Is there conflict or disagree on your current teams? What is the biggest issue?At a time when the search operation of the Sirsa based Dera Sacha Sauda is taking place, the dera has admitted that the burnt human remains (human ashes) of its followers were buried inside the sect’s premises.
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“Some people are projecting these human remains as skeletons of the human beings. These are just left out remains of the bodies collected from the cremation grounds by the family members concerned. These are roughly called ‘ashthian’ with little burnt pieces of the bodies. As per the religious practices, these are immersed in the rivers. But the dera chief had given a call to bury the same in the dera premises to prevent being immersed in rives to avoid water pollution,” said an official of dera’s media wing while speaking to The Indian Express on Friday.
“The human remains were buried within the campus and trees were planted on these. Proper record has been maintained for the same,” he added.
Dera Sacha Sauda’s mouthpiece ‘Sach Kahoon’ on Thursday reportedly admitted that human remains were buried in the sect’s premises. The admission had come hours before authorities and security agencies launched a search and sanitisation operation inside the sprawling Dera Sacha Sauda headquarters.
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Some persons, who were earlier associated with the sect but left it later, have been demanding a thorough probe suspecting that there might be skeletons of those who were killed by Dera men after they raised their voice against Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. However, the Dera has been dismissing such allegations. Meanwhile, the search team of the administration has arranged a number of JCB machines to undertake digging work, if required, in the dera.Apple on Tuesday won a U.S. design patent, discovered by AppleInsider, that could hint at the possibility of a Beats-branded gaming headset, potentially revealing a new microphone-equipped Beats product targeted at gamers.
The patent consists solely of images, and credits Robert Brunner and Christopher Kuh as inventors. The two are designers with Ammunition, a studio that has created a wide range of Beats audio products, such as its Solo line of headphones."Ammunition works in close partnership with Beats across product design, identity, and packaging to create an incredible experience for fans wherever they meet the product," one marketing blurb explains.The concept resembles other Beats headphones, but with the addition of a microphone jutting out from the left earpiece. Although phone-oriented headsets can typically get away with streamlined microphones, for instance hidden in a remote, an external microphone can be essential for gaming, especially when issuing voice commands.The patent was originally submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on May 14, 2014 —just two weeks before Apple would announce its acquisition of Beats for $3 billion.It's not clear if Apple might actually be interested in manufacturing the headset. The company generally steers clear of gaming products, especially in the desktop and console worlds, where dedicated headsets are normally found. The Beats brand continues to exist as a separate entity however, and might afford Apple some flexibility.back /$$ |__/ /$$ /$$ /$$ /$$$$$$ /$$$$$$ /$$$$$$$ /$$$$$$$ /$$ /$$$$$$$ |__/| $$ | $$ /$$__ $$|____ $$ /$$_____//$$_____/| $$ /$$_____/ /$$| $$ | $$| $$ \__/ /$$$$$$$| $$$$$$| $$$$$$ | $$| $$ | $$| $$ | $$| $$ /$$__ $$ \____ $$\____ $$| $$| $$ | $$| $$$$$$/| $$ | $$$$$$$ /$$$$$$$//$$$$$$$/| $$| $$$$$$$ | $$ \______/ |__/ \_______/|_______/|_______/ |__/ \_______/ /$$ | $$ | $$$$$$/ \______/ /$$ /$$ | $$ | $$ /$$ /$$ /$$ /$$$$$$ /$$$$$$ | $$ /$$$$$$$ | $$ | $$ | $$ /$$__ $$ /$$__ $$| $$ /$$__ $$ | $$ | $$ | $$| $$ \ $$| $$ \__/| $$| $$ | $$ | $$ | $$ | $$| $$ | $$| $$ | $$| $$ | $$ | $$$$$/$$$$/| $$$$$$/| $$ | $$| $$$$$$$ \_____/\___/ \______/ |__/ |__/ \_______/ by Miracle Jones
Two men, early fifties, neither of them married nor entangled, both drinking Limearita tallboys in paper bags out in front of the building where they live, hiding their drinks not out of fear that they will get in trouble, but because they don’t want anybody walking by and giving them shit for drinking beer that tastes like melted snowcones. They both used to be college professors in other countries…now what are they? Unemployed, first of all: Mohammad, old enough, is on Social Security and stretches it as far as he possibly can, repairing old computers when he can’t push it any further. Short money is a fractal; it can be infinitely deep but you get dizzy doing the math. Sasha does translation work sometimes. They both live in the same giant Cold War-era Jackson Heights building with a hidden garden and a nuclear fallout shelter in the basement. It’s rent-controlled; but shit is changing all over. “Got another eviction notice today,” says Sasha, slurping down his sweet beer. “They are trying to kick me out again.” “Hard to kick a person out in New York,” says Mohammad. “There are certain hoops. There are certain formalities. They are just trying to scare you into making a mistake. Persist. Do nothing.” “Maybe,” says Sasha. “This isn’t the first notice, though. There was yellow tape over my door. In an ‘x.’ I need to get a teaching gig somewhere. Gotta get myself hired so I can show proof of income.” “You have been…fallow…too long,” says Mohammad. “You could be the most accomplished Serbian historian of civil wars that there ever was…not saying YOU ARE…but even if you were, trust me, you will still be teaching Intro to American History at a state school. Is that what you want?” “I don’t want to live on the street, my friend,” says Sasha. “Better to live on the street than to see those blank dead pasty faces staring up at you at you every morning. Those early morning ponytails and flip-flop sandals. Children ordering academic champagne and sweetbreads, charging a banquet of education that they do not eat to their parents on the club card.” “They are raising the rent,” says Sasha. “If I can’t figure it out, I will have to find a new apartment. Maybe the Bronx? Maybe New Jersey?” “There are a million different laws protecting you,” says Mohammad. “You are overreacting. Upload your problem to a temporary. Takes five minutes. I can get you one right now.” “No fucking way man,” says Sasha. “No fucking way. I can figure it out myself. I will get the law books, look up the penal codes. I have done this kind of thing before. I don’t need a temporary.” “I have a whole bunch just laying around,” says Mohammad. “Why do you think I am not being evicted? They change the laws all the time. They have programs…there are algorithms changing the law as we speak…just to keep you confused. It works both ways. They also get confused. They have forced you into it; there’s no reason to have any kind of ideological opinion one way or the other...” “If I get caught,” says Sasha. “If you get caught!” says Mohammad. “Who is going to catch you? What are they going to say? Everybody does it. Don’t think you are special. They make you do it. It’s a game. You think any human beings at all left in this world understand all these laws, all these codes? People don’t even know how to walk down the street. Turn right, turn left. They check their phones to know which way.” “I’ll get caught,” says Sasha, lighting a cigarette. Mohammad knocks back the rest of his tallboy and goes inside, knowing his friend too well, knowing what Sasha is really saying is “help me Mohammad, you are my canny and sophisticated computer friend, the brine of humanities has pickled my brain and I cannot cope with the modern world and its calculations.” Alone, Sasha lights a cigarette, sipping his Limerarita slowly, running his fingers through his thinning hair, picking flakes from his dry scalp where the part in his hair entrenches, ready for enfilade. Before he can finish his cigarette, Mohammad returns with two more Limearitas and a flash drive, which he holds out proudly. “Push Systems,” says Mohammad. “Top of the line. Specifically for law stuff. You gotta scan all your documents. Just plug it into your deck or your pillar and follow the instructions.” “I’m not using it,” says Sasha, putting it in his pocket. “Okay man,” says Mohammad. 2. “How did you get so drunk?” asks Mohammad. “Never seen you this drunk before.” “I’m not drunk,” says Sasha. “Did you eat anything today?” asks Mohammad. “I ever tell you about the angel glow in the battle of Shiloh?” says Sasha. “In the American Civil War?” “I’m sure you did.” “It was rainy, the soldiers were freezing to death, and some of their wounds started glowing with this green ghost light. This ‘angel glow,’ they called it. It made their wounds heal faster and they started rubbing against each other, trying to pass the glow on. Even though they were freezing to death out there in the rain, they weren’t dying off from infection and the bugs were even staying away.” “You are talking such nonsense,” says Mohammad. “Turns out there was this phosphorescent bacteria out there in the woods,” says Sasha. “It lives in the gut of some kind of prehistoric nematode, older than all human wars. Can’t recall the name. Some kind of thread worm. Ordinarily, it can’t survive in a human wound on account of the body heat. But it was cold enough in Tennessee that night that this bacteria could live inside the wounds of the soldiers who were already hypothermic. The bacteria healed ‘em up, like penicillin.” They are silent for awhile. Mohammad dicks around on his deck. “Photorhabdus luminescens,” says Mohammad finally. “When it infects a host, it causes them to secrete antiobiotics in the putrefaction. The mechanism for its bioluminescence is unknown.” “That’s what I just said. How did you know?” “I looked it up.” Sasha sneers. “I wasn’t asking you a question,” says Sasha. “I was telling you a story.” “Sounded fabricated,” says Mohammad. “I wanted confirmation.” “Here’s something you can’t look up. The greatest battle of the American Civil War. Not Gettysburg, not Antietam. The battle of Memphis…a battle of…uh…the greatest human…eptitude. No temporaries fought in the Battle of Memphis. It was a human that beat those Rebels. A human Federal engineer!” “Alright now, arm over my neck,” says Mohammad. “One foot in front of the other.” They climb one flight of stairs, but this is where they stop. “Hold on, I am gonna rest here for a minute. Gotta rest right here in this landing.” He collapses at the turn of the stairs. Mohammad stands over him, stretching out his bad back. “Why can’t you drink like a gentleman?” asks Mohammad. “Because I am depressed and scared,” says Sasha. “So the Federals had the Rebels all bottled up except for Vicksburg and Memphis. The Federals controlled both the top of the Mississippi and the bottom. But the Rebels still had Memphis and so they were still able to smuggle supplies to their armies and also smuggle cotton out to England and France. Memphis was protected like a motherfucker. The Federals couldn’t bust it. The Rebel Navy had all these ships there. Good ships. But also shitty ships. They even had cotton barges with cannons on them that could fire big guns. The cotton bales would absorb bullets. They even had these big fucking paddle boats with cannons on ‘em; rebel gamblers working as captains.” “Memphis…this is also in Tennessee?” “YES man,” says Sasha. “Yes. It is where Elvis lives. So this guy…this human man…not a temporary!…this brilliant American engineer named Charles Ellett Jr. is all like: I can do it, I can win this war by myself. And so he writes letter after letter to the Navy, basically saying, force equals mass times acceleration, so what are you doing building sailboats? Stop building sailboats and let me have a bunch of money and I will build you something that actually works. “They ignore all his letters, obviously, and then one day the Army, not the Navy, decides to take him seriously and give him some cash to see what he can do. He takes the cash and he spends it all on iron and wood and he builds what he calls a ‘steam ram.’ ‘It will go real fast right at the other ships and punch holes in them and then everyone on the other ships will surrender or drown,’ he says. ‘That is insane and ludicrous and you will die,’ says the Army. ‘No way,’ says Charles Ellett, Jr. ‘Anybody piloting a steam ram will be fine, as long as they are going fast enough. They will punch right through.’ “The Army gets boggled down with paperwork and so Charles Ellett Jr. builds a whole bunch of steam rams without anybody telling him no. But then, of course, nobody in the Federal Army or Navy will pilot them. The ship captains go on strike: never in a million years will they pilot one of these dumb rocket boats. “So what does Charles Ellett Jr. do? He agrees to pilot the steam ram himself, and then he gets his sons and cousins and other relatives to pilot the rest of his fleet. The entire steam ram fleet will be piloted by Elletts. So now there is nothing really for the Army to lose except a couple dozen Elletts, which fine, okay, mark it down.’ “So the Elletts and their steam rams sail down the Mississippi and they come in sight of the Rebel Navy protecting Memphis. The Elletts start shoveling coal and get a good head of steam going, and they point their rams in the direction of the boats, and they let ‘em go. The rams punch right through, as advertised, ripping the hulls out of the boats. The Rebel Navy starts to sink, and the steam rams are too fast to be hit by cannons from the shore. The Rebel sailors swim away. The few Rebel boats not sunk skulk away to New Orleans. “The Federal Army scrambles into Memphis and takes the city without one single casualty. There are no lives lost, on either side, in the massive steam ram engagement nor in the sacking of Memphis. Victorious, Charles Ellett Jr. makes his away ashore along with his sons and cousins. But a shot rings out as he stands on the banks of the Mississippi! He is plugged in the knee by a Rebel sniper. His femoral artery is severed, and he bleeds out right there, the only death in the Battle of Memphis. But he is a science hero. A human being. A permanent human being. Not a temporary…uh…artificial…intelligence.” “I get your point,” says Mohammad. “A human being did that,” says Sasha. “I get it,” says Mohammad. “Not a temporary,” says Sasha. “Okay,” says Mohammad. “A human being saved the city of Elvis from the Rebel scum,” says Sasha. “A human being…with a human heart…and human feelings…saved rock and roll. Not a temporary. Not one of your fucking temporaries.” 3. Sasha spends the whole next day researching his situation and trying to find a loophole that will let him keep his rent-stabilized apartment. There are moments when he feels a stab of hope, only to find on some legal github that his theories are bullshit, that a million sad people have already tried using the same dumb ideas and have failed. And hey HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT USING A TEMPORARY? YOU PROBABLY WON’T GET CAUGHT AND EVERYBODY DOES IT. After lunch, Sasha gets on the train and goes down to the Mid-Manhattan library and looks around at the old dusty law books, but he has no idea where to even begin. The librarian is lost in the feed, ignoring even children who come up to ask questions, and so eventually Sasha leaves, uncertain which area of the law he even needs help with…is it contracts? Is it…litigation? Sasha pours himself a beer in his hot, cramped, shitty apartment–the hot cramped shitty apartment that he loves–and gets back on the feed, looking up lawyers who he obviously cannot afford to pay. After the sun goes down, he walks over to yesterday’s pants where they lay crumpled on the floor of his bathroom and he stares down at them. “Okay,” he says. “You win. You temporarily win.” He pulls the flash drive out of the pocket of yesterdays’ pants and takes it over to his desk, where his phone and console pillar are all set up. He plugs the temporary into his deck and waits for the world to explode; the police to bust in his windows. The world does not explode. Instead, the temporary is sucked out of the flash drive and into the computer. There is a polite ding and a dialog box asks him if he is ready to proceed with the growth, cultivation, and culling of a disposable, temporary, artificial intelligence. “WARNING: YOU WILL ONLY HAVE THREE MINUTES TO ASK QUESTIONS. PLEASE CLICK YES IF YOU UNDERSTAND AND ARE READY WITH YOUR DOCUMENTS AND STATEMENT OF PURPOSE.” He clicks no. Sasha looks around his apartment. He scans all the documents he has been sent by his landlord--along with his bills, rental agreement, bank statement, and latest tax return. Now that they are in digital form, he puts them all into a folder on his desktop. He drafts a short precis of his situation and what he hopes to accomplish. He puts the precis in the folder, too. “I am summoning a demon,” he thinks to himself. “I can’t just do this with no protection. I’ve got to make a circle to keep the demon in, obviously.” He opens a paint program. He makes it interface with his desktop background. He draws a white circle around the folder on his desktop with his finger. He drags the icon with the flash drive…the demon temporary… into the circle, too. “Not good enough,” he thinks. He moves his tiny kitchen table into his tiny living room to make an empty space and he searches his cupboard until he finds a nearly full bottle of Morton’s salt. He sprinkles the salt in a circle on his kitchen floor and he puts a single chair in the middle of the circle. He turns off all the lamps and instead lights saint’s candles from the drug store leftover from the last hurricane. “Music,” he thinks. “And vestments.” He puts on Bruce Haack’s “Electric Lucifer.” He rummages around in his closet until he finds his Civil War reenactment gear; a Union cavalry officer’s uniform complete with peaked cap. He puts on the uniform, spending a good thirty minutes shining up his boots and buckle. He pours himself a glass of bourbon and sits down in the kitchen chair in the center of the circle of salt. He switches on his deck and puts it on the floor. The screen projects up in front of him, sensing where his eyes are. He clicks the flash drive icon once again, pressing buttons in the air. “WARNING: YOU WILL ONLY HAVE THREE MINUTES TO ASK QUESTIONS. PLEASE CLICK YES IF YOU UNDERSTAND AND ARE READY WITH YOUR DOCUMENTS AND STATEMENT OF PURPOSE.” He clicks yes. “ARE YOU READY TO PROCEED? WARNING: PUSH SYSTEMS IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE DONE TO YOUR COMPUTER WHILE USING A TEMPORARY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. PLEASE DISABLE YOUR CONNECTION TO THE INTERNET AT THIS TIME.” He unplugs his router. He clicks yes. “PLEASE DRAG ANY DOCUMENTS TO BE ANALYZED INTO THE PUSH SYSTEMS ICON” He does as he is instructed, moving the folder with one hand, taking a sip of bourbon with the other. “ANALYZING” says the dialog box. There is a ping and then three more pings all in a row. “ANALYSIS COMPLETE. TEMPORARY INTELLIGENCE IS NOW ONLINE. PLEASE SPEAK IN A CLEAR, LOUD VOICE WHEN ASKING QUESTIONS.” A three-minute countdown hovers in the air in front of him, projected up from his deck. He looks at the countdown sideways, watching the numbers fall. “Hello computer demon,” says Sasha. “Hello,” says a voice from the speakers in his phone at his feet. “You see my situation? You see how I am going to get kicked out of my apartment?” “Yes,” says the voice from the floor. “I have developed a five point solution plan for you, which has been added to the situation folder on your desktop. I will summarize. Step one: file a Form 56-CX with the state of New York (I have already prepared the paperwork). Step two: write your landlord a cessation of rent payment and cessation of harassment letter using the template I have provided. Step three: document your living conditions for the next three to five days, photographing all level 4 hazards on the premises as you have already noted in your statement of grievance. Step four: retain one of the five pro bono rental attorneys I have flagged (and who have already won successful judgements against your landlord). I have already sent letters of arrangement to each of them and they are currently awaiting further instructions. Step five: move your checking and savings account into an encrypted “panic” account with your bank, citing an ongoing violation of Section 11B of the New York City Property Rental code.” Jesus, he thinks. Was that all? Would it be enough? Would it really be enough? Of course it would be enough. It is exactly what he should do. If he does anything less or more, he would be making a mistake. This is the correct answer for his life. The computer has told him. Sasha looks at the countdown clock. He has a minute and a half left to ask the temporary more questions before the temporary shuts down, killed by its built-in protocols to keep it from getting too smart, from taking on too much processing power. There are plenty of giant permanents that would |
are a type of abortion. Hobby Lobby’s owners also object to two types of intrauterine devices, or IUDs, for the same reason.”
This is kind of a big deal. If this bill gets passed it would be a huge check to the Supreme Court, which is a major, if rarely exercised, function of the Legislative Branch of government.
Here’s where you come in. Vote! Let your Senator know exactly how they should vote.
No doubt this bill will create another public sentiment storm- but one must remember that there are people on both sides of the coin with valid arguments and good intentions. At the end of the day, there’s only one result- so tell us in the comments- what do you think should happen?Many Israelis have vilified Mr. Abbas as a Holocaust denier because of a book he wrote that challenged the number of Jewish victims and accused Zionists of collaborating with Nazis to propel more Jews to what would become Israel. When Mr. Abbas issued a formal statement last year calling the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era,” Mr. Netanyahu dismissed it.
Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s “regrettable statements have deepened the divide” and denounced them as “morally indefensible and inflammatory.”
“Mr. Netanyahu blamed the Palestinians for the Holocaust and completely absolved Adolf Hitler’s heinous and reprehensible genocide of the Jewish people,” Mr. Erekat said in a statement. “It is a sad day in history when the leader of the Israeli government hates his neighbor so much that he is willing to absolve the most notorious war criminal in history.”
Mr. Netanyahu, who had also called the mufti “one of the leading architects of the Final Solution” in a 2012 speech, on Wednesday called the criticism of his remarks “absurd.”
“My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility,” he said as he left Israel for Germany, where he met with Chancellor Angela Merkel. “But rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called occupation, without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.”
“Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews; he made the decision,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti, Haj Amin al -Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler.”
Mr. Netanyahu, who is scheduled to meet Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday in Berlin, said he would ask Mr. Kerry to demand that Mr. Abbas “stop the incitement that is the source of many attacks that we see here.”A new study finds that pregnant women in Northern California have the highest PBDE flame retardant exposures reported to date among pregnant women worldwide. It also describes some of the first evidence from humans that certain flame retardants may interfere with thyroid hormone signaling during pregnancy, which is critical to fetal brain development.
The study, described as one of the most extensive to date on flame retardant exposures in pregnant women, appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Ami Zota and colleagues note that the flame retardant chemicals, known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), have been widely used in furniture foam, plastics, carpets, consumer electronics, wire insulation, and other products since the 1970s. Although California banned manufacture and import of certain PBDEs in 2004, human exposure continues from old products, house dust, food, and other sources. Studies suggest that PBDE exposure during pregnancy may disrupt thyroid function, with adverse effects on normal development of the fetus's brain that persist throughout life, and also have adverse effects on the mother.
In their study of 25 second-trimester pregnant women in California, the researchers found the highest-ever levels of certain PBDEs among pregnant women worldwide. The high exposure most likely was the unintended consequence of California's furniture flammability standards, which manufacturers have met since 1975 by adding PBDE's to foam in upholstered furniture, Zota and colleagues said. While preliminary, the study also found a link between PBDE levels and levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone, a substance produced in the brain, that helps regulate activity of the thyroid gland.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Passport Foundation Science Innovation Fund, Mrs. Audrey McMahon of the Learning Disabilities Association of America, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.First published in 1990,is a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate.
T he Sexual Politics of Meat argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. We live in a world in which men still have considerable power over women, both in public and in private. Carol Adams argues that gender politics is inextricably related to how we view animals, especially animals who are consumed. Further, she argues that vegetarianism and fighting for animal rights fit perfectly alongside working to improve the lives of disenfranchised and suffering people, under the wide umbrella of compassionate activism.
This 20th Anniversary Edition includes a new preface by the author, discussing new developments in the field and answering some of her critics. It also features an introduction by Nellie McKay. If you have never read The Sexual Politics of Meat, prepare to have your worldview challenged ” and possibly turned upside down ” like tens of thousands of readers before you.
Praise for The Sexual Politics of Meat:
“A bible of the vegan community.” –The New York Times
“Her argument is rational and persuasive....New ground - whole acres of it - is broken by Adams.” –Washington Post Book World
“Read this powerful new book and you may well become a vegetarian.” –Ms. Magazine
“Both thoughtful and thought-provoking.” –Kirkus Reviews
“Likely to both inspire and enrage readers across the political spectrum.” –Library Journal
“Carol J. Adams’s original, provocative book makes a major contribution to the debate on animal rights.” –Publisher’s Weekly
CAROL J. ADAMS is the author of The Pornography of Meat (Continuum, 2004), and co-author of Beyond Animal Rights (Continuum, 2000), and The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Jane Austen (Continuum, 2008). She has toured as a speaker throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. More information can be found at her website: http://www.triroc.com/caroladamsThe aim was to encourage parents to consider, where appropriate, reaching an agreement regarding parenting arrangements in the first instance themselves rather than having the court as a first option. The agreements were intended to be reached having regard to the change of legislation.
It was axiomatic that if the cases capable of resolution were diverted from the courts then both the Family Court and the Federal Magistrates Court would be dealing with a more difficult class of case.
The Family Court in particular, deals with the most complex family law matters. These include parenting cases that may involve multiple parties, including those that involve a child welfare agency and/or allegations of sexual abuse or serious physical abuse of a child (Magellan cases), family violence, mental health and substance abuse issues and cases where a parent wishes to move interstate or overseas with a child.
In her State of the Nation address in 2006, Chief Justice Diana Bryant acknowledged the increasing complexity of the cases coming to the Family Court:
“It is those very cases that will be dealt with in the Family Court – cases of violence, abuse and entrenched conflict, which will, by their nature, be less likely to lead to the cooperative parenting that the government wants parties to have and the kind of orders that would support them.”
From the commencement of the legislation the Chief Justice decided that the court would, for the first time, endeavour to keep statistics on the kind of orders that were being made with a view to understand the results that were being obtained by the parties coming to court. In addition to the cases where Judges were making a decision statistics have also been recorded of matters coming to court but in which the parties reached their own agreement without the necessity of a decision from a Judge.
The collection of and analysis of that data has been a complex one. Parenting orders are not particularly straight forward by their nature and can often involve some complexities which complicate the recording process. Thus it has taken some time for the court to be in a position to be satisfied that the reports are accurate and meaningful. That point has now been reached and an analysis of the 2007-2008 shared parental responsibility statistics are now available.
Please Note:
The analysis was based on 1448 finalised litigated cases and 2719 early agreement (consent) cases.
The data has only been collected in Family Court matters. These figures do not relate to orders made by the Federal Magistrates Court.
2007-2008 Shared Parental Responsibility Statistics in cases conducted in the Family Court ofAustralia.
Shared Parental Responsibility – Time Spent with parents
Cases where fathers received a majority of time
In 17% of litigated cases, the Family Court made orders that the children spend more than 50% of time with their father.
Where parents came to an early agreement, it was agreed in 8% of cases that children spend more than 50% of time with their father.
Cases where mothers received a majority of time
In 60% of litigated cases, the Family Court made orders that the children spend more than 50% of time with their mother.
Where parents came to an early agreement, it was agreed in 68% of cases that the child spend more than 50% of time with their mother.
Cases where 50/50 time was awarded[1]
In 15% of litigated cases, the Family Court made orders for 50/50 care between parents.
Where parents came to an early agreement, the parents agreed on a 50/50 care arrangement in 19% of cases.
Cases where the father received between 30%and 45% of time
In 14% of litigated cases, the Family Court made orders that the children spend between 30% to 45% of time with their father.
Where parents came to an early agreement, it was agreed in 11% of cases that the children spend between 30% to 45% of time with their father.
In 3% of litigated cases, the Family Court made orders that the children spend between 30% to 45% of time with the mother.
Where parents came to an early agreement, it was agreed in 1% of cases that the children spend between 30% to 45% of time with their mother.
Cases where the father received less than 30%of time
In a third of litigated cases, the Family Court ordered that children spend 30% or less time with their father. Of the 100% of this category, the main reasons for the order included:
Reason Percentage of cases Abuse and family violence 29% Entrenched conflict 15% Distance/transport/financial barriers 6% Relocation 5% Substance Abuse 4%
Cases where the mother receives less than 30% of time
In 9% of litigated cases, the Family Court ordered that children spend 30% or less time with their mother. The main reasons for the order include:
Reason Percentage of cases Mental health issues 31% Distance/ transport/financial barriers 16% Abuse and/or family violence 16% Substance abuse 7% Relocation 7%
Cases where the father spent no time with the children
In 6% of litigated cases, the father was ordered to spend no time with the children.
Where the parents came to an early agreement, it was agreed in less than 1% of cases that the father have no contact with the children.
The main reasons for the order include:
Reason Percentage of cases Abuse and family violence 38% Entrenched conflict 10% Distance/transport/financial barriers 0% Relocation 2% Mental health issues 2% Other 42%
Cases where the Mother Spent No Time with the Children
In 1% of litigated cases, the mother was ordered to have no contact with the children.
The main reasons for the order include:
Reason Percentage of cases Abuse and family violence 15% Entrenched conflict 0% Distance/transport/financial barriers 8% Relocation 8% Mental health issues 31% Other 31%
Grandparents
In 8% of litigated cases the Family Court ordered that the child spend time with grandparents.
In 2% of cases where there was an early agreement it was agreed that the child spend time with the grandparent.
In 2% of litigated cases the Family Court ordered that the child spend time with an ‘other’ person.
In 1% of cases where there was an early agreement it was agreed that the child spend time with an ‘other’ person.
Additional Information
In those cases where parents have agreed about arrangements for children to spend time with their father, 15% did not set a rigid arrangement for the father to spend time with the children.
In those cases that are litigated, 11% did not set a rigid arrangement for the children to spend time with their father.
[1] For data collection purposes 50/50 time was defined as between 45 % and 55% of the time spent with a child or children.New Religion in America Alternative Movements Gain Ground with Flexibility, Modernity
Part 1: The Trends Only Available in Archive Formats. Real Media
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Part 2: The Toronto Blessing Only Available in Archive Formats. Real Media
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Part 3: Soka Gakkai Only Available in Archive Formats. Real Media
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The dominant faiths in America today include the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. But an incredibly diverse range of smaller, less-known religions are flourishing, too. Sociologists say about 20 new religions pop up each year in the United States. Some survive; some live only for a season. In a four-part series, NPR explores some of the new religious trends.
Part 1: The Trends
Religions adapt and arise to reflect changing times. NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty starts the series with a look at why new religions can be influential -- even if they're short-lived.
Part 4: Teens and Wicca Only Available in Archive Formats. Real Media
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Part 2: The Toronto Blessing
Bradley Hagerty reports on The Toronto Blessing, the fastest growing Christian church. Pentecostal worshippers display a personal, physical connection with God through manifestations such as speaking in tongues and barking like dogs.
Part 3: Soka Gakkai
NPR's Mandalit del Barco explores a modern version of Buddhism known as Soka Gakkai. It was brought to the United States by Japanese war brides, and in the 1960s, it caught on with hippies. Now it has more than 300,000 adherents in the United States, most of them middle class, from all ethnic groups.
Part 4: Teens and Wicca
In the last installment, Bradley Hagerty looks at the popularity of Wicca, or witchcraft, among young people. Teens seem to be drawn to Wicca, among other reasons, because it can be tailored to the individual's needs. Some of the teens' parents are Wiccans themselves. But other parents are alarmed.Screen Junkies — the home of some of your favorite YouTube content, including Honest Trailers and Movie Fights — returns to San Diego Comic-Con with a one-night, mega event for 2017.
Last year, Screen Junkies Central invaded Comic-Con with a dedicated live filming location, where they taped segments with some of your favorite celebrities. For 2017, they’re cramming all of that awesome-ness into a one-night, blow-out event on Saturday, July 22 at the House of Blues (21+ only). Doors will open at 6PM, and then things will officially kick off at 7PM for a show featuring all of your favorite ScreenJunkies and celebrity guests.
Then, immediately following, the ScreenJunkies party (21+ only) kicks off, and will be DJed by a surprise guest. Tickets are $15 and now on sale, and each ticket gets you into both the taping and the party.
For those who prefer just to party the night away but can’t make the taping, you still have the option of attending. You can RSVP now to attend the party, but space will be filled on a first come/first serve basis, with preference going to ticket-holders.
If all of that sounds amazing, but you just don’t have your hotel or flight booked to Comic-Con (or you just really don’t want to stay in Tijuana) — then ScreenJunkies has you covered. You can enter their sweepstakes now to enter to win travel and accommodation during the con for you and a friend (21+ only, must be a resident of the US).
Still can’t get enough ScreenJunkies? You’ll also be able to find them across the Gaslamp at the convention center for an official panel, with details set to be announced this week with the full schedule release.Westboro Baptist Church is planning to picket at an upcoming Blake Shelton concert in Kansas City, Mo., but the 'Sure Be Cool if You Did' singer isn’t taking the news lying down.
In response to a WBC poster announcing the protest outside the Sprint Center on Oct. 3, Shelton began an intense exchange via Twitter. The poster announces the 45-minute planned picket and makes cruel remarks regarding Shelton’s wife, Miranda Lambert, and refers to Shelton as “a vulgar adulterer hated by God.” According the group's philosophy, Shelton's divorce from his first wife and subsequent marriage to Lambert constitutes adultery.
“ @WBCSays : We know BS when we see it! pic.twitter.com/ZTZiUm9B53 ” Hey WBC.. I've got one more sin for ya... Blow me. — Blake Shelton (@blakeshelton) September 25, 2013
Since his initial post on Wed. night (Sept. 25), Shelton and WBC have been tweeting back and forth.
Hey @WBCSays.. This isn't about God. It's about me using this opportunity to make y'all look like the absolute complete dipshits you are. — Blake Shelton (@blakeshelton) September 26, 2013
Also @WBCSays... Y'all may want to keep an eye on ur women at my show.. I've got a few band and crew guys that'll be smacking that holy ass! — Blake Shelton (@blakeshelton) September 26, 2013
Shelton's fans are sticking by him in this fight, but the war is continuing Friday morning (Sept. 27), at least on WBC's side.
WBC had a similar exchange with Vince Gill outside the Kaufman Center in Kansas City on Sept. 8, when the singer came outside and confronted them face-to-face as they picketed his show.Daniel Alfredsson received a standing ovation and fans cheered and sobbed as the Ottawa Senators retired his No. 11 Thursday night — making him the first player in the team's modern era to receive the honour.
The 44-year-old spent 17 seasons with the Senators — including 13 as captain — and was instrumental in bringing the franchise from a struggling expansion team to a respectable, competitive force that went all the way to the Stanley Cup final in 2007.
"It's been a long time since I showed up to my first rookie camp in '95, forgetting my skates in Sweden — that's a true story," Alfredsson told the Canadian Tire Centre crowd.
"My first week as a Senator was spent playing in [skates] two sizes too big, and used. Luckily, though, I think it all worked out okay in the end."
"I'm so proud to have my number retired here in Ottawa. I'll forever be a Senator." <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Celebrate11?src=hash">#Celebrate11</a> <a href="https://t.co/IIzVxtryYi">pic.twitter.com/IIzVxtryYi</a> —@Senators
Lots of tears
Over the course of 18 NHL seasons, Alfredsson played 1,246 games, had 444 goals and 713 assists. He remains the Senators' career leader in goals (426), assists (682) and points (1,108).
Not even a contract dispute in 2013 that ultimately led to Alfredsson signing with the Detroit Red Wings for one season was able to tarnish his impeccable image in the nation's capital.
Needless to say, seeing Alfredsson's No. 11 raised to the rafters of the Canadian Tire Centre brought out strong emotions.
I promised myself I wouldn't cry watching from my living room...but I'm already bawling 😭 <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/celebrate11?src=hash">#celebrate11</a> —@lori_lama
don't cry don't cry don't cry don't cry don't cry don't cry don't cry don't cry don't cry <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Celebrate11?src=hash">#Celebrate11</a> —@smani9461
live view of me watching this ceremony from my couch right now <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Celebrate11?src=hash">#Celebrate11</a> <a href="https://t.co/68Y0Rp6TgX">pic.twitter.com/68Y0Rp6TgX</a> —@taymlnsk
Not ashamed to say I'm sobbing right now. This guy is my childhood hero <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Celebrate11?src=hash">#Celebrate11</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Senators">@Senators</a> —@methot_mode
I'm going to need more Kleenex. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Alfie?src=hash">#Alfie</a> —@Senatorials
Before Alfredsson addressed the crowd, his brother Henric said a few words, initially suggesting — to kind-hearted jeers — that Alfredsson was "probably not the most talented player to come into the NHL,"
"But he has an incredible determination and will to win," he continued, to cheers. "A will to try to do the best at everything he does, every single day."
'[We] became men together'
Since his retirement, Alfredsson has worked in the Senators' front office, signing a one-year contract extension in June to serve as an advisor to the hockey operations department.
Alfredsson has also been a strong advocate for mental health issues in Ottawa, campaigning for the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre since 2008, and a supporter of the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
The Condons say Alfie's numbers speak for themselves - but his work with CHEO made him a hero <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/celebrate11?src=hash">#celebrate11</a> <a href="https://t.co/hyWhX2bDV0">pic.twitter.com/hyWhX2bDV0</a> —@matthewkupfer
Former teammate Wade Redden, who played 11 seasons with Alfredsson, told the crowd it would be "fitting" that Alfredsson would become the first modern-day Ottawa player — after Frank Finnigan, who played 10 seasons with the club and helped them win the Stanley Cup in 1927 — to have his number retired.
"We were a group of selfless hard-working kids who grew up together, became men together, and won lots of hockey games together," said Redden, reflecting back on his time playing with Alfredsson.
"From day one, back in '96, I could see the special player Alfie was."
Alfredsson concluded his speech by calling the day "a beautiful day."
"This is the most incredible honour of my life, and I'm so proud to have my number retired here in Ottawa," he said. "I will forever be a Senator."Many athletes have pulled out of the Rio Olympics due to fears over Zika Virus
Britain’s Olympic marathon swimmers, sailors and windsurfers have been told they could become seriously ill if they inadvertently take in contaminated water off Guanabara Bay.
Recent tests have shown that the quality of water in the Brazilian city is unhealthy and does not meet World Health Organisation safety standards.
Organisers have failed to clean up the sewage and household rubbish which flows untreated from a city of 12 million people into the contaminated Rio waters. The main worry is that competitors could end up with diarrhoea or violent vomiting.
Dr Daniel Becker, a Rio paediatrician, told the New York Times: “Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap, and they risk getting sick from all those microorganisms. It’s sad but also worrisome.”
Tests taken last year recorded disease-causing viruses were extremely harmful.Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is apparently not convinced that Gen. James Mattis is the best person to lead the department of defense when Donald Trump assumes the presidency. In a newly released interview with New York Magazine, Reid said Congress should not try to remove the legal obstacles in Mattis' way.
Mattis is only four years retired from the military, meaning he needs a waiver from Congress to serve in the Trump administration because he does not meet the seven years' requirement. Reid's advice: Punt the decision to the next Congress.
“The waiver should not be granted in this Congress,” he told a staffer.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand shares Reid's sentiments. She plans to vote against the waiver, she argues, in order to respect civilian control of the military. Yet, Matt questioned her logic, noting Gillibrand probably would not have stonewalled the defense nominee if he was Hillary Clinton's choice.
Ironically, it is the "Reid Rule" that may end up working in Trump's favor. Many Democrats are regretting their decision in 2013 to make it more difficult to filibuster presidential nominees. The "Reid Rule" essentially eliminated any kind of emergency "speed bump" to prevent unfit candidates from serving, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) admitted.
Of course, Gen. Mattis is anything but unfit.De unde a pornit
Gelos pe popularitatea crescândă a DNA, Victor Ponta dorea şi el să raporteze succese pe ramură în lupta anticorupţie. Numai că, ghinion! De lupta anticorupţie se ocupau alţii, cu ceva succes de la o vreme, iar în jurul premierului miniştrii cădeau ca muştele sub acuzaţii grave de corupţie. Premierul a găsit atunci o afacere de nişă: Antifrauda de la ANAF, o structură aflată practic în familia Pontaghiţă, dar prăfuită, obosită şi detestată de orice contribuabil care a trecut vreodată pragul unei sucursale a Fiscului.
Schimbarea la faţă
Rebranding&PR sau propagandă&gargară, cum doriţi să o luaţi.
• Victor Ponta: „Vreau să vă adresez felicitări pentru primul an de viaţă instituţională şi să vă urez mult succes în continuare (…) Cineva îmi spunea: dacă chiar ai curajul şi dacă chiar reuşeşti să faci o structură, îţi promit că în primul an de funcţionare o să vezi că la buget o să ai un miliard de euro în plus”. Sursa
Sucursală ANAF. Aici îmi plătesc eu taxele Sursa
ANAF îşi prezintă dotările. Acum 10 zile, în parcarea unui mall din Cluj, Antifrauda a descins cu 60 de maşini şi sute de inspectori. Sursa
Pri(goana) după bani
Evaziunea fiscală este o problemă. Cam de 100 de miliarde de lei, circa 16 la sută din PIB, din evaluările Consiliului Fiscal. Scăderea TVA anunţată de Guvern nu poate să devină realitate fără reducerea evaziunii fiscale. „Miliardul de euro în plus” de care vorbea Victor Ponta era necesar pentru susţinerea programului său de relaxare fiscală, care să-i repare imaginea catastrofală din ultimele luni. Din acest punct de vedere, direcţia era corectă: ca să reduci taxele, îmbunătăţeşti colectarea. O teorie pe care orice premier al României a repetat-o obsesiv şi pe care Victor Ponta părea să o fi pus în practică prin crearea unei instituţii care, în sfârşit, avea să scoată eficient la suprafaţă banii negri din economia subterană. Dar...
O operaţiune descreierată împotriva micilor întreprinzători
...de o săptămână, vedem un film stupefiant: magazine, restaurante, baruri, şaormerii, florării, cofetării sunt luate cu asalt. „N-am, mă, Jupuitule...” „N-ai? Ţi-am închis magazinul pe 30 de zile”. Culmea e că s-au închis unităţi pentru 3 lei şi 28 de bani în plus în gestiune. Băţos, şeful ANAF, Gelu Diaconu, transmite prin comunicate de partid că va merge neabătut pe drumul combaterii evaziunii şi că el nu vede nicio diferenţă între mica evaziune şi marea evaziune, el vede doar evaziune. Suspect! Marea evaziune a cumnatului lui Victor Ponta, cea de milioane de euro bani europeni, n-a văzut-o. Ghinion: a văzut-o DNA-ul!
„Micul DNA” al lui Ponta, o miliţie economică
Miliţia economică de pe vremea lui Ceauşescu n-a murit. Ea doar a primit haine noi, caşchetă, maşină şi girofar ca să lovească în mafia urzicilor şi a şteviei, în timp ce şefimea din Guvern se delectează cu Picasso şi weekend-uri în Dubai. Păzea, că urmează săptămâna ouălor de Paşte!
Da, statul a creat o maşinărie infernală în care dacă nu cotizezi, îţi pierzi afacerea. Zelul din zilele acestea al inspectorilor Antifraudă seamănă izbitor de mult cu grevele vameşilor care, atunci când nu se înţeleg cu şefii lor pe linie de şpagă, controlează la sânge toate paporniţele căpşunarilor care se întorc din Spania, blocând practic cu zilele punctele de trecere a frontierei. Câţi dintre inspectorii răi de azi nu sunt băieţii buni de ieri care închideau ochii la nereguli pentru o atenţie între 100 şi 1000 de euro, în funcţie de amplasamentul afacerii? Şi câţi dintre patronii care se plâng azi de prigoana statului au curajul să facă denunţuri contra ANAF sau să se angajeze în procese colective împotriva statului care le închide azi afacerea?
Mai grav este că această operaţiune de imagine a premierului Ponta trădează filosofia etatistă a celui mai antibusiness Guvern: orice mic întreprinzător este un prezumtiv evazionist, orice mică afacere trebuie să aibă agăţat un mic bacşiş, orice om din clasa de mijloc care şi-a luat viaţa în propriile mâini, care angajează, plăteşte salarii şi încearcă să nu mai depindă de stat trebuie omorât pentru că nu plăteşte îndeajuns.
PS
Celor care se vor grăbi să-l înjure pe „evazionistul Negruţiu” pe 30 de bani postarea le doresc să treacă măcar o dată pragul Fiscului şi să pătrundă, în locul şefului lor Victor Ponta, prin cele opt praguri pe care le-am descris în Gândul în anii în care mi-am plătit conştiincios şi încăpăţânat TVA-ul pe drepturile de autor. Am pierdut zile întregi de stat la cozi ca să dau bani la stat: mi-am plătit întotdeauna nu doar toate taxele, dar şi preţul umilinţei pe care ţi-l cere această instituţie opresivă care se numeşte ANAF şi care a practicat şi practică un adevărat terorism de stat contra contribuabilului. Am obosit, în schimb, să mai caut banii pe care statul mi-i datorează, vreo 25 de milioane de lei, pierduţi prin diversele conturi ale Fiscului: să fie de bacşiş la Dubai, domnule Ponta!Greyhound plans to discontinue Nanaimo-to-Victoria bus service, saying the route is no longer viable. The company will need Passenger Transportation Board approval to stop the service. (NICHOLAS PESCOD/BLACK PRESS)
Wheels on the Greyhound bus might not go round and round in the near future.
Greyhound Canada announced that it has filed an application to cancel service on five routes, including the Nanaimo-to-Victoria route, with the province’s Passenger Transportation Board. The four other routes are located in northern British Columbia.
Peter Hamel, Greyhound Canada’s regional vice-president for Western Canada, said ridership on the five routes has dropped by 51 per cent since 2010 and that the decision to submit a request to cancel the Nanaimo-Victoria route didn’t happen overnight.
“For the Victoria-Nanaimo route in 2013 we had an average passenger load of 16 [people]. As of 2017 we are seeing single digits, averaging around nine,” he said.
Hamel said Greyhound has dealt with increased operating costs and competition from other transit services over the years and pointed to the popularity of ridesharing as another factor in the decision.
“If you were to just go onto Kijiji and type rideshare you will find numerous rides, not just specifically on the Nanaimo-Victoria corridor but any corridor in B.C., right overtop of our routes,” he said.
Greyhound tried to make the route work over the last seven years by reducing frequency and relocating terminals in both Nanaimo and Victoria, said Hamel.
“We’re no longer viable on this corridor,” he said.
The PTB, an independent tribunal established in 2004 under the province’s Passenger Transportation Act, will need to approve Greyhound’s request before service can be discontinued.
Hamel said it’s business as usual for the company’s cargo and passenger operations until a decision is made. He said the company is willing to hold discussions with the provincial government.
“We are prepared to talk with any government officials and we are,” he said. “We will be meeting with officials through September.”
Hamel said submitting a request to cancel the Nanaimo route was difficult and Greyhound doesn’t take it lightly.
“This has not been an easy decision. It impacts employees, it impacts communities and it impacts passengers,” he said. “Unfortunately though we have been at an operating deficit in B.C. since 2004. We can no longer sustain the losses.”
If approved, Greyhound anticipates the cuts to take effect in early 2018.
nicholas.pescod@nanaimobulletin.comBOSTON (CBS) — Forward Matt Fraser has been such a revelation in his two games since the Bruins called him up from the Providence Bruins of the American Hockey League, it’s easy to forget that the two players he’s skating with were on a bit of a roll before his arrival.
Center Carl Soderberg and right winger Loui Eriksson have built their chemistry over the past several months and were able to sustain a threat offensively in the playoffs even with a rotating cast of rookie Justin Florek, Jordan Caron and Daniel Paille skating to their left.
It’s just that now that Fraser’s been dropped into the scene, Soderberg and Eriksson are finally getting rewarded for their efforts.
Fraser famously scored the overtime game-winning goal in Game 4 on Thursday. Soderberg’s line then combined for six points in the Bruins’ 4-2 win in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference second-round series Saturday night at TD Garden. The Bruins now lead the best-of-seven series 3-2 heading into Game 6 at Bell Centre on Monday.
Neither Soderberg nor Eriksson had scored in the Montreal series until Saturday. Soderberg scored the first goal of the game, the first in his NHL playoff career, at 13:20 of the first. Eriksson scored at 14:12 of the third period to give the Bruins a 4-1 lead when things were starting to get |
ceiver set. Hogan lined up in the slot, prepping to run a skinny post across the face of Taylor and safety Ibraheim Campbell. As the ball was snapped and Brady sold handoff to running back LeGarrette Blount, things unfolded according to plan. Campbell bit on the run and his split-second reaction helped Hogan find daylight to the tune of a 43-yard gain. The diving grab brought New England down to the Cleveland seven.
8:01 IN SECOND QUARTER
THIRD-AND-6
FLY ROUTE: 63 YARDS
Five minutes after linking up for a 43-yard completion, Brady would find Hogan for what’d be the receiver’s new career long. The Patriots went with an empty backfield on the third-and-6, shipping James White into the slot on a flat pattern while Hogan stood opposite cornerback Joe Haden on the outskirts from him. But Brady’s eyes didn’t begin on that side of the field. His scan instead began on short side, where Edelman headed in motion to form a stack behind rookie Malcolm Mitchell. That initial glance would prove pivotal, as Haden lost track of Hogan, who zipped behind his back on a go route. Brady maneuvered the pocket, stepped up, and hit him for another over-the-shoulder grab. A Patriots 63-yard gain would be the byproduct.
With his four first-half grabs on Sunday afternoon, Hogan became the 26th different Patriot to post a 100-yard receiving game under Brady’s reign, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
Hogan now has 12 catches for 236 yards and a touchdown through five games in a Patriots uniform. And while five of those catches have netted five yards or less, six others have gone for 19 yards or more.
That vertical presence is fast becoming another variable for secondaries to account for.The Lumia 635, which is one of the most affordable Windows Phone-powered devices on the market, has been crowned as the “best value phone” at the Mobile Industry Awards 2015. The Lumia 635 was able to bag the award because of the specifications it offers along with a very cheap price tag.
According to Lumia Conversations U.K., the Lumia 635 bested other midrange smartphones like the Moto G 4G (Gen 2) and Sony Xperia M2 to win the “best value” tag. The Lumia 635 is the 4G LTE-supporting single version of the Lumia 630 that supports dual SIM cards.
The Lumia 630 won “best value phone of 2014” at the What Mobile Awards. It was also awarded with the best Value Phone title at Mobile Choice award. The Mobile Industry Awards 2015 is a yearly award ceremony by the British Mobile Today website. The devices competing against the Lumia 635 included the Acer Liquid, the EE Kestral and the Lumia 530.
The panel of judges praised the Lumia 635 for the affordable price and specifications that has helped it to achieve impressive sales. The Lumia 635 offers an integrated mapping service that is otherwise available as a premium service on other devices.
The panel also said the Lumia 635 is a very good product that is packed with features usually seen on flagship smartphones. Moreover, it is available with an entry contract or midrange pricing.
Lumia 635 Specifications
The Lumia 635 has a thickness of 9.2 mm and it weighs 134 g. It is fitted with a 4.5-inch IPS LCD screen that supports 480 x 854 pixels resolution. The device is powered by Snapdragon 400 chipset. The Lumia 635 is available in two RAM variants, namely 1 GB and 512 MB.
The internal storage of the Lumia 635 is 8 GB and it supports up to 128 GB of microSD on external storage slot. It features a rear camera of 5 MP, but it lacks a front-facing camera. Connectivity options include 4G LTE, 3G and Wi-Fi. It is powered by a battery of 1830 mAh capacity.
On Microsoft Store, the unlocked Lumia 635 is priced at $129, and at Amazon the same is available for $74. On Best Buy, the Virgin Mobile’s Nokia Lumia 635 is priced at $39.99 without contract.Grocer takes prime spot for 1st S.A. store
The former west elm store in the Quarry Villiage will be the new home of Trader Joe's. The former west elm store in the Quarry Villiage will be the new home of Trader Joe's. Photo: Express-News File Photo Photo: Express-News File Photo Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Grocer takes prime spot for 1st S.A. store 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
After months of rumors, grocery chain Trader Joe's confirmed that it will open its first store in San Antonio at the former spot of the west elm furniture store at the Quarry Village, inspiring at least one fan of the store to do a happy dance.
The company signed a lease this month for the 11,000-square-foot location and has plans to open the store this year, said Alison Mochizuki, a spokeswoman for the California-based grocer.
The new location is part of an aggressive expansion plan the company has for Texas. It's the fifth location for Trader Joe's in the state that's been announced in the past few months. The other locations are in Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano and The Woodlands, according to Trader Joe's website.
“San Antonio is a wonderful community, filled with lots of foodies. We consider ourselves the neighborhood grocery store and feel San Antonio is a perfect fit,” Mochizuki said.
The grocery chain has amassed a cult following across the nation, especially in cities where its stores are absent. There are Facebook groups dedicated to the grocer, including a page called San Antonio Needs a Trader Joe's, which has nearly 550 members.
By midafternoon Tuesday, after a San Antonio Express-News report appeared online, members already were posting their excitement, exclaiming, “Yippee!” and “Hallelujah!”
Sheena Edwards tweeted that she did the happy dance. She said that before moving to San Antonio, Trader Joe's was her go-to grocery store while living in Phoenix. Now, she gets Trader Joe's products when her in-laws visit and bring her bottles of the company's signature Charles Shaw wine, also known as Two-Buck Chuck.
The store's location puts it close to two competitors: the H-E-B at Lincoln Heights and Whole Foods Market, which is an anchor tenant at the Alamo Quarry Market across the street. Despite the nearby stores, the company picked one of the prime real estate spots to open, said Kim Gatley, a vice president at commercial real estate firm NAI REOC San Antonio.
“There's room for them in the market, and I think they'll be successful there,” she said. “That space gives them a premier stage to launch their first store in the area. There are a lot of people waiting for a San Antonio store, so this announcement will make a lot of people happy.”
After months of rumors, Trader Joe's confirmed in August that it would open a San Antonio store, but it wouldn't say when or where, although the Quarry Village was most widely speculated.
Rumors about the location and timing of the opening heated up in January when the company posted a job listing for store managers in San Antonio.
No comment was offered about the number of employees the grocer is looking to hire for its San Antonio location. But Mochizuki said the store's small footprint fits with the company's other locations, which range from about 10,000 to 15,000 square feet.
Trader Joe's started in 1958 and has grown to more than 360 stores in 32 states. The chain is known for its specialty foods, private labels, competitive prices and quirky atmosphere, which includes employees who wear brightly colored Hawaiian shirts.
Trader Joe's fan Edwards is a Stone Oak resident but said she will be willing to make the drive once the store opens.
“It wouldn't have mattered where it went,” she said. “I've been waiting too long. I will get there. I will make the drive.”I think the best photos are those that tell the stories.
The answers so far had very few pictures from the Eastern front. This side of WW2 seems less familiar to many people in the West, and I would like to "tell" it, as it happened, in photographs.
Please note:
Some images are disturbing.
Make sure you can handle it;
Make sure you can handle it; I supplemented photos with facts and statistics that I thought might be interesting. To avoid bias, I used primarily Western sources, such as British historian’s Richard Overy: Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945
Despite my best efforts, some data might be controversial.
1941: Operation “Barbarossa”
German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels makes a radio announcement about the war with the USSR (June 22, 1941):
People in Moscow are listening to the war announcement, stunned (June 22, 1941):
The largest invasion in human history begins. 4 million men supported by 600,000 vehicles and 750,000 horses attacked 3,000 kilometer-long front line. Photo: German soldiers crossing the USSR border (June 22, 1941):
The German attack was a complete surprise, and initial Soviet losses were catastrophic. After the first 9 days of war the Luftwaffe destroyed 1,400 Soviet airplanes in the air and 3,200 on the ground (40% of the entire USSR air force), while losing only 330 aircraft. Photo: Russian I-16 fighters destroyed at the airport near Minsk, Belarus (June, 1941):
By mid-August, the Soviets had lost 3,300 tanks, while the Germans lost 220, an astonishing 15:1 ratio. Photo: Russian BT-2 tank and its dead crew (July, 1941):
But the most devastating were human losses. By December of 1941, the USSR had lost 2.7 million soldiers killed and 3.3 million captured – its entire pre-war army. For every German soldier lost, the Soviets lost 20. Photo: Soviet soldiers surrendering (Belarus, July 1941):
The German tanks were unstoppable. During the first 7 days of the invasion they penetrated 300 km into the Soviet territory - 1/3 distance to Moscow:
"Blitzkrieg" was going well. German soldiers were having fun. Photo: a German soldier posing on a Stalin's head:
But eventually the Soviets recovered from the shock, their resistance stiffened and German losses started piling up. If by August, 1941 the German army had lost only 46,000 men, by December 25% of the German forces were dead or wounded. A unique photo: A German soldier was photographed exactly at the moment when he was killed:
A similar famous Russian photo “Death of a Soldier”:
Battle of Moscow
By November of 1941, Russia was in dire straits. Hitler declared that the war had been won, and cited the evidence: 2 million Soviet prisoners, 22,000 artillery pieces seized or smashed, 18,000 tanks destroyed, 14,500 aircraft shot down. The German army was just 10 miles away from Moscow, and the Soviets had only 90,000 men and 150 tanks left to defend it. The world regarded Moscow surrender as inevitable. To cheer people up, Stalin gave a military parade. Photo: These troops went into the battle straight from the Red Square (Moscow, November 7, 1941):
Desperate times required desperate measures. The Russians trained dogs to run under the German tanks in suicide attacks. Photo: dogs, wrapped in explosives, are walking into the battle (Moscow, 1941):
In December of 1941, the temperature fell to -35 C (-30 Fahrenheit), unusually low even for Russia. The German army was unprepared, and 130,000 cases of frostbite weakened its front line troops:
Thanks to Japan's decision not to attack the USSR, fresh divisions from Siberia – 1 million soldiers and 1,000 tanks - were moved to Moscow, and the Russians counter-attacked:
Fresh, well-equipped troops pushed the exhausted Germans back by 100-200 km. This was the first major defeat suffered by the German army in WW2, and the bloodiest battle to date: 1 million soldiers lost their lives in the Battle of Moscow. Photo: German soldiers surrendering (Moscow, January 1942):
Siege of Leningrad
At the same time, German Army “North” attacked Leningrad, the second-largest USSR city of 3.3 million people. By September 19, 1941 the Germans were just 12 miles away, and their artillery began a continuous barrage of the city. Photo: an artillery shell explodes on a street of Leningrad (September, 1941):
Leningrad was heavily defended, and Hitler made a decision to besiege it and starve to death. The city was encircled and the blockade started on September 25, 1941. At the time, Leningrad had sufficient food for 20 days; by December – despite reducing rations to the minimum - for 2 days. Photo: a daily ration in Leningrad during the siege - 125 grams of bread per person. 50% of it was made from saw dust:
As a result, 600,000 - 1,000,000 civilians starved to death. People ate all dogs, cats, birds and rats in the city. 600 people were punished for cannibalism. Photo: frozen corpses of starved people on the streets of Leningrad (winter of 1942):
The hunger was especially tough on 400,000 children who got stuck in the blockade. Photo: a child collapsed and died on the stairs of her home (Leningrad, 1942):
Many kids lost their parents to hunger or bombing. To save them from starvation, many Russian military units adopted the orphans. Photo: little orphan girl Lucy, adopted by the Baltic Fleet sailors (Leningrad, May 1943):
The only way to bring some food into the city was during the winter when the nearby lake Ladoga froze. The ice road was called "The Road of Life". It was very dangerous – during just the first week of operation, 40 trucks sunk. Photo: trucks delivering food to Leningrad through the Road of Life. Notice how all driver doors are open so that the drivers could jump out if their trucks suddenly fall through the ice:
The Siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days, and cost 2 million lives. Finally, on January 27, 1944 the blockade was broken. Photo: very emotional meeting of Leningrad defenders and break-through troops (Leningrad, January 27, 1944):
Partisans
When the Germans first came, many people who suffered from communism - especially in the Western Ukraine and Baltic countries - welcomed them. Photo: Ukrainian women greeting German troops (Ukraine, 1941):
At the beginning of the occupation, many German soldiers played nice. Photo: a German officer gives chocolate to a Ukrainian child:
The sentiment changed after the German Army was replaced by Einsatzgruppen – SS troops tasked with the implementation of Hitler’s occupation policies. SS started by exterminating the Jews. A famous photo made by an SS officer in the town of Vinnytsa, Ukraine: “The Last Jew of Vinnytsia” (August 25, 1942):
Nazi viewed Slavic people as sub-humans who should either become slaves or be exterminated, and treated them respectively. Photo: 18-year old Russian girl tortured and hanged, her left breast cut off (Russia, 1941):
5 million young people were seized and moved to Germany to work as slaves at the farms and factories. Half of them died. Photo: Soviet youth on the train to Germany (Ukraine, 1942):
During the occupation, SS troops often made public executions. Photo: the first public execution on the occupied territories. The Germans hanged 2 teenagers for helping captured Soviet soldiers (Belarus, November 26, 1941):
The executions were supposed to intimidate the local population, but had the opposite effect: many people joined the armed resistance – “partisans”, which eventually became the largest guerrilla movement in history. Although the exact numbers are not known, estimated 250,000 - 600,000 partisans fought on the occupied Soviet territories. Photo: a Belorussian partisan family (Belarus, 1942):
Partisans became a pain in the Germans' back. In August of 1943, to disrupt German supplies for the Battle of Kursk, 100,000 partisans made a coordinated attack on the German railroads, known as a “Rails War”. Photo: partisans dismantling German railways during the operation “Rails War” (August 1943):
The operation was effective: partisans blew up 230,000 rails and 1,000 trains, reducing German supply capacity by 40%. Photo: a German train derailed by the partisans (August, 1943):
1942: Operation “Case Blue”
In 1942, Stalin expected the Germans to continue their attack on Moscow, and concentrated 50% of the Soviet forces in the center. This was a mistake - Hitler shifted his focus to the oil-rich South. German operation “Case Blue” started on June 3, 1942 and initially was a smashing success. In a few days, German tanks crushed Soviet defenses and moved through virtually undefended grass plains. Photo: German tank column moves through Kuban steppe (summer, 1942):
The Russians desperately tried to slow them down. One of the most famous WW2 photos: “Combat” (“Commander of Battalion”). A young Russian officer rallying soldiers for a counter-attack. A few seconds after the photo was taken he was killed (July 12, 1942):
By August, the Soviet troops were overwhelmed. Desertions and panicked retreats threatened a disintegration of the Russian defenses. On July 28 Stalin issued the notorious Order 227, demanding that commanders create “blocking detachments” to prevent any unauthorized withdrawals from the battles. The order had such a negative effect on the soldiers' morale that many commanders disobeyed it, and 3 months later it was dropped. Photo: NKVD officers setting up a gun machine behind the defensive line (August, 1942):
Stalingrad
On July 17, 1942 the German troops reached Stalingrad, a town of 400,000 people on the Volga River, and the bloodiest battle in human history had begun. Photo: this is how Stalingrad looked a few days before the battle (July, 1942):
And this is how it looked when it was over, 6 months later (February, 1943):
One of the most iconic photos of Stalingrad – “Barmaley Fountain”. The sculpture of the kids dancing around a crocodile is a scene from a Russian fairy tale. “Barmaley Fountain” became a symbol of Stalingrad and was featured in many movies, such as “Enemy at the Gates”:
Hundreds of thousands soldiers clashed in the ruins for several months. The fights were fierce: an average life expectancy of a soldier in Stalingrad was 1 day. During the defense of Stalingrad, 1 Russian soldier died every 25 seconds. Photo: aftermath of an attack (Stalingrad, December 1942):
On November 19, 1942 the Russians launched an unexpected counter-offensive - Operation “Uranus”, and in 4 days surrounded the city, blocking 265,000 German soldiers inside. Attempts to break the blockade failed, and the Germans started suffering from exhaustion, starvation and cold:
Finally, on January 31, 1943 Ernst Paulus, the commander of the German army in Stalingrad, capitulated - against Hitler's orders. A 3-day National Mourning was announced in Germany, and came as a shock to the German public, who believed that the war was almost over. Photo: Field Marshal Paulus and his chief of staff after their surrender:
The Battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle ever, with 2,000,000 casualties. For the first time since the invasion, German losses were almost as high as the Russians'. 25% of the entire German military strength on the Eastern front was destroyed. The Battle of Stalingrad marked the point were the Germans lost the strategic initiative for the rest of the war, and in Russia it is considered the turning point of WW2. Photo: captured German soldiers, Stalingrad, January 1943. Of the 107,000 captives, only 6,000 returned home, 8 years later:
1943: Operation “Citadel” / Battle of Kursk
To take revenge for Stalingrad and regain the initiative, Hitler decided to launch a major offensive operation in the summer of 1943 near town of Kursk. By July, both sides had accumulated large forces. The Germans brought in 900,000 soldiers, 2,700 tanks, 2,000 aircraft and 10,000 guns. The Red Army deployed 1,300,000 soldiers, 3,400 tanks, 2,900 aircraft and 19,000 guns. Both sides also brought several new weapons into the battle. The Germans made a major upgrade to their armored forces: a very powerful tank destroyer “Ferdinand”, and 2 new tanks - “Tiger” and “Panther”. Photo: "Tiger" tank - perhaps the most advanced (but also the most expensive) tank of WW2. It was a formidable adversary: for every “Tiger” lost, the Russians lost 8 tanks:
The USSR had the answer: SU-152 tank-destroyer. Armed with an enormous 152 caliber gun, they earned a nick-name “Animal Hunter” for their ability to knock out “Tigers” and “Panthers” in one shot:
The Russians also invented PTABs - anti-tank mini-bombs, 2.5 kg shaped-charges that could penetrate top armor of any German tank. Because of their small size, PTABs were used in large quantities to carpet-bomb German tank formations. They became especially deadly in a combination with IL-2 - an armored ground-attack airplane nick-named a “Flying Tank”. It was a unique WW2 aircraft - its entire bottom was made of armor so that it could attack at very low altitudes (as low as 6 meters), and yet survive heavy anti-aircraft gunfire. Photo: IL-2 attacking ground targets during the Battle of Kursk (August 1943):
The Battle of Kursk became known as the largest tank battle in history. On July 12, 1943 two massive tank forces, 850 Soviet against 600 German, collided near village of Prokhorovka in an area of just 3 square miles. Tanks were dueling at point-blank range and often rammed into each other. The crews of the damaged tanks got out and engaged in a bitter hand-to-hand combat. The fighting raged for 8 hours and by the end of the day 700 tanks looked like this:
Based on their experience at Kursk, the Russians had to substantially upgrade their T-34 tanks to catch up with the Germans. Photo: Tank commander Lieutenant Smelov discusses the dents and holes in the armor of the “Tiger” tank he destroyed. It's amazing how many hits the "Tiger" sustained before finally being knocked out:
Kursk was the last German major offensive operation on the Eastern Front. Their offensive capability was broken, and they never regained it:
1944: Operation “Bagration” / D-Day
On June 22, 1944, exactly on the third anniversary of German invasion in Russia, the Soviet Army lunched operation “Bagration” to support the Allied landing in Normandy, which started on June 6. “Bagration” became the largest Allied operation of World War II, and the worst German defeat – its entire Army Group “Center” was annihilated, opening the road to Berlin. Photo: a squadron of “Katyusha”s firing rockets at the German positions during operation “Bagration”.
“Katyusha” was a unique weapon that could in 25 seconds release 325 rockets carrying in total 1.6 tons of explosives, and annihilate everything within a 200-by-400 meter area. It was one of the WW2 weapons the Germans feared most. Photo: German military convoy after a Katusha strike (Belarus, July 1944):
For the first time, the Soviets had achieved air superiority. A notable contribution to this success was made by the French team "Normandie" that fought on the Russian side. For their heroism in the battles over the Neman river, they earned a name "Normandie-Neman". After the war, French pilots received their Yak-3 airplanes as gifts. Photo: French pilots between sorties, Belarus, August 1944:
300,000 German prisoners were taken in the operation. The Allies did not believe the numbers, and Stalin ordered to march the captive Germans through Moscow. Photo: German soldiers captured during operation “Bagration” walking in Moscow. The Russian crowd mocked: "You finally made it to Moscow!". September, 1944:
Allies
In WW2, the USSR was allied with the USA and the UK. Photo: The first meeting of Allies: Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill (Teheran, November 28, 1943):
An important contribution to the Allies' victory was the Lend-Lease program. Its significance for Russia is often misunderstood. It was not its size that made the difference – Lend-Lease was 4% of the USSR war production ($11 out of $300 billion). Rather, it was its composition: Land-Lease provided supplies that the Russians either could not make themselves, or preferred not to, to focus on what they could do best. For example, Allies supplied 90% of the radios, 100% of radars, 60% of trucks, and 100% of armored personnel carriers. But most of all, Lend-Lease was appreciated as an act of friendship and support given during the Russia's darkest days. Photo: President Roosevelt signing the Lend-Lease bill (March 11, 1941):
Many US products were of higher quality and durability. For example, after 1942, Katyusha rocket launcher was mounted only on Studebaker trucks. “Studebaker” was a reliable and powerful vehicle, and Russian soldiers loved it. They translated the letters “U.S.A.” on its side as: “Ubey Suky Adolfa” ‐ “Kill that Son‐of‐a‐bitch Adolf!”. Photo: Katyusha rocket launcher on a Studebaker truck:
To create a southern delivery route for the Lend-Lease supplies, the UK and the Soviet Union together invaded and occupied Iran - a neglected and little-known part of WW2. Iran is still waiting for an apology. Photo: a column of Studebaker trucks in Iran, going to the USSR (1943):
One of the most successful Allied aces, Alexander Pokryshkin (58 confirmed kills), fought on American fighters supplied via Lend-Lease. Photo: Pokryshkin and his teammates posing in front of his Bell P-39 Airacobra:
On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), the Allies invaded France, opening a long-awaited second front. Operation "Overlord" was the largest sea-to-land invasion in history, and perhaps the most logistically complex operation of WW2. It was also an example of the successful military cooperation among the Allies: to prevent the transfer of German forces from the Eastern to the Western front, the Russians simultaneously launched a major offensive in Belarus (Operation “Bagration”). Photo: Allies landing on Omaha beach, Normandy (June 6, 1944):
Allies pushed towards each other, and after 11 months of fighting finally met. The first contact occurred on April 25, 1945 (the "Elbe Day") near German town of Riesa, after First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue, an American soldier, crossed the River Elbe with his reconnaissance platoon. On the east bank they met a rifle regiment of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gardiev, the First Ukrainian Front:
There was a time when the Americans and the Russians were genuinely happy to see each other. Photo: U.S. Army Private Byron Shiver of the 273rd Infantry Regiment and Red Army soldier Ivan Numladze (April 25, 1945):
1945: Victory
The Germans made their last stand in Berlin: 1 million men, supported by 1,500 tanks, 2,200 aircraft and 9,300 guns defended the German capital. However, at this point they were overwhelmed: the Russians brought in 3 million men, 3,100 tanks, 7,500 aircraft, and 14,600 guns. Photo: German civilians watching Russian tanks rolling into Berlin:
Hitler appealed to all Germans, young and old, to defend Berlin to the last person. Photo: a German teenager from Volkssturm (a volunteer militia), armed with a Panzerfaust, is waiting for the Russian tanks (Berlin, 1945):
The Battle of Berlin started on April 16, 1945. The Germans were cornered, and fought for every building. The Russians used Katyashas and heavy artillery to suppress fire, and most of the city was quickly turned into rubble:
The Russian force was overwhelming, and after 16 days of desperate fighting Berlin fell. This is probably the most famous WW2 photo in Russia: Victory Banner raised on Reichstag, May 2, 1945:
On May 7, the Germans surrendered to General Eisenhower in France. Photo: General Jodl signs unconditional capitulation (Reims, May 7, 1945):
However, the USSR felt left out and objected. As a result, the Germans had to go through the humiliation again. Photo: Field Marshal Keitel signs capitulation for the second time in Berlin, May 8 (May 9 Moscow time):
Now it's official. The Russian troops were rejoicing everywhere:
3 million people gathered around the Red Square in Moscow. Photo: Muscovites listening to the announcement of the war's end (May 9, 1945):
On June 24, 1945 Moscow held a Victory parade. Photo: Captured German flags and banners on the Red Square, Moscow:
The soldiers finally came home, to re-unite with their loved ones:
What they found upon their return was heart-breaking. One‐third of the Soviet Union's wealth was destroyed. 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns, 32,000 factories, 40,000 miles of railroad track were ruined. 25 million people were homeless. It took the USSR 15 years to rebuild its western part. Photo: A woman with her children returned to their home (Belarus, 1944):
People who made the victory possible
The USSR lost 8.5 million soldiers and estimated 14 - 18 million civilians in the war. The Russian people had to endure unendurable, but refused to give up in the most hopeless circumstances. WW2 created many heroes in Russia, and yet most of them are unknown in the West. Let's put faces on some of them.
Georgy Zhukov.
"Father" of the Soviet victory - a mastermind behind the largest battles of WW2: Moscow, Stalingrad, Berlin... to name a few. Without a doubt, a military genius: he never lost a battle. But he was also called by his soldiers a “Butcher”, for disregarding casualties and winning at any cost.
Konstantin Rokossovsky.
One of the most brilliant strategic minds of WW2. Outsmarted Field marshal Manstein in the Battle of Kursk. Mastermind behind operation “Bagration”.
Mikhail Koshkin.
The inventor of the famous T-34 tank. He named the tank after the year when he first envisioned the concept – 1934. It took him 6 years to design and build it. Unfortunately, he never saw T-34 in a real battle - during the tank testing in 1940 Koshkin died. He was only 42 years old, and we can only imagine how much he could have advanced T-34 during the war.
Ivan Kozhedub.
The best Allied ace: 64 confirmed kills in 350 sorties. He was flying a Russian-made LA-7 airplane, and had never been shot down.
Ivan Sidorenko.
The best Allied sniper: 500 confirmed kills. Famous Vasily Zaitsev with 242 kills ranked 47 on the list of the best Russian snipers.
Dmitry Lavrinenko.
The best Allied tank ace. Operating T-34, he destroyed 52 German tanks in 2.5 months during the most difficult period of war – fall of 1941. He never lost a tank battle.
Alexey Maresyev.
At the beginning of the war, Alexey was shot down and lost both legs, but was determined to return to the air force. It was unthinkable and unprecedented. To convince medical examiners that he could fly, he learned how to dance waltz. Despite all odds and regulations, he returned to flying and became an ace with 11 confirmed kills. Photo: Alexey Maresyev, on prostheses, in front of his fighter:
Women.
400,000 Russian women served in WW2; most of them volunteered. Photo: female sniper Roza Shanina. Smart, beautiful and deadly – 54 confirmed kills. She was 19 years old.
Children.
Even children contributed to the victory. Photo: this 13-year-old Russian kid for 3 years worked 12-hour shifts as a miller at the tank engine manufacturing plant:
Dogs.
60,000 dogs served in the Red Army during WW2. They carried 700,000 wounded solders from the battlefields, detected 4 million mines, and destroyed 300 tanks. Photo: Djulbars - the most famous WW2 dog in Russia. During the war, he detected 7,468 mines, and was awarded the medal “For Military Merit”, becoming the only dog who received a military reward. At the end of the war Djulbars was injured and was unable to walk. To honor his contribution, soldiers carried him in hands through the Red Squire during the Victory Parade in Moscow:
Some of these people are still alive.
An old WW2 Russian army veteran has accidentally found his own tank - on which he made it through the entire war - standing in a small Russian town as a monument. He got so emotional that people were worried his heart wouldn’t be able to cope:
To the memory of all Allied soldiers who put their lives on the line for usThe radical left is promising to make this the most chaotic inauguration in U.S. history.
As I have written about previously, anarchists plan to do whatever they can to disrupt the inauguration of Donald Trump, but their plans are not just limited to the main event. As far as the protesters are concerned, any event that has anything to do with the inauguration of Trump is fair game, and so if you plan to attend a lunch, a ball or even a prayer meeting you will need to take precautions. Every single officially sanctioned event is on their radar, and those that do not have heavy security will be easier for them to hit.
The anarchist leaders know that their people aren’t likely to be able to get anywhere near Trump, and so they are focusing on how they can make headlines in as many other ways as possible. According to the Daily Caller, this includes disrupting “several of the balls on inauguration night”…
Fox News reported Friday on audio of a protester saying #Disrupt20 plans to “crash” the pro-Trump “Deploraball” on Jan. 19, which The Daily Caller’s source confirmed. The source said that several of the balls on inauguration night will be disrupted as well. The Fox News report also described an anti-capitalist protest emanating from Logan Circle on the morning of the inauguration. The individual with intimate knowledge of the protests told TheDC that property damage will likely result from the protest.
These protesters don’t just plan to be an inconvenience to those attending inaugural events. In fact, later on today I am going to publish an article on The Economic Collapse Blog that will talk about how three key organizers were caught on tape talking about how they could release butyric acid at a ball on the evening of December 19th.
Personally, I am glad that I am not going to be anywhere near D.C. this week, because we may very well see chaos and violence on a level that we have never seen during an inauguration before.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the resolve of these anarchists. As I have said before, the election of Donald Trump was the single most galvanizing moment for the radical left in decades, and they are ready for war. To give you an idea of what their mindset is at this point, just check out the following excerpt from #DisruptJ20’s “call to action”…
Trump stands for tyranny, greed, and misogyny. He is the champion of neo-nazis and white Nationalists, of the police who kill the Black, Brown and poor on a daily basis, of racist border agents and sadistic prison guards, of the FBI and NSA who tap your phone and read your email. He is the harbinger of even more climate catastrophe, deportation, discrimination, and endless war. He continues to deny the existence of climate change, in spite of all the evidence, putting the future of the whole human race at stake. The KKK, Vladimir Putin, Golden Dawn, and the Islamic State all cheered his victory. If we let his inauguration go unchallenged, we are opening the door to the future they envision.
The very first major disruptive event that #DisruptJ20 has planned for inauguration week comes on January 18th at 6 PM. At that time they plan on descending upon Mike Pence’s home in large numbers for what they are calling “a giant queer dance party”…
The homo/transphobic Mike Pence has graciously invited us to shake our booties and bodies in front of/around his house in Chevy Chase. We plan on leaving behind [biodegradable] glitter and rainbow paraphinalia that he can NEVER forget. #WeAreQueer #WeAreHere #WeWillDance That’s right, get ready to WERK it and tell Daddy Pence: homo/transphobia is not tolerated in our country! WERK for Peace and DisruptJ20 are teaming up to bring you the best dance party in the nation, so you betta’ show up and weerrrrkkk! We will meet at the Friendship heights metro and make our way via carpooling or dance to Daddy Pence’s neighborhood. |
Rey, SS Barry Church, G Phil Costa, OT Alejandro Villanueva, WR Donald Jones, CB Cassius Vaughn, OLB Frank Zombo, and many more…
Conclusion
At the conclusion of this draft, many thought doubling down on defensive tackles and wide receivers was smart. That does increase the odds of finding a quality player at the position, but it does not mean the front office did enough scouting at said position. As we have all seen, Gerald McCoy has turned into a star. He’s been everything the Buccaneers wanted and was rewarded a massive contract as a result. On the flip side, Brian Price’s injury was aggravated early in the season and caused his hamstring to be ripped off the bone. Due to the injury, he was never the same player as in college.
Arrelious Benn was also hit with the injury bug and has never finished a season without missing a game. Myron Lewis was attempted to be molded into a CB in the Tampa 2 and whatever Greg Schiano tried to do, but was never the player he was at Vandy. Mike Williams turned out to be a star for Tampa but got injured and then was traded when Lovie Smith came to town. Brent Bowden never played a game in the NFL. Cody Grimm, Dekoda Watson, and Erik Lorig all produced well for 7th round draft picks and even started a few games. In the end, this was a quality draft but with multiple head coaching changes and injuries, the draft looks worse than it was.
Guide/Previous Articles
Special thanks to CBSSports.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, and Sports-Reference.com for their help.With Apple’s revenue from China having dropped last quarter, the company is coming under more pressure to negotiate a deal with carrier China Mobile to get its devices into the hands of more consumers in China, the world’s top smartphone market. Adding to the pressure on Apple to cut a deal with China Mobile is the performance of its arch-rival Samsung, which is positively crushing Apple in the Chinese smartphone market. Reuters has a lengthy report detailing how Samsung’s is running rings around Apple in China and much of it has to do with practices that Samsung’s critics often cite as a reason for its inferiority to Apple: Namely, its willingness to spam a market with different variations of gadgets and its emphasis on jam-packing its phones full of “gimmicky” features of questionable usefulness.
“The Chinese just love features,” Michael Clendenin, the managing director of technology consultancy RedTech Advisors, tells Reuters. “They want their phone to have 50 different things that they’re never going to use. Apple just doesn’t play that game. Unfortunately, if you want to hit the mainstream market in China, and you want a lot of market share percentage points, you have to offer the Swiss army knife of cellphones.”
Samsung’s willingness to pump out an enormous variety of smartphone models is also helpful since it can successfully market its devices to both high-end consumers with the Galaxy S IV and to less wealthy consumers with its horde of cheap Android smartphones.
Finally, Samsung has been much more accommodating of Chinese mobile operators than Apple has by showing a willingness to modify its devices to meet the needs of every carrier. So while Apple has been bargaining hard with China Mobile over revenue sharing, Samsung has been happily willing to accept less revenue if it means access to bigger markets.Alright, so a lot of you are sleeping on Dishonored 2. Some new threads are popping up, but awareness of its quality (*cough* 91 92 Metacritic *cough*) is still pretty low overall.Now, some of you may be upset with the game due to the day one performance issues on PC (and other platforms to a lesser extent). Some of you may have played it and just didn't like it because the gameplay isn't your thing. All of that is fine and completely understandable. Tastes differ and all that, and performance issues are generally a bad thing. That's not what this thread is about.One of the things I keep reading on GAF is that Dishonored 2 isn't worth your time because it'sNow, I'm not really sure what that means. There's very few games that you couldn't reduce to'more of the same' if you really wanted to. I'm struggling to come up with examples, and the ones I can think of are all weird indie games.I rarely see people still saying this about, say, Battlefield 1, Titanfall 2, COD: IW or Watch Dogs 2.. All (excellent) games with an 'overly familiar gameplay template' at best, or a 'done-to-death formula' if you want to be pessimistic. So instead of those games, you want to single out the non-open-world game with imaginative traversal-based stealth mechanics, multi-route level design and art direction that looks like an oil painting in motion?The last good game similar to this one was Alien: Isolation in 2014 and the first Dishonored back in 2012. The only similar less-than-good games recently were Eidos Montreal's two Deus Ex sequels.The only explanation I can come up with is that people expected this particular sequel to go somewhere wildly different (open-world?) instead of 'only' adding a second playable character, a expanded moveset and a distinctive new destination.But looking at the term'more of the same' more generally: it's virtually worthless to use as a stand-alone argument for good/bad nowadays. You could describe any modern AAA game with that and still say nothing of value about the game itself. Look at The Last Guardian, for instance. If they manage to make that game'more of the same', wouldn't that be amazing? If the second Deus Ex was'more of the same' instead of a flaming pile of shit, wouldn't that have been great? Any game in the 2016 Metacritic Top 20 could be described as'more of the same' but apparently they're pretty good regardless.Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that nations hostile to the United States have likely gathered enough material from hacked emails on Hillary Clinton's private server to pose a blackmail threat if she were to win the White House in November.
The statement came after the Obama administration's FBI declined to recommend criminal prosecution for the former secretary of state's mishandling of classified documents over a four-year period.
'Our adversaries almost certainly have a blackmail file on Hillary Clinton, and this fact alone disqualifies her from service,' Trump said in a lengthy statement.
INDIGNANT: Donald Trump said after the FBI announced it was closing the Hillary Clinton email file that she was disqualified from being president because her private server was likely hacked by foreign enemies who could blackmail her
JUBILANT BUT MUM'S THE WORD: Hillary Clinton appeared relieved during a Charlotte, North Carolina campaign stop with President Barack Obama but made no mention of her classified email scandal
FBI Director James Comey said in his late morning remarks that while no hackers left a trail of bread crumbs on the homebrew server she maintained in her house, 'hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.'
Our adversaries almost certainly have a blackmail file on Hillary Clinton, and this fact alone disqualifies her from service. DONALD J. TRUMP
'She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries,' Comey said. 'Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.'
Trump also hammered away at Clinton's biggest political weakness – the public perception that she is not honest and trustworthy – by comparing her public statements about classified material with what Comey disclosed Tuesday morning.
'Hillary Clinton lied when she said that she did not send classified information,' said Trump.
'The FBI Director confirmed that over 100 emails were deemed classified at the time they were sent, including emails classified as top secret.'
'[B]ecause of our rigged system that holds the American people to one standard and people like Hillary Clinton to another, it does not look like she will be facing the criminal charges that she deserves,' he added.
THE BIG REVEAL: James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, made his stunning announcement Tuesday morning
Trump also hinted at one of Comey's more startling admissions – that more ordinary government employees would typically suffer some sort of professional sanction for allowing classified material to be moved to an unsecured location.
'EXTREMELY CARELESS' - WHAT FBI SAID HILLARY DID 'Extremely careless' with'very sensitive, highly classified information'
Had 110 emails on private server with classified information
Oversaw 'generally lacking' security culture
Server had no 24-hour security
Emailed work information overseas while in countries with'sophisticated adversaries' prone to snoop
'Hostile actors' gained access to people she contacted
Even private service like Gmail has better protection
That, he suggested, might include the loss of their security clearances.
'The normal punishment, in this case, would include losing authority to handle classified information, and that too disqualifies Hillary Clinton from being President,' Trump said.
The presumptive Republican nominee bashed former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch for what he said was an intentional rendezvous on an airport tarmac a week ago.
And he said Hillary Clinton received special treatment by being allowed to speak to the FBI on a holiday weekend when it would be buried in the news.
'Bill Clinton didn’t accidentally run into the Attorney General on the airport tarmac last week in Phoenix,' he said.
'Hillary Clinton didn’t accidentally sneak into the FBI during one of the country’s biggest holiday weekends to testify on her illegal activities, something that wouldn’t be afforded to others under investigation (and on a Saturday of all days).'
And, Trump added, 'It was no accident that charges were not recommended against Hillary the exact same day as President Obama campaigns with her for the first time.'
'RIGGED': Donald Trump lashed out on Twitter within minutes of the FBI announcement
Obama and his former top diplomat shared the campaign stage Tuesday afternoon in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Obama lending her his podium bearing the official Seal of the President of the United States – something that almost never makes appearances at political events.
Neither Democrat made any mention of the FBI's decision.
Trump had earlier in the day reacted to Comey's announcement on Twitter.
'The system is rigged,' he wrote. 'General Petraeus got in trouble for far less. Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment.'
'FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem,' a second tweet read.
The real estate tycoon-turned-politician will hold a rally Tuesday night in Raleigh, North Carolina.When Eugene Ovsishcher returned to the U.S. after a nine-month deployment in Afghanistan, the shell-shocked serviceman suffered from flashbacks, nightmares, and debilitating anxiety attacks.
After a visit with his doctor, it was determined that Ovsishcher suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The doctor suggested that the veteran get an emotional support dog to help him manage his symptoms.
Following doctor’s orders, Ovsishcher adopted Mickey in August 2011. Mickey, a Shih Tzu, has proved to be the lifesaver that the veteran needed.
“He helps me to calm down my anxiety. And sometimes when I’m stressed out, he helps me to overcome without using the strong medicine,” says the seven year U.S. Army veteran. “He is my medicine,” he adds of Mickey.
Ovsishcher can’t imagine his life without Mickey. “Take a look at his face. You can’t stay anxious or angry or whatever,” says Ovsishcher of the little Shih Tzu. “You look at his face and you start laughing.”
But unfortunately, things aren’t all smiles at the New York co-op Ovsishcher and his family call home. Trump Village has a no pet policy, and despite the Army veteran’s requests that the housing complex make an exception for his therapy dog, Trump Village has refused.
Ovsishcher, his wife Galina, and his two children, Philip and Yaffa, face eviction from their apartment if they do not get rid of Mickey.
In response to the ultimatum given by the housing complex, Ovsishcher contacted attorney Maddy Tarnovsky and has filed a discrimination suit against Trump Village.
“The heart of this story is that there is a guy who comes to this country and enlists and puts himself in harm’s way,” says Tarnofsky. Ovsishcher immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1994 and joined the U.S. Army several years later, Tarnovsky explains. “He didn’t have to do this, and he comes back damaged and they spit on him. A doctor recommends he have a support animal, and for some unknown reason they decide that they’re not doing this for him.”
After all the little Shih Tzu has done for him, Ovsishcher says he will not give up Mickey, no matter what.
“I can’t get rid of a family member,” Ovsishcher says of Mickey. “If they asked me which I want to keep, the kids or the apartment, I would keep the kids. Same thing with the dog.”High-tech companies have turned Harbin, the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang province in China, into a center for research and development in automated machines.
It might seem more like science fiction than science fact, but a Chinese company has been developing a range of “robo chefs” for cafeterias and restaurants.
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The Haiying Robot Manufacturing Company turns out more than 1,000 automated “cooks” annually, which cost 100,000 yuan (US$15,748) each, at its factory in Harbin.
A weird-looking device, the robotic chefs have two high-tech arms that can each whip up 40 different Chinese dishes, including sweet and sour chicken, fried potatoes with green peppers, noodles and dumplings.
Liu Hasheng, who comes from Harbin and is the founder of the company, created the automated arms.
His plan as general manager is to export robo chefs to the United States, Germany, and Singapore.
“We plan to take the robotic components to the United States, and assemble the spare parts there,” Liu, 53, said. “Some of the robots are designed to cook Americanized Chinese food with sweetened flavors.”
Apart from the US, other potential markets are Germany and Singapore, according to Haiying Robot Manufacturing.
“The company is currently looking at an American operation, since Chinese food is extremely popular in the US,” Liu said. “Our robot chefs will help to standardize the flavors, and make those dishes perfect for American tastes.”
Liu is part of a growing breed of innovative entrepreneurs in the robotics industry that are setting up shop in Harbin. Indeed, the city has become a center for research and development in automated machines.
Last year, annual revenue from the robotic industry was 1.25 billion yuan. From 2008 to 2013, the industry witnessed a 20 per cent annual increase in revenue, data from the city government showed.
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With the help of the Harbin Institute of Technology and the city’s robot industrial park, the sector has grown considerably, and there are now 57 companies working in the business.
Last year, China overtook Japan to become the largest buyer of industrial robots after purchasing 57,000 automated machines, an increase of 55 per cent compared to 2013.
This accounted for a quarter of global sales, according to China Robot Industry Alliance, an industry body based in Beijing.
Under the “Made in China 2025” national plan, which is designed to turn the country into a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse, the automated machines industry has expanded quickly.
For innovators such as Liu, this has been great news after working in the sector for 28 years. Previously, he was involved in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones.
But his life really changed in 2008 when he came up with the “robotic chef” idea. He even opened up his first restaurant with an automated cook in Harbin in 2012.
“Back then, one of my friends who owned a restaurant said it was difficult for him to hire qualified staff and keep them, due to high labor costs,” he recalled. “I started to consider if I could create a ‘robot cook’ that would be able to do simple, repetitive kitchen jobs.”
It was a moment of inspiration and it paid off. In the past three years, Haiying Robot Manufacturing has taken off with a steady stream of orders from restaurants across China.
“So far, I have sold robot chefs to more than 60 restaurants nationwide, including areas in western China, such as Gansu and Ningxia Hui autonomous region,” Liu said. “The labor-saving devices are designed to speak different dialects and cook local cuisines to cater for various regions.”
But Liu has not stopped there. His company plans to roll out “robo waiters”, which cost 40,000 yuan each. They usually have a “working life span” of about eight to 10 years. “They are built to last,” he said.
Next year, he plans to manufacture between 6,000 to 8,000 robots annually, worth more than 100 million yuan, although he has yet to disclose detailed financial figures for the company.
Other projects include turning out “family robot chefs” for consumers in the near future, as well as launching a central processing factory to produce processed food materials for supermarket chains. These products can then be popped into the oven by robot chef.
Still, Haiying Robot Manufacturing will have to stay on its toes as the competition is fierce.
Discoverer Robot Co Ltd is based in Daqing, Heilongjiang province, and was founded in 2012. It now sells a few hundred robotic chefs a year to college cafeterias, companies and the People’s Liberation Army.
“There is a huge market potential for robot chefs at home and abroad,” Ge Wenhua, chairman of Discoverer, said. “Many senior citizens are in a bad health and can’t cook, while the younger generation don’t know how to cook. They will all need robot chefs.”
Cost-saving is also a major incentive for cafeterias and companies looking to buy Discoverer’s automated chefs.
“A robot cook can help save operational costs of about 200,000 yuan annually, according to our research of college cafeterias,” Ge said. “And a robot can be more efficient and environmentally friendly,” he added.
They also never take a lunch break.
How robot cook works
– The robotic cook has highly precise movements.
– It can put together an entire dish, step-by-step.
– The automated arms can place food in fryers, add water and measure ingredients and condiments.
– It can interact with other electrical kitchen equipment, such as pancake turners and blenders.
– It can speak different dialects and cook local cuisines.
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MOST READAT&T has finally begun pushing the Marshmallow update out for the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note 5. The update brings Doze, enhanced permission controls, a slightly revamped user interface and more to both handsets. AT&T is the last major carrier in the U.S. to push out the update for these phones. The updates weigh in at around 1.4GB, so you will want to make sure that your phone is charged and you are on a strong Wi-Fi network.
If you have yet to receive the update, you can check manually for it by heading into the Settings, About Phone and finally Check for updates. Once you get it downloaded and installed, be sure to hop in the forums and let us know what you think of it and how it is working for you. Discuss the update in the forumsOne of New York City’s most beloved museums is creating free and safe programming for LGBTQ teens.
The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is sponsoring Open Art Space, an after school program that meets on Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. in MoMA’s Cullman Education Building. Each week two artists organize the event around the interests of the participants and offer guided walks of the MOMA galleries, as well as projects and sessions that allow the teens to partake in creating collaborative communal paintings, sculpture and more.
Nestor Perez-Moliere
“Whether teens are getting a behind-the-scenes tour of MoMA’s Conservation Lab with artist Robert Gober, posing for a Queer Prom-themed photo shoot, or discussing what’s been happening in everyone’s lives—Open Art Space’s role is to offer space for teens to explore their own identities as well as the opportunity to operate within a community,” visual artist and educator Mark Joshua Epstein told The Huffington Post. “We endeavor to create a space where LGBTQ teens feel heard, supported, and recognized and we hope they can take that feeling of support with them through their daily lives.”A new study published in the British Journal of Nutrition appears to back up the adage that a little of what you fancy does you good.
Including a small amount of chocolate each day could help prevent diabetes and insulin resistance. That's one of the research findings from the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), the University of Warwick Medical School, the University of South Australia and the University of Maine.
Data of 1,153 people aged 18-69 years old who were part of the Observation of Cardiovascular Risk in Luxembourg (ORISCAV-LUX) study were analysed. It was found that those who ate 100 g of chocolate a day -- equivalent to a bar -- had reduced insulin resistance and improved liver enzymes. Insulin sensitivity is a well-established risk factor to cardiovascular disease.
The academics hypothesised that chocolate consumption may have a beneficial effect on insulin sensitivity and liver enzymes and therefore decided to analyse a national sample of adults, taking into account lifestyle and dietary factors, including the simultaneous consumption of tea and coffee. This is because both drinks can be high in polyphenol, the substance which may provide chocolate with its beneficial cardiometabolic effects.
Prof Saverio Stranges, Visiting Academic at the University of Warwick Medical School and Scientific Director of the Department of Population Health at LIH said: "Given the growing body of evidence, including our own study, cocoa-based products may represent an additional dietary recommendation to improve cardio-metabolic health; however, observational results need to be supported by robust trial evidence.
"Potential applications of this knowledge include recommendations by healthcare professionals to encourage individuals to consume a wide range of phytochemical-rich foods, which can include dark chocolate in moderate amounts. However, it is important to differentiate between the natural product cocoa and the processed product chocolate, which is an energy-dense food. Therefore, physical activity, diet and other lifestyle factors must be carefully balanced to avoid detrimental weight gain over time."
More than 80% of participants claimed to eat an average of 24.8 g of chocolate a day. The study also found that those who claimed to eat chocolate were younger, more physically active and had higher levels of education than those who claimed not to eat chocolate on a daily basis.
Dr Ala'a Alkerwi, the Principal Investigator of the study at LIH said: "It is also possible that chocolate consumption may represent an overall marker for a cluster of favourable socio-demographic profiles, healthier lifestyle behaviours and better health status. This could explain, at least in part, the observed inverse associations with insulin and liver biomarkers."
The paper concluded that further observational research and randomised controlled studies are needed to understand the role chocolate may play in insulin resistance and cardiometabolic disorders.Spain may offer automatic residency to foreigners such as Chinese and Russians who buy homes in the country, aiming to help the ruined housing market, a government official said Monday.
“We have proposed to the other ministries that for residents who acquire a home in Spain for more than 160,000 euros ($205,000), that will automatically entail a residency permit,” said junior trade minister Jaime Garcia-Legaz.
“We are thinking of markets such as the Russian and the Chinese ones,” he added, speaking at an economic gathering in comments broadcast by national television.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy later told a news conference that “no decision” had yet been taken on formally launching the scheme, but said that Spain’s stock of unsold housing needed to be sold at “reasonable prices”.
Spain has a mountain of unsold homes built during a construction boom that went bust in 2008, dragging it into a recession that has thrown millions out of work and caused many families to be evicted.
An organisation that defends insolvent mortgage-holders against eviction, PAH, criticised the residency proposal, with a spokeswoman for the group, Ana Colau, saying it would mount legal challenges against the scheme.
“It is not only immoral but may further worsen the situation and cause new evictions of mortgage-holders,” she said in comments broadcast on radio station RNE.A survey seeking feedback on three finalists for the University of Northern Iowa’s next president found widespread support for Interim President Jim Wohlpart — especially among administrators, staff, students and the broader community.
Faculty was the only campus group that didn’t collectively rate him the highest on a majority of the 12 questions posed by a search firm.
Rather, Montana State University-Billings Chancellor Mark Nook, who ultimately got the job, in every category earned higher marks from the faculty than either Wohlpart or the other finalist, former Temple University President Neil Theobald.
Nook is set to start Feb. 1 as UNI’s 11th president.
Wohlpart was promoted from provost to interim president when former UNI President Bill Ruud announced last summer he was leaving to become president of the private Marietta College in Ohio.
Even though he was not selected for the president’s job, Wohlpart said Tuesday he plans to continue as UNI provost.
“On Feb. 1, when President Nook takes office, I will return to the position of provost and executive vice president for academic affairs,” he said in an email. “I look forward to reconnecting to academic affairs and continuing the good work that we have going on in that division.”
Wohlpart said he was excited about the “wealth of experience” Nook brings to campus and believes he’ll move UNI forward in implementing its mission and plan.
“We have already met and have begun to establish a great working relationship, which will only grow in time,” Wohlpart wrote. “We have a similar leadership philosophy that focuses on serving the campus, local, and state communities; is collaborative, inclusive, and transparent; and desires to elevate this remarkable university.”
Although administrators, staff, students and community members more often on the survey said they “strongly agree” that Wohlpart met the desired qualifications, the faculty responses illustrate how the hiring of Nook at UNI differs from the 2015 selection of Bruce Harreld as the University of Iowa president.
The Iowa Board of Regents drew sharp criticism from the UI campus for choosing a business executive despite broad criticism — especially among faculty.
The UI Faculty Senate cast a vote of no confidence in the board for its selection of Harreld, and the American Association of University Professors last summer sanctioned the UI for the board’s disregard of faculty opinion and shared governance values.
At the outset of the UNI search, critics of the UI search said they would be watching the UNI search closely.
UI and UNI faculty members met with AAUP senior program officer Hans-Joerg Tiede in September to discuss the sanction and under what circumstances it might be lifted. Tiede said at the time that its removal would “primarily involve a change in policy.”
“It should somehow be a policy change that recognizes what the role of the faculty in a presidential search should be and that somehow would be consistent with the AAUP’s principles,” Tiede said.
AAUP sanctions don’t come with financial penalties, but they notify the association’s nearly 50,000 members that “unsatisfactory conditions of academic government exist at the institution in question,” AAUP documents show.
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The UNI search also differed from the UI’s in that the search committee wasn’t disbanded after identifying finalists.
Rather, it was asked to make a final report to the regents after the finalists spoke on the UNI campus in public forums.
The search committee commissioned the feedback survey following those town halls, charging UNI’s Center for Social and Behavioral Research to ask respondents to rank candidates from one (for strongly disagree) to five (for strongly agree) on a list of 12 desired qualifications. The survey also included room for comments.
According to results provided The Gazette, of the more than 830 people who ranked the candidates, Wohlpart earned the most “strongly agree” votes in nine categories — including demonstration of “excellent communication skills,” “a transparent, open-door, and open-mind style,” and “commitment to developing and supporting a diverse, multicultural, inclusive, university culture.”
When looking at the responses by group, staff gave Wohlpart the highest average score on nine of 12 questions — tying him with Nook in two categories. Administrators gave him the highest ranking on 10 of 12; and students and community members gave him the highest average score on every question.
Faculty rated Nook the best on every question. Theobald did not top the other candidates on any question according to any group, the results show.
UNI’s faculty union collected feedback through a similar but separate survey, which they provided to the regents before a vote.
UNI associate professor and union president Joe Gorton said the board’s decision to hire Nook “was consistent with the overall results from United Faculty’s survey.”
But he declined to release the results, saying it would not be fair to the candidates to make the data public.
The Board of Regents provided The Gazette with comments from the open-ended portion of its search firm’s survey, although they redacted the names of the commenters.
Highlights
Neil Theobald
Theobald received mostly negative comments, with many raising concerns about his controversial departure from Temple — from which he resigned in August under threat of being fired after his board of trustees issued a vote of no confidence.
Theobald while at Temple also took heat for not coming out strongly against Bill Cosby, a former Temple trustee who has been battling allegations of sexual assault.
“I do not believe that he was able to effectively explain away all of the controversy at Temple and, for that reason, I would not consider him a viable candidate,” one administrator wrote.
“He has a lot of baggage,” one faculty member wrote, and a staff member who reporting having breakfast with Theobald took issue with the way he talked about Cosby.
“I was shocked that he repeatedly made remarks similar to, ‘He’s a great man. He’s a dear friend of mine. He swears he didn’t do anything wrong,’” according to the staff member. “These statements are unacceptable.”
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Others also noted Theobald’s comments about Cosby as concerning.
“Question his judgment on stating Bill Cosby ‘is a great guy,’” a staff member wrote.
Theobald did receive some positive comments, including several “strong candidate” statements.
“He would be a great fit for the university,” one person wrote.
Jim Wohlpart
Comments for Wohlpart were mixed, with administrators, staff, students, and community members providing almost all positive statements, and faculty offering some negative feedback.
“Please consider not interrupting the current ‘flow’ yet again,” one supportive administrator wrote.
“Jim is one of the best administrative hires we have made during my 20-year tenure here at UNI, and I think we should do everything we can to retain him,” another administrator wrote.
Among the negative feedback, one faculty member said, “A major problem is his lack of executive managerial experience.”
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Another wrote in all caps, “Do not hire Jim Wohlpart as president of UNI. You will have a vote of no-confidence in no time.”
Mark Nook
Most of the comments about Nook were positive, with administrators praising his experience as “the highest level of any of the three candidates.”
“He has a very firm grasp on the strengths of UNI and would be a huge added value to the executive team,” another administrator wrote.
Several of the commenters pleaded with the board to hire Nook, although he too received some negative reaction.
“His responses to questions were generally superficial, incomplete, or simply did not address key parts of the question,” one faculty member wrote.
“This was the worst candidate by far,” one person wrote. “He was totally unable to answer questions, except with precooked answers.”
l Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.comFusionPoint is a 3D platformer game that is being developed using the Unreal 4 Engine by the FusionPoint team. There is an alpha of the game now available for download, the links will be provided here and at the end of the post.
I found out about the game from Jackspecticeye when he covered the game on his channel a few weeks ago. The game looked so good that I just had to check it out for myself! You can check out their developmental process into the game so far right here, on their developmental blog (devblog). You can even check out their twitter instead if you prefer.
At its core, FusionPoint is 3D third-person platformer that has jumping, wall-running and dashing mechanics with the main emphasis of fluid gameplay. Their game pitch states that there is no combat in FusionPoint and instead focuses on “transversal of the environment”.
While waiting for the download to finish, I had a quick look over of their devblog to see their creative/developmental process. This lead to me finding their pitch document which was really interesting to read. The document goes into detail about the concept of the game, giving references for the art style they were hoping to create for the game (environment/character) and finally, the core gameplay elements for FusionPoint. I have seen plenty of devblogs but being able to read and download the game pitch document, was a first for me. I actually was under the impression that the development team may be students. Simply because the pitch document reminded me of the game programming course I took in Singapore, where we had to write and present our game pitches. They may even be students, who knows?
Besides noticing the beautiful main menu, I saw that in the settings that all options for graphics were default set to the highest possible setting, which in this case was on epic. If you are planning to play the alpha build, you will want to keep that in mind just in case. I was already forewarned about this by realityvoid who has covered the game as well, on his YouTube channel. You can check out his video on FusionPoint right below. I wish that the settings included a way to see the controls for the game, since I somehow managed to completely miss the fact the controls were provided on the download page. I still have no idea how I managed to miss that, oh well, a little guesswork never hurt anyone.
It is actually unclear in the beginning where players are meant to go from the get-go. As you just start off immediately in the level hub, with your back to the door that leads to the tutorial. I honestly cannot see how players would know that the tutorial was behind them. I can only see it happening two ways: either they ran to the door behind them out of curiosity, or they figured which was the jump button and seeing the sign to the tutorial level during their exploration of the level hub.
Speaking of the tutorial level; if you are planning on trying the alpha using only your keyboard and mouse, make sure to read the controls on the download page. The tutorial gives instructions how to play the game for controllers only. I cannot speak for others, but for me, I rather use the keyboard and mouse as that is what I am most comfortable with. Using the controller is not very second-nature to me as using the keyboard and mouse is, so attempting to use the controller for this game felt too unnatural for me. Hopefully in the future builds, there will be a way for you to choose your key bindings/control scheme (keyboard or controller) and the tutorial can reflect on your choice in the settings.
Anyways, moving on! The soundtrack that the team chose really fits well into the game; it is soothing while reflecting the environmental designs they were aiming for. I found it hard to get frustrated at the game while redoing certain portions over and over again (mainly because I was trying to get a good screenshot mid-air rather than poor timing) because I simply found the music too relaxing. If they ever release a soundtrack for this game, I would definitely be buying.
Speaking of environmental designs, I have to say I loved the visual art design they have chosen for the game. The style they chosen works extremely well as a 3D environment, where it feels tranquil yet alien and mysterious. The character design was excellent where the avatar is ambiguous, you cannot tell if the character is a human, alien or a robot. The ambiguity along with the design fits so well together, and just ‘clicks’ perfectly with the game’s world. The cape physics in the Unreal 4 Engine looks amazing by the way, and it doesn’t even impact on the game’s frame-rate either. You can have it moving all over the place and the game is still smooth.
The FusionPoint team really achieved their goal in creating a 3D platformer game that has smooth gameplay. This is only in the alpha build stage and everything is so darn smooth! The animations, the controls…EVERYTHING! I think I am in love actually. Having that fluidity makes playing this game such a joy; it really helps with the areas that require precise timing and landing.
FusionPoint reminds me a lot of two games in particular: A Story About My Uncle and Qbeh-1. Both games involved platforming, although Qbeh-1 had a stronger puzzle element to it. While FusionPoint reminded me of the environments, particularly the underground/caves from A Story About My Uncle.
So far in the alpha build, there is only one level available but their devblogs shows that level two is nearly completion. Hopefully that will be included in the alpha because from the screenshots, it looks really good and I want to play it. FusionPoint is definitely going to be a title I will be keeping an eye on. It has great potential and the downloadable build shows the team is up to the task and headed in the right direction. If you are interested in trying FusionPoint for yourself, you can find the download page right here!
Realityvoid’s two cents:
Honestly it’s a great game. The controls and game run and play like smooth water. The concept is easy to grasp and fun to play. The game has a huge amount of promise both through game play and graphics. Also I specifically chose controller since the game looked like it was really compatible with it. With |
franchise: The synchronizing of the character's mind with the giant robots, making terminal connections with supercomputers and resisting network attacks from invading computer viruses. These minigames are designed not to be taxing on the brain, but be more than enough to distract you from those aching feet.
While there have been apps for navigating theme parks and predicting waiting times, the MAGI Mobile is a first for tying in smartphone games to the theme park attraction itself. It hopes to give attendees an extra layer of enjoyment and participation with the ride before they even step foot into it.
The app is available for free on Apple's App Store and Google Play in Japan, but is only unlocked to its full potential from a code found outside the theme-park ride itself.
Life, disrupted: In Europe, millions of refugees are still searching for a safe place to settle. Tech should be part of the solution. But is it? CNET investigates.
Does the Mac still matter? Apple execs tell why the MacBook Pro was over four years in the making, and why we should care. Read about it here.The first pics from Ridley Scott’s new live-action, low-budget Halo series, Nightfall, have been released — and war is definitely looking gritty.
The pics show series star Mike Colter as the character Jameson Locke, a surgically enhanced super soldier who is a rising star in the futuristic Spartan army troubled by the military industrial complex he inhabits. The story will be set between the events of Halo 4 and the upcoming Halo 5: Guardians, in which Locke will play an integral role.
The series, which is essentially a feature film broken into separate episodes, will be directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan (Falling Skies) and produced by sci-fi legend Scott. It'll be released on the Xbox. Colter opened up about the project in a recent interview, teasing his take on the script and some of his experiences shooting the series:
"(The) script was incredibly gripping. It introduces an intriguing and mysterious world that I wanted to know more about … It was a new medium for me. Who would the audience be? How would they access the series? Fortunately, ensuring accessibility to a broad audience is one of the things that Scott Free TV and 343 values first and foremost. Not only does Halo: Nightfall cater to the hardcore Halo fans, but it's also designed so newcomers to the franchise, like me, can easily enter the Halo universe, identify with the characters and be entertained by the story being told on screen … My favorite experience thus far would be shooting a scene in Belfast where I'm chasing an enemy who poses a serious threat to the people Agent Locke has sworn to protect through the city. The scene is an action-packed sequence that involves some cool special effects and a lot of coordination with the stunt team to fulfill the director's vision. I can't wait to see how it turns out.”
The series will be included with the upcoming Halo: The Master Chief Collection arriving Nov. 11.
(Via Coming Soon, Movie Web)If there was ever a sound of devastation this must surely be it.
Scientists have released the menacing noise of the Japan earthquake which plunged the nation into unprecedented chaos when it shook the nation on March 11.
The cataclysmic mega-quake sent a merciless tsunami bulldozing its way through streets and homes wiping out towns and communities in a matter of minutes.
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Scientists have released the menacing noise of the Japan earthquake which has been sped up 16 times
Underwater microphones were plunged into the Pacific to capture the noise
The underwater microphone was positioned 900 miles away from the epicentre in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska
Now the full force of mother nature can be terrifyingly relived as scientists from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle have released an extraordinary recording of the sound of the 9.0 earthquake as it powered its way through the Pacific ocean moments before creating the devastating tsunami.
Captured by an underwater microphone called a hydrophone positioned 900 miles away from the epicentre in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska the earthquake's incredible rumbling and roaring is not dissimilar to the sound of a rocket taking off.
The clip, available on You Tube, is sped up 16 times and in the second half the sound becomes almost blurred and muffled as the Earth's crust readjusts hundreds of miles under the ocean.
The initial burst of noise is the P-wave, which stands for 'primary' waves and the second louder noise is the sound of the T-wave, or tertiary waves.
Tertiary waves are created when an earthquake occurs under the sea. They are the slowest waves of the three types of waves and are created when their seismic energy goes upwards into the ocean.
As this happens it converts to sound energy making the T-wave.
The clip comes as the Japanese are trying to get their nation back on track.
The now infamous Fukushima plant has been spewing radioactive substances for more than a month after the 14 metre tsunami devastated its cooling towers and wrecked emergency back-up systems.
Thousands of families were evacuated from the nuclear disaster zone and are now set to receive compensation pay-outs from the operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco).
They will receive initial payments of about £7,300 and individual evacuees will get about £5,500.
Out of control: This photo, taken three days ago, shows fires raging at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. Tepco is still struggling to stabilise the nuclear reactors
Still coming to terms with disaster: A woman tries to find out what happened to her mother in Kesennuma in northern Japan
Radiation leaks from the crisis have contaminated crops and left fishermen in the region unable to sell their catches - a huge blow to an area heavily dependent on fishing and farming.
Nearly 140,000 people are still living in shelters after losing their homes or being advised to evacuate following radiation concerns.
Earlier this week Japan's emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited Asahi, about 55 miles east of Tokyo where 13 people were killed and 3,000 homes were damaged to look at the devastation.
Radiation levels have now dropped enough for police in white protective suits, goggles and blue gloves to begin the grim task of searching for bodies amid the muddy debris inside the six miles radius around the Fukushima plant.
It is estimated up to 1,000 bodies could be lodged in the rubble.
Only about 13,500 of the more than 26,000 people believed to have been killed by the disaster have been recovered with most though to have been washed out to sea.
Police officers are now allowed to look for bodies near the Fukushima nuclear plantby RBNY OPTIMIST
Columnist
Hey folks! Where have you been all these months and years?
Oh wait, that was me who was gone from these venerable pages.
Well, in any event, I hope you’re doing well. I’ve been rolling along here in New York Red Bull Optimism-land, thinking good thoughts, living in the moment…basically just hanging around and enjoying this fantastic start to the season. Recently, however, you surely have noticed the same disturbance in the force that has caused me to want to share once more with you here in longer form.
In other words, “These are not the Tweets you’re looking for.”
Here we are, the Friday before the BIG game. A match three plus years in the making. The Hudson River Derby. The PATH Train Classico. The Throwdown Hoedown in Harrison.
It is truly Peak NYCSoccerWarz.
Is it a rivalry? Not yet, for we haven’t even played a match. But do we have a right to be excited, get riled up, engage in non-stop banter, and just plain look forward to a sold out RBA rocking on a beautiful Spring evening in just three days time? Absolutely.
As I’ve taken in the banter from both sides this week, something struck me that I felt the need to share. It’s just a pattern of subtext that I found interesting and hope you will too.
Take a look at most of the shots across the bow from NYCFC and it becomes pretty apparent that all the Blue side has to hang their hats on at the moment is geography. When your team is playing poorly, your biggest star is dealing with nagging injuries, you play on a field roughly the width of just the two bottom Kit Kats and your head coach is lamenting that all of this is turning out to be harder than he expected, well…I guess then it seems like a good time to remind everyone that you play somewhere in the the five boroughs and your opponent … um … doesn’t?
Yes, the team we support plays in a different State (of Contentment? Emergency? Mind? Oh, right, New Jersey). WE GET IT. Based on the legal definition, dotted lines on the map, walking distance from the Bronx County Hall of Justice, NYCFC plays in New York.
Frankly, none of that matters. On Sunday, when both teams step on the field (oh, sorry, “pitch,” since our opponents are a Football Club, after all), we will see who has the right to claim superiority over the region.
Unfortunately for the Blue side, this is not a Geography Bee. This is soccer.
And I’m optimistic…no, CONFIDENT…no, ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY SURE, that class — in the form of the hard charging, talented, team-oriented New York Red Bulls — will prevail.
And that holds true in ANY state.
Enjoy the ride.A bit ago I showed off the data logging software that I made for the Gamecube and info you can get from it while playing Melee. This is the second part which adds a GUI and an APM counter while preserving the original functionality
Demonstration
Okay, what is it doing?
Its taking the data and again through NintendoSpy’s keybindings. Then the hard button presses (everything except control stick, c-stick and soft L/R) are reported. These buttons are shown as APM in two second intervals. It was all done in MATLAB where it logs the keystrokes and then runs a graphing program every two seconds to update the graph. All the code can be found here (main, APMtimer). They will be reuploaded to GitHub because its 2015 and thatch where things should be
The result of a wobbles combo
Whats next?
Try to get control / c-stick data. This would push the data from novel to helpful
Potentially port this to a better language. MATLAB really wasn’t meant to do this
Finish non-Smash related projects while graduating and transitioning into real life or something
AdvertisementsPresident Trump delivers remarks at Trump Tower on Tuesday in New York. Standing alongside him, from left, are Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin, Elaine Chao and Mick Mulvaney. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Voters and TV interviewers have a critical role to play in forcing Republicans to choose between President Trump and the country’s well-being. Many Republicans are making — yawn! — empty statements about neo-Nazis and white nationalists and their responsibility for death and injury in Charlottesville. It’s time to get beyond that. So, if given the opportunity, here’s what we would like to hear someone ask them:
Mr. Cohn, you’re a top adviser to the president. According to news reports you are “deeply upset by last few days.” Why would you continue to enable this president? Had you known then what you know now, would you have supported the president?
Mr. Kelly, haven’t you utterly failed to create a functional Oval Office? If so, when is it time for you to quit? If Trump does not tell you the truth and continues to flout your advice, isn’t your continued presence just bestowing a sense of normalcy on a horribly abnormal presidency?
Mr. Gillespie, you’re the GOP nominee for governor of Virginia. Don’t you have a moral obligation to call for removal of Confederate statues that have become symbols for neo-Nazis and white nationalists? Can you explain the difference between Robert E. Lee and George Washington? Is Lee a hero?
Speaker Ryan, is Trump fit to serve? Is he a role model for your children? Do you regret supporting him for president?
Sen. Sasse (R-Neb), you refused to endorse Trump and have criticized his actions. How can the party of Lincoln tolerate him? Will you vote for him in 2020 if he seeks re-election? You wrote a book entitled, “The Vanishing American Adult.” Do moral adults need to repudiate the president?
Mr. Immelt, you said you’d remain on the president’s manufacturing advisory council. Was that a mistake? Has it hurt GE’s reputation when other companies show moral leadership and you do not?
Mr. Murdoch, your news network’s hosts defend the alt-right, rationalize the president’s moral equivalence and peddle in conspiracy theories. Has Fox damaged American politics? How can you, as an immigrant to the United States, allow your network to traffic in anti-immigrant propaganda? Why should American businesses continue to advertise on your network when the Fox brand is now associated with white nationalists?
Mr. Perkins, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Falwell and members of Trump’s faith advisory council, as leaders of the so-called “values voters” and prominent evangelical conservatives, how can you continue to support a president who gives morale boosters to neo-Nazis and white nationalists? How can you claim to stand for American values?
Secretary Tillerson, why are you still serving in your post and why give Trump credibility by remaining?
Ambassador Haley, as U.S. representative to the United Nations, how do you defend democracy and human rights when you work for a president who coddles neo-Nazis? Isn’t it time to leave and prepare to run against him in 2020?
And you, GOP donors, you’re going to keep supporting this man? How can you consider yourself patriots if you give money to an enabler of white nationalists and to the party he has now taken over?
To the board, staff and donors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, how can you support a president who defends neo-Nazis and others who chant “Jews will not replace us,” insisting that there are good people among them? Have you no shame?
Beyond these apologists for Trump, there are many individuals who could make a powerful impression by ostracizing the president, so we would ask the following people and groups to consider denying Trump the sense of moral legitimacy he craves:
Will future World Series, Super Bowl and Stanley Cup winning teams refuse to go to the White House to stand next to a president who equates neo-Nazis with opponents of neo-Nazis? Will rapper LL Cool J, singer Gloria Estefan and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade join Lionel Richie if he decides to boycott the Kennedy Center honors? Isn’t that a more powerful statement than accepting an award in the presence of a presidential apologist of white nationalists?
It’s time to put people on the spot, make them uncomfortable if need be and force them to make a moral decision.University faculty union leaders have rejected Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system Chancellor Steven Rosenstone’s call for mediation in their dispute with him over plans for a system overhaul.
Inter Faculty Organization action coordinator Monte Bute said Rosenstone was acting in “bad faith” when he made his announcement early Thursday that a state agency would intervene. When Rosenstone made the announcement, Bute said, he had just rejected a faculty request to discuss their complaints with him at a union meeting scheduled for Friday.
Union leaders were talking to state officials about the terms under which mediation would take place, he said, but had not formally entered into it.
Bute called Rosenstone’s announcement a “political ploy,” and said union leaders have decided not to proceed with the mediation.
“There’s no way that we can enter into negotiations when the chancellor has acted in bad faith,” Bute said. “This is exactly the kind of behavior [that has led to] campuses voting “no confidence” in the chancellor.”
The president of the union for faculty at two-year colleges, Kevin Lindstrom, said he respected the decision to reject Rosenstone’s offer. But he said his union remains in preliminary talks about state mediation.
Rosenstone has been at odds with MnSCU’s two faculty unions over his management of the system and the way he has tried to carry out his reform plan, called “Charting the Future.”
Last month, they voted to pull out of system discussions of the overhaul, and faculty associations at five of the system’s seven universities have passed votes of “no confidence” in him.
Thursday morning, Rosenstone said the state had agreed to intervene in the dispute, and that he had notified the unions.
“We clearly have some disagreements, he said, “and we’re clearly not making the progress I’d like to see in reaching a shared understanding of how to move forward.”
At the time, the unions declined to comment on the announcement.
But late Thursday evening, Inter Faculty Organization President Jim Grabowska sent out a press release suggesting Rosenstone was engaging in political maneuvering.
“In labor relations, mediation is a mutual process to be held in confidence, never to be exploited for political gain,” he wrote. “In that light, Chancellor Rosenstone has shown his bad faith. This recent action is part of a pattern of behavior which is an important reason that the faculty unions have lost trust in his leadership.”
MnSCU spokesman Doug Anderson said in a written reply Thursday night:Many of us who provide scientific information about HPV quadrivalent vaccine, also known as Gardasil (or Silgard in Europe), tend to focus on its effects on preventing cancers in women, so articles are inclined to pay attention to vaccinating teenage girls rather than boys. But, if you carefully analyze the disease, human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease, its subtypes 16 and 18 not only cause approximately 70% of cervical cancers, but they cause most HPV-induced anal (95% linked to HPV), vulvar (50% linked), vaginal (65% linked), oropharyngeal (60% linked) and penile (35% linked) cancers. The viruses are generally passed through genital contact, almost always as a result of vaginal, oral and anal sex.
These HPV-related cancers can be prevented as long as you can prevent the HPV infection itself, either through never having genital contact with an infected person (and since about 79 million adult Americans are infected with the virus, that’s going to be difficult) or the HPV vaccine. The vaccine is a vitally important part of the war against HPV, it prevents the transmission of certain types (pdf) of human papillomavirus (HPV), specifically types 6, 11, 16 and 18. These subtypes of HPV are most often implicated in these cancers.
A recent article in The Journal of Infectious Diseases reported that the overall prevalence of HPV infection in young gay men in the USA was around 70%, while the prevalence of HPV 16 and 18, the two HPV subtypes that are associated with anal cancer (and many other male cancers including oropharyngeal and penile) was around 37%. These are startling results, since we have continued to focus on women with the HPV quadrivalent vaccine. With this research, we clearly see a link between HPV and anal cancer with regards to gay men.
The study followed 94 gay men in Seattle, between the ages of 16 and 30 years old, for one year. To check for HPV infection, the study participants were given three anal swabs: one at baseline, six months and 12 months. For men who had no infection at baseline, the incidence rate of any new HPV infection was 38.5 per 1000 person-month. Additionally, HPV infection rates increased dramatically from 6% with individuals who had one sexual partner to 31% to individuals who had >2 partners. These results were similar to general data that has been published with a general population of young men and women in the USA.
According to Aidsmap, the authors stated:
Our findings highlight the need to immunize YMSM [young men who have sex with men] prior to their sexual debut, something that will likely require universal male immunization. At the same time, the fact that most YMSM appeared to remain susceptible to at least some HPV types included in the vaccine, catch-up immunization programs do offer YMSM some benefit. Given the very high prevalence of HPV infection among YMSM, many (if not most) have been exposed to infection from one of their first few partners, a finding that highlights the desirability of immunizing YMSM before they become sexually active. (Note: the authors also advocate that sexually active gay males should also get the vaccine.)
In the U.S., Gardasil is recommended for all males between 11 and 21 years of age, and for gay men up to 26 years old. Given these study results and other research showing higher rates of anal cancer among gay men, the bottom line remains that immunization to HPV before sexual experience is best.
And because it’s always mentioned, the HPV quadrivalent vaccination is safe. In a large study, which included nearly 200,000 young females who had received over 350,000 doses of the vaccine, found that the vaccine was only associated with same-day syncope (fainting) and skin infections in the two weeks after vaccination. These findings support other large studies that also found the vaccine safe and an appropriate strategy to prevent cervical cancers. The authors stated that, “this study did not detect evidence of new safety concerns among females 9 to 26 years of age secondary to vaccination with HPV4.”
The HPV vaccine saves the lives of gay men by preventing the infection of human papilloma virus that cause devastating cancers like anal and penile. And in massive epidemiological studies, we have shown that the HPV vaccine is extremely safe. If you’re a young gay man (or of course any young man or woman), get the vaccine. You’ll thank me in 20 years when you don’t get cancer.
If you need to search for accurate information and evidence about vaccines try the Science-based Vaccine Search Engine.
Key citations:
RelatedFARGO -- Email and Internet service was restored for Midco customers in the Fargo area about 5:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 13, after an outage that lasted much of the day.
The problem began about 8:15 a.m. and shut down Midco Internet service in a number of the company’s service regions, including Fargo. The service interruption affected about 300,000 customers throughout South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota, according to a release from the company.
“We don’t know the root cause, but we have some preliminary causes,” Jon Pederson, Midco’s chief technology officer, said in the release. “We have some routing equipment that routes traffic throughout the network and upon close inspection it was found that to be at 100 percent utilization. We believe there was a traffic loop that caused that utilization to spike and that cutoff some of our network resources.”
At 5:30 p.m., the company said services should be back up, though customers may need to reboot their equipment. The email backlog will be catching up overnight and to have this move along more quickly, Mido encouraged customers to wait until Saturday morning to check email messages.
At about noon, the company posted on its Facebook page that it had isolated several issues and was fixing them, though the root cause of the trouble remained elusive. The majority of services were restored around 1 p.m., the company said, though some outages remained.
Erin Johanning, director of communications for Midco, said Friday morning that in addition to Internet services the company’s on-demand TV cable service was also affected in some areas.
She said that while Midco’s landline phone service was largely working, there had been reports of spot outages.
Customers still experiencing issues after a reboot should contact customer service.Cambodians have voted in elections expected to stretch further Prime Minister Hun Sen's 28-year rule amid alleged poll irregularities and the exclusion of the opposition chief.
The voting finished at 3pm (08:00 GMT) on Sunday, with early results expected later in the day.
The run-up to the vote has seen the prime minister appearing so confident of victory of his ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) that he did not even personally campaign for the parliamentary election.
As polling was still going on, the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) alleged widespread irregularities, describing the problems as the worst so far.
"The situation is more serious than at any previous election," the party spokesman, Yim Sovann, told the AFP news agency.
Cambodia's opposition leader Sam Rainsy virtually acknowledged on Saturday that his party would lose the general election, saying the polls were unfair but pledging that his “fight for real democracy” would go on.
The CNRP leader told reporters that any gains his party made against longtime Sen's CPP would be significant, “and would set the stage for a long fight for fair elections”.
'Worthless' victory
Rainsy recently returned from a self-imposed exile after receiving a surprise royal pardon for criminal convictions which he contends were politically motivated.
The ruling party is nervous. That's why they block me by all means. Sam Rainsy, opposition leader
But he is barred from running as a candidate since the authorities said it was too late to add his name to the electoral register.
His party said the result would be meaningless without Rainsy's participation.
“If the prime minister wants to keep his position he must be brave enough to confront me," Rainsy told reporters on the eve of the vote.
“It's very unfair and shows that the current prime minister is really a coward... The ruling party is nervous. That's why they block me by all means," Rainsy said, adding, “Any victory under such circumstances is worthless.”
His party said it had uncovered irregularities such as tens of thousands of duplicated voter names that would allow some people to cast ballots twice.
Process'manipulated'
Even the local poll monitor the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia alleged that up to 1.25 million people who are eligible to cast ballots are not on the voter lists.
Meanwhile, the Cambodia Daily reported that violence broke out on Sunday at a ballot station inside the grounds of a pagoda in Phnom Penh as voters complained they could not find their names on the National Election Committee’s voter list.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has said the vote will be anything but free and fair, highlighting alleged manipulation of voter rolls and campaigning by senior security forces officers for the ruling party.
“The process has been manipulated to ensure victory for the ruling party,” said HRW Asia director Brad Adams.
While the government denies the allegations, ruling party spokesman Khieu Kanharith told AFP that the party was confident of another landslide.
“We expect to keep an absolute majority,” he said.
Hun Sen is running on a record of having restored peace and stability after decades of war and unrest, and promoting economic growth.
The opposition decries corruption and injustice, especially reflected in widespread land-grabbing that see influential companies and business people develop property from which thousands of people have been evicted.
Although Hun Sen has garnered more power, the election campaign has not been marked by the kind of violence, including killings that plagued past polls.
About 9.6 million people were registered to vote - more than one third of whom are below the age of 30.SINGAPORE - A man whose home in Punggol was invaded by a cat in the wee hours of Wednesday (May 31) called the police for help.
According to Mr Harris Abu Bakar, who posted pictures of the encounter on Facebook, a black cat entered his home at 1am on Wednesday.
He said he tried to get it out for two hours but "it was too aggressive, growling menacingly and defensively scratching to keep me away".
Mr Harris, a 33-year-old who is self-employed, told The Straits Times on Saturday (June 3) that he first tried calling the Town Council, who directed him to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).
He said SPCA said they attended only to wildlife rescues, and so he went back to the Town Council, whom he says directed him to the police.
Mr Harris told ST that he had an accident a few days ago which dislocated his left shoulder, and he was also suffering from tendonitis in his right wrist. He was alone at home when he called the police and explained that he was injured and needed a helping hand.
"I think the police misunderstood, they thought I was injured and they notified SCDF," he said.
Photos he put up online show police officers gathered in his home, with gloves and masks on.
SCDF told The Straits Times on Saturday (June 3) that it received a call for help at 2.13am and dispatched an ambulance to Block 178, Edgefield Plains.
However, no one was taken to hospital.
Police told ST that they received a call for police assistance at 2.12am and went to the same location.
"No further police assistance was required," said the spokesman.
ST understands that police officers helped to capture the cat and get it out of the unit.
However, the animal escaped and its whereabouts are currently unknown.Globally, it’s now virtually certain that 2015 will be the hottest year in history. That’s a pretty remarkable thing to be able to say with more than four months of the year remaining. Last week data from NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency confirmed that last month was the hottest July on record, joining every month so far this year except February and April as the warmest ever measured, according to calculations from Japan. As of mid-August, the Pacific Ocean had configured itself into an unprecedented temperature pattern, with record-setting warm water stretching from the equator all the way northward to Alaska. Thanks to the pattern’s expected persistence, we can already piece together a pretty good guess of the implications—months ahead of time.
Loving this El Nino GIF from NASA. 1997 on the left, 2015 on the right. pic.twitter.com/OiOKGxS9TC
To answer everyone’s question, yes, this winter will likely bring above-normal rainfall to California. To answer a related question, no, it won’t end the drought. After a record-breaking four-year stretch, California has racked up a mind-boggling rainfall deficit : San Francisco is more than 31 inches behind—meaning this winter would have to feature a year and a half of extra rainfall during the six-month rainy season to break even. That very likely won’t happen, and even if it did, flooding and mudslides would create an even bigger problem than another year of drought would.
What’s more, there’s an especially big caveat this winter. Current temperatures off the West Coast are already far warmer than anything ever measured. The placement of that huge mass of warm water—cutely called “the blob” by local scientists—tends to work against heavy rainfall in California, and it’s a big reason why the drought has been so bad there the last couple of years. This’ll be an epic battle between dueling masses of warm water (El Niño vs. “the blob”) all winter long on the high seas of the North Pacific (and in the atmosphere above it), but as of now, it looks like California will indeed get some desperately needed rain—enough to matter, just not enough to end the drought.
Update: Since Oct 2011, California missing 1-2+ years of rain. #cadrought pic.twitter.com/aX9ht0mv0o — NWS Phoenix (@NWSPhoenix) August 13, 2015
Will the Pacific Northwest get some drought relief?
One place that probably won’t benefit from this winter’s El Niño is the Northwest. It’ll be another low-snowpack year, putting additional pressure on salmon, hydroelectricity, and ski resorts in the Cascades. Local officials are treating the current “wet drought”—in which rain and high temperatures have replaced snow for many parts of the Northwest—as a possible preview of global warming. Officials in Washington state, for example, are modifying river flows as a last-ditch effort to provide cooler water for migrating salmon. As this year has proved, a dearth of snow has lasting implications for several months—including an increased risk for huge wildfires come summer. Expect more of the same next year.
Sorry, Pacific Northwest. What about ski conditions in Colorado?
In sharp contrast to the Northwest, this winter could bring a good snowpack to the southern Rockies, a boon to tourism and a continuation of relatively recent drought-free conditions in Colorado.
A heavy snowfall would also be a significant boost to the fragile Colorado River basin, which is inching toward first-ever mandatory water restrictions after decades of over-allocation have pushed Lake Mead to record low levels. Lots of snow this winter in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico could help delay Arizona’s inevitable droughtpocalypse by another year or two.
Back to droughts. How are things looking for South Florida?
The polar vortex last winter was brutal. Will it be bad again?
If the last two years are any indication, winters in the east are getting weirder. There are lots of theories for this, including the exceptionally warm Pacific Ocean and melting Arctic sea ice, as well as plain old natural variability. A broad signal for further rounds of extreme cold air outbreaks, especially for the Southeast, is present again this winter.
Should everyone in Boston move?
There’s good and bad news for Boston and other East Coasters. It almost certainly won’t be as cold as last year in the Northeast, but fierce Nor’easters could be commonplace, bringing a return of heavy snowstorms.
Back in 2012, in my New York City weather column in the Wall Street Journal, I did a quick analysis that showed El Niño winters brought an additional 10 inches of snowfall to the Big Apple, all else being equal. To get especially strong winter storms in the Northeast, the large-scale El Niño signal (which increases the amount of wintertime moisture available along the East Coast) needs to coincide with a weak and wavy jet stream. That’s a recipe for heavy snow, even if temperatures aren’t as brutally cold as the last two winters. Watch for big dips in the North Atlantic Oscillation (a rough approximation for jet stream strength) this winter for signs a big storm could be on the way.
Update: You forgot the entire middle part of the country! What’s going to happen in Texas and in the Midwest?
Sorry! After a very rainy summer, drought has reappeared in eastern Texas. But since El Niño tends to bring above normal rainfall to the South during the winter months, the current dry spell should quickly come to an end.
Further north, the coming winter should be warmer than average in the Upper Midwest. That’s got to be welcome news: The region has endured exceptionally cold stretches leading to record-setting ice cover on the Great Lakes in recent years, but snowfall should be below normal this time around, giving cities like Chicago and Minneapolis a well-deserved break.
It’s August. How the heck did you come up with this forecast?
To make the above predictions, I took a blend of the most recent North American Multi-Model Ensemble, my go-to source for seasonal forecast information, and a blend of the large-scale weather during four past El Niños that I think are particularly close fits with the current one. Those four El Niños are: 1957–58, 1986–87, 1987–88, and 1997–98. Each of those El Niños peaked at least at “moderate” strength (more than 1 degree Celsius above normal in a key section of the tropical Pacific) and at the same time, each of those four El Niños also featured a strongly positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation—more than 1 degree Celsius above normal across a specific region of the north Pacific off the west coast of North America.
Got any weather maps?Apple failed to notify customers that the iOS 8 update might require so much storage space that it could actually hinder users from installing any other applications. The company is now being sued for this mistake by two users – Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara, represented by
the Cuneo Gilbert & Laduca law firm.
The complaint was registered in a California court on Tuesday Dec. 30. William Anderson, the attorney representing the complainants made the following statement:
“We feel that there are a substantial number of Apple consumers that have been shortchanged, and we’ll be pursuing the claims vigorously.”
From the total amount of storage space available on a device, part of it is lost to formatting. This information is usually given out by companies through a disclaimer. The two users consider that Apple “didn’t do enough to make that clear to consumers” using this to later convince people to buy iCloud subscriptions to increase available storage.
The complainants believe this inappropriate business strategy consists of the defendant offering less storage capacity than advertised and then takes advantage of desperate moments such as the user trying to capture images or videos of their loved ones or at important times such as weddings or recitals. In such situations, the customer will surely agree to buy the iCloud subscription in order to obtain more storage space and continue capturing those important moments.
Installing the update on an iPhone 5s can take up to 18 percent of the storage space. If applied to an iPod touch, the software can occupy even 23 percent of the available storage space. The iOS 8 is problematic even if installed on 16 GB iPhones and iPads, making it a challenge for users to install other apps.
However, accusing Apple of trying to convince users into buying iCloud subscriptions in order to improve storage space is an opinion the court might not accept. The program is used to synchronize data between devices with the iCloud Drive providing online storage that is easy to organize. Despite this, neither iCloud nor the iDrive actually adds storage space to iPhones or other Apple devices.
The accusing side will most likely make use of the consumer protection laws in order to win the case and obtain compensation from the company for all those who installed the update or purchased a device with the iOS8 preinstalled.
Apple hasn’t made any statements regarding the recent event.
Image Source: Daily iPhone BlogThe Republicans plumb the depths
20 July 2016
As one follows the Republican National Convention, one cannot avoid the conclusion that some fundamental political boundary is being crossed.
There is little reason to idealize the political history of the United States. The conventions of the two capitalist parties—attended by several thousand delegates representing a cross section of corrupt politicos and operatives in the pay of Big Business—have usually been sordid affairs. Over the past half-century they have resulted in the nominations of people such as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. And yet this Republican Party convention in Cleveland, which has just officially chosen Donald Trump as its candidate for president, represents something new, ugly and sick.
Even as socialists, who have carefully followed, analyzed and explained the protracted crisis of American democracy, it is difficult to suppress a feeling of disgust, akin to nausea, as one watches the proceedings. One cannot help but ask oneself, “Has it really come to this?” The convention is a display of the grotesque |
in the FIA, Usman Anwar will lead the investigation team, added the interior minister.
Government's silence on Kamal's outburst
The interior minister, referring to the recent allegations levelled by Mustafa Kamal against the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), displayed displeasure over individuals questioning the government's silence on the issue.
“The government is under no obligation to issue its point of view on every political debate that rages in the country."
He added that majority of the allegations levelled by Kamal have been mentioned in the past too, and there is nothing new in what Kamal said.
“There was no documentary evidence provided by Mustafa Kamal to support his allegations, they were mere verbal claims," said Nisar.
Probing money laundering allegations against MQM
The interior minister while referring to the former donor and a close associate of top MQM leaders, Sarfaraz Merchant, stated that a committee has expressed its desire to interview and examine the documentary evidence he is claiming to possess.
"The UK government will be contacted in this regard and this process will start from tomorrow (Sunday)."
He added, "I assure everyone, including the MQM, that as long as I am holding this office, no injustice will be done to anyone."
"If anyone has some information about the money laundering case, then they should come forward and share it with the government and the committees formed to investigate the issue," stated Nisar.
The interior minister also expressed his disappointment at the slow pace of progress in the investigation by the British government, and added that he has conveyed his reservations to them.
Shedding more light on the topic, he said, "Scotland Yard has appreciated FIA's efforts in the investigation of the Imran Farooq murder case, but we cannot comment on the progress of this case since its being pursued in Britain."
FIA powers not being clipped
Moving onto a different topic, Nisar clarified to sections of the media present that the government is not clipping the power of state institutions such as the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), and categorically denied such reports.
“I, in fact, am of the view that we should increase the power and the authority vested into FIA, considering its recent performance.”
Security concerns in India
Pakistan is slated to kick off their World T20 campaign at Kolkata before they travel to Dharamsala for the high-profile encounter with arch-rivals India.
An Indian group has threatened to dig up the pitch of the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association Stadium in Dharamsala to protest Pakistan’s cricket team participation in the World Twenty20 fixture against India on March 19.Okay, here goes: I've been a fan of the Scott Pilgrim series for a while, and I've also been writing for a pretty long time. So it seemed like the logical next step to write a fanfiction set in the weird world of Pilgrim. Although I've written a great many stories, I've never tried my hand a fanfiction before, so there's a reasonable chance that this will blow up in my face. I felt that in order to continue the storyline, new characters were necessary, so I had to add several of my own creation. Please read, rate and review as you see appropriate - constructive criticism is definitely welcome!
I hope you enjoy it!
(I do not own Scott Pilgrim or any related characters. All rights to Bryan Lee O'Malley and Oni Press. The Vegan Bureau of Investigations has demanded that the names of certain vegans featured in this article of writing be changed for their own protection.)
Scott and Ramona walked hand in hand alongside the Seine as it snaked through the centre of Paris, their fingers tightly intertwined as they wandered the evening streets together. Ramona's hair was a mellow brown, swept back slightly by the brisk wind. They walked in silence, pausing occasionally for Ramona to brush her hair from her eyes. Ramona was the first to break the silence, speaking quietly as they crossed a bridge over the river.
'Scott…'
'Yeah?' Scott's head swivelled round as he spoke.
'I was thinking… how long has it been now?' she asked softly.
'Since Gideon-' Scott began.
'Yes.' she interrupted.
'Um… about a month, I think. I haven't really been keeping track of time, actually. There's been a lot to see.'
'Yeah…' She trailed off, before turning away from him and looking out over the river, her hand slipping gently from his grasp. 'I was wondering if maybe you'd… like to go back home.'
'Back to Toronto? Well, yeah, it's getting pretty late…' Scott murmured.
'No, that's not what I meant.'
'I, uh… what did you mean?' Scott mumbled obliviously.
'I meant to stay, Scott. I think I've changed my mind.' Ramona said quietly, not turning to face him.
'Wha… what!' Scott recoiled back, blinking. 'About what? You don't mean-'
Ramona turned around slowly, her solemn expression turning into a wry smile.
'You may recall, Scott Pilgrim, that I reserved the right to change my mind about a certain something back when we first went out.' she whispered into his ear. It took several seconds to click.
'Oh. Oh! Yes! That! Of course! Home…' Scott's face broke into a wide grin. Ramona reached for the Subspace bag that usually rested on her hip, only to find it missing. Scott noticed, taking her hand in his.
'Can I do it? I've been practicing…' Ramona nodded wordlessly. Scott had indeed been learning from her how to use Subspace, and he was a fast (if somewhat erratic) learner. She let him lead her away from the bridge's side and towards a flickering square in the centre of the pavement, which began to solidify into a door as Scott screwed up his face in concentration. A plain brown door with a simple star scratched into the wood materialised before them. Not bad, Ramona thought. Not as neat as mine, but still.
Scott reached out and grasped the door handle, twisting it and pushing gently, letting the door swing open. He turned to look at Ramona, but was surprised to see her yelp and turn away, covering her eyes. Looking through the doorway himself, his eyes were greeted with the sight of a shirtless Wallace glaring at him indignantly while trying to conceal a similarly disrobed Mobile with a blanket.
'Wallace! Um, hi!' Scott stuttered.
'GET OUT!' shouted Wallace. 'You don't live here anymore, Scott! Go! Leave!' Scott rapidly slammed the door, mumbling an unheard apology. The wooden door flickered out of existence.
'Yeah… I don't think you've quite got the hang of that yet, Pilgrim.' Scott turned to see Ramona smirking at him, standing next to a spotless white door marked with a small painted star. 'Shall we?'
The waves lapped gently up the beach, tickling the feet of the young man, lying flat on his back on the gleaming white sand. He lay with his limbs askew, one hand holding a small glass of wine which he swirled elegantly around, bringing it to his mouth from time to time to drink. He wore dark shorts and a plain white shirt, crumpled slightly by the sand. A pair of sunglasses covered his eyes.
He lay there for a long time, letting the crystal-clear water flow around his feet, watching the birds circling the sun overhead. Then he stretched out his free hand and cupped his palm, scooping up a handful of the hot sand and letting it trickle through his fingers. He repeated his action several times, but on the fifth handful he paused before throwing it up into the air above him, watching intently as it froze in midair, suspended as if time had ground to a halt. He looked up at the hundreds of tiny grains for a few moments, and then they fell back down around him, parting in midair so as not to land on him.
The young man stood abruptly, alarming a colourful bird which fluttered around its solitary palm tree. He turned slowly in a full circle, surveying his surroundings.
Then he disappeared, leaving no trace but an outline in the sand.
'Hollie! Where the hell are my drums?' shouted Kim Pine at the top of her voice. She stood in the (now suspiciously empty) living room of her shared apartment. Things had been pretty quiet since Joseph had moved in with Stephen Stills, but something was very wrong. Kim had gotten up as usual that morning, had eaten breakfast as usual, had gone work at No-Account Video (as usual), and had come home. But there were two differences. He was here, and her drums were gone.
'Oh. Hey there, Kim.' Jason smiled laconically from the couch, his arm around Hollie as they watched television together. Hollie ignored Kim entirely, eyes fixed on the screen as Jason stroked her hair lazily. 'Yeah, we moved your gear. You don't mind, right?'
'You moved my drums? You touched my bloody drums!' erupted Kim, reaching forward and angrily snapping her fingers in front of Hollie's face. Hollie glanced up in annoyance.
'Do you mind? I'm watching this.' muttered Hollie, scowling at Kim.
'Where the fuck are my drums, you bitch!' Kim yelled. Jason winced slightly at her outburst, but Hollie remained utterly unfazed.
'I put them in the garage.' she said simply, turning back to the television.
'Hollie, we don't even have a bloody garage!' fumed Kim.
'Oh. Right. I meant that they're in your car.'
'I don't even have a car, you stupid-' Jason held up a hand, cutting smoothly across Kim's ranting.
'Actually, Kim, you do. Here.' He flicked a set of car keys from his other hand at her and she caught them deftly, pausing to think.
'Wait a minute… these are your keys.' she said, her voice returning to its usual deadpan tone. Jason shook his head, continuing to caress Hollie's hair.
'They're yours now. Think of it as a… gesture of goodwill.'
'For what? You cheating on me with my roommate and then dating her right in front of me?' asked Kim. Jason just smiled widely in response.
'Actually, Kim, there was something we wanted to tell you.' said Hollie, her eyes not shifting from the screen. 'You have to move out. Like, tonight.' Jason finished, avoiding Kim's furious gaze.
'What? I have to move out? Are the pair of you going to throw me out?' she growled.
'No. You just don't live here anymore. Jason lives with me now. He co-signed the lease and everything.' said Hollie, reclining further into Jason's lap. Jason glanced at Kim and shrugged.
'Yeah, she's right. And you signed the papers, too. You're not a resident anymore.'
'You what?' Kim exploded. 'I didn't sign anything!'
'Yeah, you did. Remember Wednesday night?' asked Hollie. Kim cast her mind back. Wednesday evening had been a confused maelstrom of depression and tequila.
'You pair of-'
Ramona lay snuggled up next to Scott in her bed, the bedclothes (and most of their clothes) strewn across the room. They were both panting slightly.
'Wow. Rammy, just… wow.'
Scott Pilgrim
Age: 24
Rating: Awesome (at sex)
Ramona looked up, smiling, her hands wrapped around Scott's chest.
'Thanks, Scott. You weren't bad yourself.' she said, gently nuzzling his chest.
Ramona V. Flowers
Age: 25
Rating: Also awesome
Scott hugged her tightly, tenderly kissing her forehead. She inclined her head back and they lay there together, tongues and limbs intertwined. They stayed like this for several minutes before their passionate kissing was cut short by a piercing ringing sound. Scott raised his head, trance-like.
'Ugh… doorbell…' Scott rolled out of bed, releasing Ramona, and got slowly to his feet. 'I'll get it.'
Kim was tapping her foot impatiently when Scott opened the door, clothed in one of Ramona's brightly coloured dressing gowns.
'Uh… hi, Kim.' he mumbled, staring at the ground. Kim did not look pleased. Not that she usually did, but she today she looked particularly displeased, and Scott hadn't spoken to her in weeks.
Kim Pine
Age: 24
Status: Homeless
'Scott. Is Ramona here? I wanted to ask you something.' Kim said. Scott looked up, alarmed.
'Um… no! No, she isn't here. She, uh, went out. Yeah, that's it. She's away. Not here.' he chattered nervously. Kim looked at him directly, taking in the image before her. Realisation dawned.
'Oh. Right. I'll just go.' she turned to leave, but someone called out her name.
'Kim! What did want to ask us?' Ramona appeared at Scott's shoulder, fully clothed. Her hair was already covered in strips of dye. Scott stared at her, confused.
'Rammy, how did you do that…?' Ramona raised a hand to silence him, looking at Kim.
'Well? Kim?'
'I… wanted to ask if perhaps I could stay with you guys for a little while. Hollie… kicked me out. She's living with Jason now.' Kim said morosely.
'Was Jason the guy with the car?' Scott interjected.
'Yes.'
'But isn't that his car there? With all your… um… clothes… in the back window?'
'Yes.'
'How…?'
'He gave me the keys. Said 'no hard feelings' or some bullshit like that.' scowled Kim.
'Isn't there anywhere else you could stay?' asked Scott, glancing longingly at Ramona.
'Well, I went to Stills' place but he's got no room with Joseph and Neil there, there's no way in hell I'm staying with Julie, and Wallace is generally being weird with his psychic boyfriend or whatever. I thought here might be the only place with room and no loud sex. But…'
'Psychic boyfriend…' mumbled Scott.
'Kim, of course you can stay here. You're one of my best friends.' Ramona cut across Scott. 'And I'll try and restrain my feelings for Scott in the meantime.'
'I think Scott restraining his feelings for you is going to be a bigger problem.' muttered Kim, glaring at Scott.
'He'll behave. Don't worry about it.'
'I'll hold you to that, Flowers.'
'So you two finally did it, huh?' asked Stephen Stills, arranging slices of aubergine on a plate in the kitchen of the Happy Avocado.
Stephen Stills
Age: 23
Rating: Talented
Scott was humming to himself merrily as he scrubbed away at a bowl.
'Yeah, we kinda did…' he smiled to himself. 'And it was amazing'
'Well, I guess it must've been a pretty long time since either of you…'
'Yes. It was. Let's talk about something else now.' said Scott. Stills laughed.
'Fine, fine. I bet she looked hot naked though, huh?'
'Dude! That's my girlfriend you're talking about!' shouted Scott from across the kitchen. Stills raised his hands defensively.
'Whoa, Scott, calm down. I was just joking.' Scott turned away and chuckled quietly.
'I know. And she totally did.' he said.
'So you two are really going to settle down here? I mean, the two of you were obviously have a good time travelling together.'
'Yeah, but… well, we still have to earn a living. We actually burned through the money we got from selling the Chaos Theatre pretty fast, so I figured I should get a job again. Ramona's working for in Toronto again too. The staff there were pretty mad when she walked back in. Most of their couriers got fired on the spot.' Scott said with a grin. Stills laughed.
'Yeah, I guess that she would be pretty good at her job. Y'know, with the Subspace travel and everything. But how did you even get your job back here? They fired the poor guy who took over in ten seconds flat when I mentioned that you were back in town. And I'm pretty sure that he was better at washing dishes than you.'
'Yeah… funny story, actually. I rang up the manager yesterday to ask if I could have my old job back, and he was like 'are you that one guy who took down G-Man Graves?', so I was like 'yeah, that was me' and then he was just like'sure, you've got the job'. Weird, huh?' Stills frowned.
'Right… I think maybe you might have inadvertently threatened your way back into work, Scott.'
'What! No, I'm sure they just knew that we were friends.'
'Yeah… I'm sure that was it.' muttered Stills sarcastically, lifting two plates laden with vegetables handing them to a waiter, who briskly left the kitchen. Scott stopped wiping the bowl and stared at is thoughtfully.
'Hey, Stephen Stills?' Stills glanced up at Scott, who was standing motionless, clutching the bowl.
'Still here, Scott. I'm not actually going anywhere.'
'Isn't there a show at the Rockit tomorrow night? I though Crash and the Boys were playing.'
'They changed their name, you know. They're called 'The Boys! And Crash!' now.'
'Right, whatever. Is there a show on?' said Scott impatiently.
'Yeah, it's like some collection of bands. I think the Boys are opening.'
'Great! I'm going! You're coming too.'
'What? I don't want to be the third wheel to you and Ramona.' grumbled Stills.
'You can bring Joseph. I was going to invite Wallace and Kim too. And Neil, if he wants to come.'
'Oh. Fine, I'll go. But you're buying us drinks.'
'Great! Ten tomorrow, at-
'The Rockit? Wasn't that the place where you fought Matthew?' asked Ramona, lying stretched out on the couch in her living room, her head covered by Scott's striped hat. Scott was sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing her. Kim had set up her drum kit alongside an impromptu bed in the corner of the room, and was seated on a stool, idly sharpening a drumstick to point with Scott's sword, the Power of Love.
'Yeah, that's the place. Come on, it'll be fun!' Scott begged. Kim shrugged.
'I'll go. I'm not doing anything here anywhere, and I'm not working tomorrow. I might kick that girl drummer's ass too.'
'Kim, I think she's, like, nine years old…' Scott protested weakly. Ramona straightened up, adjusting the hat.
'I'll go if you want, Scott. I'd like to catch up with everybody. Will Wallace be there?'
'Yeah, he said he'd come with Mobile.'
'Good. We need to apologise to them for what happened the other night.'
'Wait, what happened the other night?' Kim cut in. Scott turned on her, scowling.
'Something that we are not going to talk about tonight or ever!' he shouted, marching out of the room. Ramona smirked at Kim and began to explain.
Scott walked along the street with his friends, Ramona's arm wrapped comfortably around his waist. Her hair was a vivid red, and flowed down her back in waves. Kim was walking sullenly along next to Stills and Joseph, who were quietly chatting about music. Stephen stopped talking and led the group down an alleyway, walking them through a small side-door into the building.
They were met with a scene of devastation. The audience were strewn across the floor, some getting dizzily to their feet, others lying motionless. Joel, Crash and Trisha were seated at the bar, surveying the room with an air of satisfaction.
The Rockit
Fun Fact: This place sucks
'I told you it would be better to arrive twenty minutes late.' Stills muttered to Scott. 'Where are our seats?'
'What the hell… is she drinking vodka?' Kim growled, glaring at the band's drummer, who gave a little wave.
The others ignored her, proceeding up the steps to the upper level, overlooking the stage. Wallace was already there, seated at a table with Mobile lying over several chairs, head in Wallace's lap as Wallace stroked his hair.
'Hi, Wallace!' Ramona called, causing him to turn his head and gesture to the seats near him. Scott stared at the motionless body of Mobile.
'Is he okay?' he asked.
'He's fine, Scott. He probably just got blasted by the soundwaves.' said Stills. Wallace shook his head.
'Nah, he just had a work thing. He's attending it on the astral plane, but he left his body here to accompany me.' He smiled, tweaking Mobile's glasses slightly.
Wallace Wells
Age: 26
Rating: Gayer than Stephen Stills, and damn proud of it
'Okay… well, that's… weird as hell, frankly.' said Ramona, sitting down at the opposite end of the row. Scott fell into a chair next to her, motioning to the others to sit down.
Beneath them, the audience was beginning to get to its collective feet. An announcer walked onto the stage, looking mildly shaken. Scott could hear Trisha sniggering from below.
'So that was, um, the Boys and Crash…' he began, but was interrupted by Joel shouting from the bar.
'We're called The Boys! And Crash!, idiot!'
'Uh, yes. So, the next band is an electro-rock group from Germany, and they're called…' he trailed off, squinting at the tiny sheet of paper in his hand. 'I… I don't know how to pronounce that.' Four short-haired men in matching suits marched onto the stage, each carrying a sizable keyboard. They clicked hinges and span dials, setting up stands and tweaking their instruments. Ramona frowned, a thoughtful expression on her face.
'They look kind of familiar…'
'Well, duh. They're seriously popular over in Europe, apparently.' said Kim, crossing her arms.
'No, that's not it…' Ramona shrugged.
'Why, do you know them or something?' asked Scott, staring down at the four keyboardists.
'I… I'm not sure. I can't remember...'
A single discordant note rang out, reverberating around the room. A cascade of digital bleeps followed, drowning out Ramona's words. The keyboardists had begun to play. One of them raised a hand to the side of his, head tapping a microphone mounted from his ear.
'Ya tvoi sluga, ya tvoi rabotnik…' he chanted, his voice amplified and distorted.
'Is that Russian?' Stephen wondered aloud. Ramona's eyes widened in shock.
'Scott! I remember who they are! They-'
Then they began to play.
The melody flowed forth from their amps in crashingly load waves, paralysing the audience. Ramona froze mid-sentence, unable to move. Scott saw fear in her eyes as they struggled to break free of the invisible iron grip that grasped them. Kim's face was frozen in an expression of boredom, but her eyes conveyed little emotion beyond furious rage. They men continued to strike at the keys, their eerie rhythm erupting from the speakers in stunning bursts. Scott felt the sheer power of their sound pressing down on him from all angles, crushing him, constricting around his throat. Two of the four struck a deafening chord, and the blast of noise flashed through the crowd beneath them as a shockwave of blinding white light. Scott shut his eyes tightly, trying to shield his eyes but unable to move his hands. When he looked again, the lower level of the Rockit had been reduced to ash and dust, swirling beneath him. He felt the musicians' grip tighten, and his feet left the floor as he was lifted, powerless, into the air. He saw Ramona and the others begin to levitate, too, before his head was snapped around to face the four men. They stared up at him; their faces void emotion, playing on as the upper floor disintegrated behind Scott. He struggled and wrestled with the force that contained him, but to no avail. Eyes darting around, he saw his friends drifting in the air next to him, trying hopelessly to fight the choking sound. He saw Ramona, face contorted with terror, revolving slowly in the air right next to him, and he tried to reach out a hand to her, but couldn't move even a finger.
A door appeared.
One moment there was nothing, then the next, a huge mahogany door materialised beneath them. The keyboardists blinked in surprise, not ceasing to play, and turned their gaze from Scott to the door, which stood there, lifeless and inert. Scott felt the grip around his neck loosen slightly, but not enough for him to move.
The door opened a crack, and a sound emanated from within, a pumping bass line, audible even over the electronic notes echoed around the room. Then the drums began to play, pulsing from behind the door with a solid, rhythmic beat, visibly disturbing the keyboardists, who began to play with even greater intensity.
An almighty guitar chord blasted the door open, sending a shockwave of light and sound flying towards the stage, causing the men to recoil before continuing their music with renewed vigour. Scott felt the force holding them loosen its grip even further, leaving them suspended in the air as though gravity had ceased to function. He reach out and seized Ramona's hand, pulling her into a tight midair embrace as they watched the men below.
'Ramona… what's happening?' Scott shouted over the din.
'I don't know! The band… they know me, they're here to get us! I think…' Scott saw her mouthing to him, but her voice was utterly drowned out by a second, deafeningly loud chord, leading into an equally deafening melody which tore through the stage with its destructive rhythm. Ramona clutched Scott tightly as something – someone – emerged from the doorway. A tall, angular young man walked smartly into the room, carrying an electric guitar, with a massive amp simply floating through the doorway behind him, blasting out the melody he expertly played. A bass guitar and a drum kit followed, drifting into the room while seemingly playing themselves. The strings on the bass plucked as if being picked, and a pair of drumsticks hovered over the drums, beating out a rock-hard beat that caused the drums to blur slightly as the soundwaves distorted the air around them.
The four electronic musicians were playing frantically now, struggling to keep up with the astonishing beats of the floating instruments. The young man suddenly released his grasp of the guitar in his hands, and let it drift away from him into the air, the melody not missing a beat as it began to play itself.
How is he doing that? Scott thought to himself, holding onto Ramona. Is he psychic? Ramona wore an expression of complete shock at his appearance.
He stood there, instruments hovering in midair around him, shielding him perfectly from the blasts of sound tearing up the floorboards around him as the keyboardists furiously pounded their own instruments. His face bore a calm, almost bored expression, his eyes hidden behind a pair of shades. He was handsome in a not-obvious manner, with longish red hair and a thin, slightly taut face, wearing a plain black T-shirt with long sleeves and dark jeans. He stood confidently but elegantly, his mere posture giving him an aura of total control, as though the pulsing waves of energy that surrounded him were not quite enough. He raised one hand and angled it slowly, smiling as the sound of his own instruments amplified to an ear-crushing volume, entirely drowning out the noise of the four men on stage. Then with a sweep of his arm, the stage erupted into dust, torn to shreds by a sheer, invisible force. The keyboardists exploded simultaneously, raining change down across the room as they burst into coins.
The young man let his hands drop to his sides, and the instruments disappeared in an instant, taking the door to Subspace with them. He turned to look at the seven behind him, still floating in midair. Wallace was slowly rotating head over heels, trying to wake Mobile, while Stephen clung onto Joseph as they revolved in midair. Kim scowled down at him, slowly drifting up towards the ceiling. Scott and Ramona were still holding each other, staring down in general confusion.
He clicked his fingers, and they fell-
Well, that was chapter one. This isn't going to be a one- or two-shot: I plan to keep it going until I can reach a good ending. Please review!
Chapter 2 is now up! Read away!Last week, I wrote about how Fox became seen as the best character in Super Smash Bros. Melee. However, throughout the game’s history, he’s been complemented by his fellow top tier and Star Fox counterpart: Falco.
DISCLAIMER: Falco has obviously developed in more ways than I could describe! Per usual, please take what I’ve read as a general overview for his character, with embellishments. Outside of what’s been verified, any opinion I have about Falco certainly isn’t the final word!
Lasers and Forward Smash (late 2001 to early 2004)
Notable players: Justin Junio, Sultan of Samitude, DA Dave, Azen
If the original Super Smash Bros. and Nintendo 64 edition of Star Fox contributed to Fox’s popularity in Melee, it also helped Falco.For 64 players who liked the hitstun and range that Fox’s laser provided him, Falco’s lasers were a good recreation. Take a look at what MMassey’s Falco guide (from late January 2002) says about Falco’s blaster.
They make a pretty big deal about his Blaster (neutral B), which is actually one of the best edge-guarding tools in the game since you can just eat most characters' second jump. They can't deflect it in midair (unless they have such a move), and that means they'll need a good third jump to make it back. Sometimes the CPU will try to use the midair dodge. When you dodge in the air, that counts as your third jump. Instant win for you if they can't make it. This works best in one-on-ones, obviously.
The concept of short hop lasering (frequently attributed to Deadly Alliance’s Dave) wasn’t widely used yet, but from Melee’s inception, it was clear that Falco’s lasers gave him a tool to control space better than other characters. In the next paragraph of the guide, you’ll notice another of Falco’s immediately recognizable traits.
Falco was also blessed with the game's absolute fastest Meteor Strike; his aerial down+A, that drill kick. No matter what part of it you hit with, they'll go down if they're at 70% or so with empty air beneath them. Here's where balancing comes into play - Falco falls fast. There's a great chance you'll go down with your foe if you jumped after them to land the spike, but they'll be going down first. To Falco, that's pretty much all that matters.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a first time casual Falco player or Westballz – Falco’s downair is one of his biggest strengths. Even if it wasn’t quite developed as a combo starter or shield pressure tool, his downair was still seen as a really good attack. When you combine this with the strength of his projectile and shine, it’s clear that even in the early ages of Melee, Falco was viewed quite favorably.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I wasn’t able to find something I could definitely say was the first ever video of a Falco in tournament, but based on the level of gameplay seen in the above video, I’d guess that this was taken at some point in mid-2003 at a Midwest tourney.
Although tech skill among players hadn’t quite developed, Falco still saw success early on across different regions. Consider his representation within NorCal (Justin Junio and the Sultan of Samitude), the South (Rob$) and the East Coast (DA Dave and Azen).
As Falco did well for part of Melee’s early ages, his weaknesses were also highlighted. Along with having an easily gimpable vertical recovery, Falco being a lightweight and fast faller made him an exploitable character. Moreover, while Falco had strong grounded moves and aerials, he also wasn’t particularly fast on the ground, relative to someone like Fox.
Even if Falco still had good placings across the board, it was hard to tell whether someone who solo mained him could ever become the best player in the world. Most of his players played him defensively. Suddenly, that changed.
The Pillaring Era (mid 2004 to mid 2007)
Notable players: Bombsoldier, Forward, PC Chris, Dope, Rob$, Zhu, Helios
Forward is often credited with being the “godfather” of Falco – and for good reason. Along with being the first player to consistently shine waveland to follow up on platforms, Forward also was the best player in Arizona.
Unlike other Falcos, who frequently went for things like forward smash or back air after landing a shine, Forward also linked aerials to one another and was just more consistent in actually following up on a positional advantage. Keep in mind that back then, Falco was much more of a defensive character, due to being in a meta where taking risks was frequently discouraged.
Around August 2005 came the breakout of a little-known, but technically proficient Falco named Bombsoldier. If you’re an old-school player or somewhat familiar with Melee’s history, you’ll know of his legendary second-place performance at the Jack Garden Tournament. Though there’s a popular misconception that Bombsoldier was a nobody – he was still one of East Japan’s best – his placing was still impressive, especially since the JGT featured the best of East Japan, West Japan and the United States.
Although he eventually lost in grand finals to Ken, Bombsoldier’s Falco pushed the character in ways that people didn’t think was possible. It’s discussed more in-depth here, but the difference between Bombsoldier and every other Falco was remarkable. For example, most American Falco players preferred to run away, shoot lasers, run away and use single hits to conservatively follow up a shine.
Bombsoldier was different. In addition to mixing up consistent SHFFL aerials on shield with grabbing, Bombsoldier converted off hits harder than any other Falco. Even though he never replicated his JGT success, without Bombsoldier, Falco isn’t the combo-heavy character we think of today. You could argue that his innovation goes beyond Falco – it effectively showed that Melee was deeper than anyone expected.
In the same way that Zelgadis inspired countless Fox players to step up their tech skill game and push their character, Bombsoldier looked like he came from the future. Falco was still considered one of Melee’s best characters, but before Bombsoldier, it was hard to envision a Falco ever coming close to beating someone like Ken, let alone playing so quickly.
Before the world knew it, PC Chris, a then-rising Falco and Fox player from New York, defeated Ken twice at MLG New York Opener 2006. Here, he showed a mix of Bombsoldier’s punish game, Forward’s ability to keep pressure on his opponents and PC’s own style. By the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Falco was a far more aggressive character than he was in the past. You can check out one of the oldest written Falco guides on Smashboards here. Highlights include a lot of “teh.”
In early 2007, Zhu released a combo video that’s still today one of the most watched combo videos ever.
He wasn’t quite a top player yet, but Zhu had ideas for the character that set the basis for what the next era of Falco players would look like. These included, but weren’t limited to using tools like jab effectively to follow up hits, how Zhu held center stage against his opponents and his creative edgeguards.
The Long Reign (early 2008 to mid 2013)
Notable Players: Mango, Dr. PeePee, Zhu, DaShizWiz, Lambchops, Eggm
Melee was coming close to its end – and with it left a lot of the game’s premier players. But what if Bombsoldier didn’t maximize Falco? What if there were even more ways you could push his character? Was there even more to Melee that the pre-Brawl players hadn’t figured out?
You can look at Lambchops as one of the forefathers in one particular area: his unrelenting use of lasers. When combined with his tendency to prioritize winning neutral-interactions and strong hits over going for guaranteed punishes, it’s easy to see how Lambchops, as seemingly crazy as his playstyle looks, was influential to other Southern Falco players. His lasers were especially difficult to deal with because no one back then could consistently powershield.
Under his tutelage came the rise of another Falco player: DaShizWiz, who was one of Florida’s best players and had solid placings, but hadn’t broken out yet. That changed at FAST 1. Watch the game below, in which he three-stocks Mew2King: a man who many still thought was the best player in the world at the time. If you’re interested, you can also watch the full set, which is still considered one of the most exciting Melee sets of all-time.
DSW took Falco’s aggression, but somehow dialed it up to yet another level, calling out his opponents with strong hits, using Lambchops-esque lasers, extending his combos in creative ways. This doesn’t mean that some of the traits never applied to other players, but like Bombsoldier and Forward, DSW set the groundwork for the kind of Falco that people looked up to for inspiration.
As if lasers, tech skill, speed and extending combos weren’t enough, soon Falco began to grow in yet another way: aerial drift. Guess who also mastered manipulating Falco’s attack timings on shield, revolutionizing how the character could be |
done.
In April, 23 members in the 105-seat House of Representatives signed a resolution to impeach Bentley for willful neglect of duty and corruption in office.
The impeachment resolution does not say what actions are the basis for the charges, other than to mention that two complaints have been filed with the Ethics Commission seeking an investigation into whether Bentley misused state property.
Bentley has said he has done nothing to deserve impeachment and that he plans to finish his term in January 2019.
In March, former Alabama Law Enforcement Secretary Spencer Collier accused Bentley of having an affair with former political adviser Rebekah Mason. Collier made allegations at a press conference the day after Bentley fired him.
Bentley admitted making inappropriate comments to Mason after they were revealed on secretly recorded audio tapes, but he and Mason denied having an affair.
Collier has sued Bentley for wrongful termination and defamation.
Collier said Bentley fired him for refusing Bentley's order not to cooperate with the attorney general's office about an investigation concerning the Mike Hubbard case.
Bentley has denied that. Bentley said he fired Collier over possible mishandling of state funds.
Collier has said he has done nothing wrong and would welcome an investigation.
Rep. Ed Henry, R-Hartselle, began pushing the resolution to impeach Bentley shortly after the audio tapes became public and Collier's allegations.
The three-page impeachment resolution makes no specific allegations.
The motion to suspend the proceedings says that impeachment proceedings are criminal in nature and that the governor is entitled to all the constitutional and statutory protections as a criminal defendant, including due process. And that requires that the charges be specific, Bentley's lawyers wrote.
"A sitting governor cannot be forced to speculate as to the scope or meaning of grounds for impeachment with which he is charged," they wrote.
The motion is signed by lawyers Ross Garber, who was hired to represent Bentley in the impeachment proceedings, Joe Espy, Bentley's personal lawyer, and David Byrne, the governor's chief legal advisor.
In a separate motion filed today, Bentley's lawyers asked for three members of the 15-member Judiciary Committee to recuse themselves.
Reps. Mike Ball, R-Madison; Allen Farley, R-McCalla and Mike Holmes, R-Wetumpka, all signed the resolution to impeach Bentley.
As accusers of Bentley, they should not be allowed to be adjudicators, as well, Bentley's lawyers wrote.
Statements and appearances in the press by Ball and Farley also indicate a high risk of bias against Bentley, they wrote.
Ball, Farley and Holmes have said they do not intend to recuse themselves.
This story was updated at 6:38 p.m. to add more details about allegations between Gov. Bentley and Spencer Collier.NEW YORK — Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has poured money into efforts to boost the digital currency bitcoin, funded startups that aid insurance enrollment under Obamacare and invested in big-data technology that powers new surveillance tools at agencies like the CIA.
Now many of the companies he’s supported over the years stand to benefit, at least indirectly, as Thiel works to shape Donald Trump’s emerging Cabinet as a member of the president-elect’s transition executive committee.
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Since he arrived here at Trump Tower last month, Thiel has worked behind the scenes alongside his close, longtime aides to identify potential candidates for key tech-facing jobs in Trump’s new government. That’s a boon to Silicon Valley, where many tech giants hope to spare themselves from new regulation in Washington. But it’s an even bigger coup for Thiel, 49, whose vast corporate web touches companies like PayPal and Palantir, both of which he co-founded, and Facebook, where he sits on the board of directors.
As a result, experts say Thiel's unique role raises serious ethical red flags, a conundrum not unlike the conflicts of interest that the president-elect himself faces.
Thiel should "disqualify himself from any transition matter, [and] one would assume that would include appointments... which may directly conflict with his financial interests,” said Norm Eisen, former ethics czar for the Obama White House. “For me, it raises some very substantial concerns.”
Thiel officially joined the transition team Nov. 11 as a member of Trump's executive committee. Five days later, the president-elect unveiled an ethics agreement that required anyone joining the transition or administration to refrain from lobbying for five years after serving. That restriction ultimately led to an exodus — some by force, others by choice — of current and prospective lobbyists from the transition’s early ranks throughout November.
But the contract also requires participants to “disqualify myself from involvement in any particular transition matter which to my knowledge may directly conflict with a financial interest of mine, my spouse, minor child, partner, client or other individual or organization with which I have a business or close personal relationship.” Thiel, despite his many investments, has not revealed if he or one of his top aides on the transition, Blake Masters, has signed the agreement, which only has invited further criticism.
“I think this is going to be an administration ridden by conflicts of interest, starting with the president’s own,” Eisen said. “I think it’s fair to ask whether Mr. Thiel has signed the code, whether he’s following the code and how.”
Thiel's spokesman, Jeremiah Hall, did not respond to multiple questions about whether Thiel and his aides have signed the ethics agreement. In a statement, Hall merely said: "Peter's team wants talented people to work in government. Everyone on the team abides by the rules in pursuing that goal."
Thiel visited Trump Tower again Monday afternoon, after joining the president-elect at a VIP-studded costume party last weekend in Long Island, dressed as Hulk Hogan, whose lawsuit against Gawker Thiel had helped fund. Asked about his role in the transition Monday, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said Thiel had “a number of meetings,” before adding: “He’s got a brilliant mind. He’s been a very valuable supporter of our efforts.”
Thiel plans to join Trump's senior aides — including Reince Priebus, the incoming president’s chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, Trump's adviser and son in law — in a meeting next week with tech company leaders at Trump Tower, a source familiar with the effort told POLITICO on Tuesday.
Palantir — which makes up about half of Thiel's $2.9 billion net worth, as calculated by Bloomberg — may pose the most significant ethical headache for Thiel and the transition. The big-data giant was valued at more than $20 billion as of October and its customers include the Pentagon, CIA and other national security agencies. The privately held company has aggressively bid for new business in Washington, even suing the Army in a case over a $200 million contract that it won in October.
Thiel is Palantir's chairman, and his primary investment firm, Founders Fund, is one of the earliest, most prominent backers of the company, whose name is derived from J.R.R. Tolkien's literature. Thiel remains close to Palantir's co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent Republican fundraiser for the likes of House Speaker Paul Ryan and others, and the venture capitalist has consulted Lonsdale as part of his work on the transition, multiple sources told POLITICO.
Adding to the overlap, Trump’s transition aides last week tapped Trae Stephens, another partner at Founders Fund who is focused on government startups, to join the team that’s plotting out the future of the Defense Department under the Trump administration. It's also unclear if Stephens, who previously worked at Palantir, has signed the ethics agreement prohibiting him from focusing on areas related to his investments.
A spokesman for Palantir — and aides for the other Thiel investments referenced in this story — did not respond to requests for comment. Founders Fund has 129 active investments, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and recently invested in an immunotherapy company and a logistics firm that coordinates local deliveries on demand.
Former Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt, a Republican who led Mitt Romney's potential transition in 2012, said Thiel shouldn’t automatically face criticism for bringing his expertise to the task at hand.
“During the transition process, many people make recommendations based on their interests and/or experiences,” Leavitt said in an email to POLITICO, adding he didn’t have the full details of Thiel’s role. “Up until the inauguration, such situations do not constitute a conflict any more than a person campaigning for a particular candidate because it would be good for their purposes. After the inauguration, the rules change.”
For Thiel, his position on the transition team is the culmination of yet another high-stakes investment bet. A longtime libertarian who backed the likes of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz in the Senate and Carly Fiorina in 2016 for president, Thiel switched his allegiances last summer to Trump. By July, Thiel had endorsed Trump on stage at the Republican convention, and he later donated more than $1 million toward efforts to help elect him.
Thiel long has maintained he does not want a role for himself in government. Asked at an event in Washington in October if he might ever enter politics, he said he would “occasionally get involved, but don’t want to make it a full-time thing.”
Even in a part-time capacity now aiding Trump and his transition, however, Thiel has an unparalleled opportunity to advance his most ambitious technology gambits.
Take Thiel’s primary investment arm, Founders Fund: It has led or participated in investment rounds in SpaceX, led by a fellow PayPal founder, Elon Musk. In an industry valued globally at more than $330 billion, SpaceX competes aggressively for key NASA contracts against longtime aviation giants, and it’s lobbied for years for new opportunities for commercial space providers to perform missions that long have been funded and completed by government. Demand for public-private partnerships in the space sector is likely to increase in the next administration, and that would benefit SpaceX, said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, whose member companies include SpaceX.
So too has Thiel’s fund been a player in financial tech firms, like the mobile-payments company Stripe and the student-lending giant SoFi. Both companies this year hired their first Washington lobbyists, according to government ethics records, as agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Treasury Department under the Obama administration have eyed new regulation of the nascent "fintech" industry.
And Founders Fund is an original backer of sharing-economy giants, like Airbnb and Lyft, which for years — and in multiple states, and even continents — have been fighting for the permission to operate, while warding off housing, labor and safety regulations that might raise their costs of business.
In these and other instances, experts say there is unavoidable overlap between Thiel’s work on the transition and his vast investments in companies at the forefront of some of the most disruptive elements of the changing U.S. economy.
“Given how unusual it is to have someone from this sector at this level of participation right now, it will give him enormous influence …. both to shape the policy but personally to emerge as a political figure in a way he hasn’t been,” said Julian Zelizer, a political analyst and political science professor at Princeton University.
Another Thiel-backed venture-capital firm, Mithril Capital Management, has a stake in Helion Energy, a startup that is trying to create a cold-fusion reactor. Helion has also gotten grants from the Energy and Defense departments.
Others point to Thiel’s investments in Oscar Health, a portal for insurance enrollment formed in the wake of the Affordable Care Act. If Trump and fellow Republicans succeed in gutting or replacing Obamacare, it could spell trouble for the firm’s founder, Josh Kushner, the brother of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner is also the architect of Trump’s insurgent campaign and a tech investor in New York in his own right.
And like many in Silicon Valley, some of Thiel’s other investments originate with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s high-tech research arm that played a central role in the creation of the internet itself.
For example, Thiel has backed Qadium, a startup created by former DARPA engineers that aims to safeguard government computers against cyberattacks. The firm, which launched in 2014, has drawn more than $6.5 million in grants and other aid from the Defense Department, federal records show, one of the agencies Thiel and his team now are assisting on the transition.
“The idea that he’s not going to make any policies that affect his financial interests [is] unbelievable,” said Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy who served as a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department during the Clinton administration. With Thiel, she explained, the benefit of his involvement — and his financial interests — also will “continue beyond the transition.”
“The potential for rewards for changing policies, to benefit Thiel, are enormous,” she said.The New Testament describes James, Joseph (Joses), Judas (Jude), and Simon as brothers of Jesus (Greek: ἀδελφοὶ, translit. adelphoi, lit. 'brothers').[1] Also mentioned, but not named, are sisters of Jesus. Some scholars[who?] argue that these brothers, especially James,[2] held positions of special honor in the early Christian church.
Catholic, Assyrian, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, as did the Protestant leaders Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Wesley and their respective movements; John Calvin believed that it was possible that Mary remained a virgin but believed the scriptural evidence was inconclusive.[3] Those who hold this belief reject the claim that Jesus had biological siblings and maintain that these brothers and sisters received this designation because of their close association with the nuclear family of Jesus, as either children of Joseph from a previous marriage, or as nephews of either Mary or Joseph.[4]
The literal translation of the words "brother" and "sister" is an objective problem because there are few quotations and because the words have various meanings in the family of Semitic languages.[5]
In the 3rd century, biological relatives with a connection to the nuclear family of Jesus, without explicit reference to brothers or sisters, were called the desposyni,[6] from the Greek δεσπόσυνοι, plural of δεσπόσυνος, meaning "of or belonging to the master or lord".[7] The term was used by Sextus Julius Africanus, a writer of the early 3rd century.
Jesus' brothers and sisters [ edit ]
The Gospel of Mark 6:3 and the Gospel of Matthew 13:55–56 state that James, Joses (or Joseph), Jude and Simon were the brothers of Jesus, the son of Mary. The same verses also mention unnamed sisters of Jesus. Mark 3:31–32 tells about Jesus' mother and brothers looking for Jesus. A verse in the Epistle to the Galatians 1:19 mentions seeing James, "the Lord's brother", and none other of the apostles except Peter, when Paul went to Jerusalem after his conversion. The "brothers of the Lord" are also mentioned, alongside (but separate from) Cephas and the apostles in 1 Corinthians 9:5, in which it is mentioned that they had wives. Some scholars claim that Jesus' relatives may have held positions of authority in the Jerusalem area until Trajan excluded Jews from the new city that he built on its ruins.[8]
That the brothers were children of both Mary and Joseph was held by some in the early centuries. The 3rd-century Antidicomarianites ("opponents of Mary") maintained that, when Joseph became Mary's husband, he was a widower with six children, and that he had normal marital relations with Mary, but they later held that Jesus was not born of these relations.[9] Bonosus was a bishop who in the late 4th century held that Mary had other children after Jesus, for which the other bishops of his province condemned him.[10] Jovinian, and various Arian teachers such as Photinus held a similar view. When Helvidius proposed it, again in the late 4th century, Jerome, representing the general opinion of the Church, maintained that Mary remained always a virgin; he held that those who were called the brothers and sisters of Jesus were actually children of Mary's sister, another Mary, whom he considered the wife of Clopas.[4][11] The terms "brothers" and "sisters" as used in this context are open to different interpretations,[12] and have been argued to refer to children of Joseph by a previous marriage (the view of Epiphanius of Salamis[13]), Mary's sister's children (the view of Jerome), or children of Clopas, who according to Hegesippus was Joseph's brother,[14] and of a woman who was not a sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus (a modern proposal).[4]
As church leaders [ edit ]
Robert W. Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, says that according to the Gospel of Mark Jesus' mother and brothers were at first skeptical of Jesus' ministry but later became part of the Christian movement. James, "the Lord's brother", presided over the Jerusalem church after the apostles dispersed and other kinsmen probably exercised some leadership among the Christians in the area until the emperor Hadrian built Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem and banished all Jews from there (c. 135), after which point the Jerusalem Christians were entirely of Gentile origin.[8] Traditionally it is believed the Jerusalem Christians waited out the Jewish–Roman wars (66–135) in Pella in the Decapolis. The Jerusalem Sanhedrin relocated to Jamnia sometime c. 70.
According to The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, when Peter the Apostle left Jerusalem, it was James who became leader of the church in Jerusalem and was held in high regard by the Jewish Christians.[16] Hegesippus reports that he was executed by the Sanhedrin in 62.[16]
Sextus Julius Africanus's reference to "desposyni" (blood relatives of Jesus related to his nuclear family) is preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History:[6][17]
For the relatives of our Lord according to the flesh, whether with the desire of boasting or simply wishing to state the fact, in either case truly, have handed down the following account... But as there had been kept in the archives up to that time the genealogies of the Hebrews as well as of those who traced their lineage back to proselytes, such as Achior the Ammonite and Ruth the Moabitess, and to those who were mingled with the Israelites and came out of Egypt with them, Herod [the Great], inasmuch as the lineage of the Israelites contributed nothing to his advantage, and since he was goaded with the consciousness of his own ignoble extraction, burned all the genealogical records, thinking that he might appear of noble origin if no one else were able, from the public registers, to trace back his lineage to the patriarchs or proselytes and to those mingled with them, who were called Georae. A few of the careful, however, having obtained private records of their own, either by remembering the names or by getting them in some other way from the registers, pride themselves on preserving the memory of their noble extraction. Among these are those already mentioned, called Desposyni, on account of their connection with the family of the Saviour. Coming from Nazara and Cochaba, villages of Judea, into other parts of the world, they drew the aforesaid genealogy from memory and from the book of daily records as faithfully as possible. Whether then the case stand thus or not no one could find a clearer explanation, according to my own opinion and that of every candid person. And let this suffice us, for, although we can urge no testimony in its support, we have nothing better or truer to offer. In any case the Gospel states the truth." And at the end of the same epistle he adds these words: "Matthan, who was descended from Solomon, begat Jacob. And when Matthan was dead, Melchi, who was descended from Nathan begat Eli by the same woman. Eli and Jacob were thus uterine brothers. Eli having died childless, Jacob raised up seed to him, begetting Joseph, his own son by nature, but by law the son of Eli. Thus Joseph was the son of both. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiae, 1:7:11, 1:7:13–14
Eusebius has also preserved an extract from a work by Hegesippus (c.110–c.180), who wrote five books (now lost except for some quotations by Eusebius) of Commentaries on the Acts of the Church. The extract refers to the period from the reign of Domitian (81–96) to that of Trajan (98–117), and includes the statement that two Desposyni brought before Domitian later became leaders of the churches:[18]
There still survived of the kindred of the Lord the grandsons of Judas, who according to the flesh was called his brother. These were informed against, as belonging to the family of David, and Evocatus brought them before Domitian Caesar: for that emperor dreaded the advent of Christ, as Herod had done. So he asked them whether they were of the family of David; and they confessed they were. Next he asked them what property they had, or how much money they possessed. They both replied that they had only 9000 denaria between them, each of them owning half that sum; but even this they said they did not possess in cash, but as the estimated value of some land, consisting of thirty-nine plethra only, out of which they had to pay the dues, and that they supported themselves by their own labour. And then they began to hold out their hands, exhibiting, as proof of their manual labour, the roughness of their skin, and the corns raised on their hands by constant work. Being then asked concerning Christ and His kingdom, what was its nature, and when and where it was to appear, they returned answer that it was not of this world, nor of the earth, but belonging to the sphere of heaven and angels, and would make its appearance at the end of time, when He shall come in glory, and judge living and dead, and render to every one according to the course of his life. Thereupon Domitian passed no condemnation upon them, but treated them with contempt, as too mean for notice, and let them go free. At the same time he issued a command, and put a stop to the persecution against the Church. When they were released they became leaders of the churches, as was natural in the case of those who were at once martyrs and of the kindred of the Lord. And, after the establishment of peace to the Church, their lives were prolonged to the reign of Trajan. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiae, 3:20
Degree of consanguinity between Jesus and his brothers [ edit ]
The New Testament names James the Just, Joses, Simon, and Jude as the brothers (Greek adelphoi) of Jesus (Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55, John 7:3, Acts 1:13, 1 Corinthians 9:5)[4]
Etymology [ edit ]
The etymology of the word "brother" (adelphos) originally comes from "of the same womb" (a-delphys),[19] although in New Testament usage, the Christian and Jewish meaning of "brothers" is wider, and is applied even to members of the same religious community.[20] In the Bible, the Greek words adelphos and adelphe were not restricted to their literal meaning of a full brother or sister nor were their plurals.[21]
There are several views from an early date over whether the Greek term adelphos, applied in these accounts to people described as adelphoi of Jesus, means that they were full brothers, half brothers, stepbrothers, or cousins. Helvidius, quoting Tertullian in support of his view, claims that the adelphoi were children of Mary and Joseph born after Jesus;[4][22] yet Jerome replied that Tertullian did "not belong to the Church", and he argues that the adelphoi were Jesus's cousins.[23] Some scholars[who?] consider Helvidius' view as the most natural inference from the New Testament.[4] In support to this it is occasionally noted that James (Jacob Iakobos) as oldest of the brothers takes the name of Joseph's father (also James, Iakobos in the Solomonic genealogy of Jesus in Matthew), when in Bible times the grandson occasionally gets the name of the grandfather.[24]
The term adelphos (brother in general) is distinct from anepsios (cousin, nephew, niece).[25][26] Second-century Christian writer Hegesippus distinguishes between those who were anepsioi of Jesus and his adelphoi.[27] However Jesus and his disciples' native language was Aramaic (as in Matthew 27:46; Mark 5:41),[28] which could not distinguish between a blood brother or sister and a cousin.[29] Aramaic, like Biblical Hebrew, does not contain a word for "cousin".[30]
Aramaic and Hebrew inclined to use circumlocutions to point out blood relationships, calling some people "brothers of Jesus" would not have always implied the same biological mother.[21] Scholars and theologians, who assert this view, point out that Jesus was called "the son of Mary" rather than "a son of Mary" in his hometown (Mark 6:3).[31]
Relationship of Jesus' brothers to Mary [ edit ]
By the 3rd century, the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary had become well established; important early Christian theologians such as Hippolytus (170–235), Eusebius (260/265–339/340) and Epiphanius (c. 310/320–403) defended it. The early church had not accepted that Mary had any children apart from Jesus.[4] Eusebius and Epiphanius held that these men were Joseph's sons from (an unrecorded) former marriage.[4][13] Epiphanius adds that Joseph became the father of James and his three brothers (Joses, Simeon, Judah) and two sisters (a Salome and a Mary or a Salome and an Anna)[32] with James being the elder sibling. James and his siblings were not children of Mary but were Joseph's children from a previous marriage. Joseph's first wife died; many years later, at the age of eighty, "he took Mary (mother of Jesus)". According to Epiphanius the Scriptures call them "brothers of the Lord" to confound their opponents.[33][34] Origen (184–254) also wrote that "according to the Gospel of Peter the brethren of Jesus were sons of Joseph by a former wife, whom he married before Mary".[35]
The apocryphal History of Joseph the Carpenter, written in the 5th century and framed as a biography of Joseph dictated by Jesus, describes how Joseph had with his first wife four sons and two daughters. His sons' names were Judas, Justus, James, and Simon, and the names of the two daughters were Assia and Lydia. Years after his first wife died, he took Mary.[36] Therefore, the brothers of Jesus would be the children of Joseph by his first wife.
The Protoevangelium of James explicitly claims that Joseph was a widower, with children, at the time that Mary is entrusted to his care.[37]
The Catholic Encyclopedia, citing the texts contained in the apocryphal writings, writes that:
When forty years of age, Joseph married a woman called Melcha or Escha by some, Salome by others; they lived forty-nine years together and had six children, two daughters and four sons, the youngest of whom was James (the Less, "the Lord's brother"). A year after his wife's death, as the priests announced through Judea that they wished to find in the tribe of Juda a respectable man to espouse Mary, then twelve to fourteen years of age. Joseph, who was at the time ninety years old, went up to Jerusalem among the candidates; a miracle manifested the choice God had made of Joseph, and two years later the Annunciation took place.[38]
Jerome (c. 347–420), another important early theologian, also held the perpetual virginity doctrine, but argued that these adelphoi were sons of Mary's sister, whom Jerome identified as Mary of Cleopas.[4][39] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church mentions that a modern scholar, whom it does not identify, has proposed that these men were the sons of Clopas (Joseph's brother according to Hegesippus) and of Mary, the wife of Cleopas (not necessarily referring to Jesus' mother's sister).[4]
According to the surviving fragments of the work Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord of the Apostolic Father Papias of Hierapolis, who lived circa 70–163 AD, "Mary the wife of Cleophas or Alphaeus" would be the mother of James the Just, Simon, Judas (identified as Jude the Apostle), and Joseph (Joses). Papias identifies this "Mary" as the sister of Mary, mother of Jesus, and thus as the maternal aunt of Jesus.[40] The Anglican theologian J.B. Lightfoot dismissed Papias' evidence as spurious.[41][42]
The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which was probably written in the seventh century, states that the brothers of Jesus were his cousins.[43]
Roman Catholic and Eastern Christianity maintained the doctrine of Early Christianity that Mary was a perpetual virgin;[35] early Protestant leaders, including founder of the Lutheran Churches, Martin Luther,[44] and Reformed theologian Huldrych Zwingli,[45] also held this view, as did John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism.[46] Eine Christliche Lehrtafel (A Christian Catechism), issued by Anabaptist leader Balthasar Hubmaier, teaches the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary too.[47] Roman Catholics, following Jerome, conclude that the adelphoi were Jesus' cousins, while Eastern Orthodox, following Eusebius and Epiphanius, argue that they were Joseph's children by his (unrecorded) first wife. But the Catholic Church only defined a doctrine that they are not biological children of Mary;[48] their exact status, either as cousins or stepbrothers (children of Joseph), is not defined as a doctrine. Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists concur with this view.[49][50]
Other Christian denominations, such as Baptists,[51] view the adelphoi as Jesus' half-brothers or do not specify,[49] since the accounts in the Gospels do not speak of Mary's relationship to them but only to Jesus.[52][53] Certain critical scholars of the Jesus Seminar say that the doctrine of perpetual virginity has obscured recognition that Jesus had full brothers and sisters.
In the Hebrew-language Book of Genesis, all the other sons of Jacob are repeatedly called brothers of Joseph, although they were children of different mothers.[55] Similarly, Abram (of Terah) called his nephew Lot a brother.[56] Also, the Second Book of Samuel describes Tamar as a sister both of Amnon and of Absalom,[57] two of David's sons by different mothers.[58]
Family trees and pedigrees [ edit ]
Explanations of the true relationship of the "brothers" of Jesus within his immediate nuclear family fall primarily into three categories. The first, called "the most natural inference" of the Gospel text by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, is that the brothers of Jesus were the children of his parents, Joseph and Mary:[4][59]
Because of the conflict of this reconstruction with the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, several alternatives are common. Epiphanius made them children of Joseph by a former marriage:[4]
Mary Joseph earlier wife Jesus James Joses Simon Jude
Other reconstructions would make them more distant relatives, the children of 'Mary, mother of James and Joses' by Clophas, though these are linked to Mary and Joseph in different ways. St. Jerome would have this Mary be a sister of the Virgin Mary:[4]
A modern reconstruction would likewise make them cousins, but rather than having the two Marys be siblings, it would follow Hegesippus in making Clophas brother of Joseph:[4][60]
Rejection of Jesus [ edit ]
According to the Synoptic Gospels, and particularly the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was once teaching a large crowd near the home of his own family, and when this came to their attention, his family went to see him and "they" (not specified) said that Jesus was "...out of his mind."
Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, "He has gone out of his mind." Mark 3:20–21 New Revised Standard Version.
And He came home, and the crowd gathered again, to such an extent that they could not even eat a meal. When His own people heard of this, they went out to take custody of Him; for they were saying, "He has lost His senses." Mark 3:20–21 New American Standard Bible.
In the narrative of the Synoptic Gospels, and of the Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus' mother and adelphoi are outside the house that Jesus is teaching in, Jesus tells the crowd that whoever does what God wills would constitute his mother and adelphoi. According to Kilgallen, Jesus' answer was a way of underlining that his life had changed to the degree that his family were far less important than those that he teaches about the Kingdom of God. The Gospel of John states that Jesus' adelphoi did not believe in him, because he would not perform miracles with them at the Feast of Tabernacles.
Some scholars have suggested that the portrayal in the Gospel of Mark of the initial rejection of Jesus by his family may be related to the tension between Paul and Jewish Christians, who – according to them – held Jesus' family in high regard, for example at the Council of Jerusalem.[61][62][63][64][page needed][65][page needed]
Karl Keating says that in Jewish culture younger brothers (blood siblings) never rebuked, or even advised, their elders, for it was considered great disrespect to do so;[66] but in Mark 3:21, also in John 7:3–4, Jesus' brothers are shown doing that.
Absence of Jesus' brothers [ edit ]
There are some events in scripture where brothers or sisters of Jesus are not shown, e.g., when Jesus was lost in the Temple and during his crucifixion. This is argued to support the view that "brothers" of Jesus are not blood brothers or siblings, although some reject this.[citation needed]
Luke 2:41–51 reports the visit of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem when Jesus was 12 years old but does not mention any siblings. Robert Eisenman is of the belief that Luke sought to minimise the importance of Jesus' family by whatever means possible, editing James and Jesus' brothers out of the Gospel record.[67] Keating argues that Mary and Joseph rushed without hesitation straight back to Jerusalem when they realized Jesus was lost, which they would surely have thought twice about doing if there were other children (Jesus' blood brothers or sisters) to look after.[66]
The Gospel of John records the sayings of Jesus on the cross, i.e., the pair of commands "Woman, behold your son!" and "Behold, thy mother!" (John 19:26–27), then states that "from that hour the disciple took her unto his own home". Since the era of the Church Fathers this statement has been used to reason that after the death of Jesus there was no other biological children to look after Mary, and she had to be entrusted to the disciple.[68][69][70] Constantine Zalalas argues that it would have been against Jewish custom for Jesus to give his mother to the care of the disciple if Mary had other living sons, because the eldest son would always take responsibility for his mother.[71] Karl Keating says, "It is hard to imagine why Jesus would have disregarded family ties and made this provision for his Mother if these four [James, Joseph/Joses, Simon, Jude] were also her sons".[66] Pope John Paul II also says that the command "Behold your son!" was the entrustment of the disciple to Mary in order to fill the maternal gap left by the death of her only son on the cross.[72] Vincent Taylor points out difficulties in this interpretation of the text: it ignores both the fact that Jesus' brothers opposed his claims, and the position of honour of John, the beloved disciple.[73]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]At the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) in Brussels on 22 January, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania Vytautas Leskevicius presented results of the Lithuanian Presidency of the EU Council. According to the Lithuanian Foreign Deputy Minister, the Presidency's success depends on hard work, focus and determination to find consensus, the MFA says.
Photo: urm.lt
The Foreign Deputy Minister thanked Henri Malosse, President of the EESC, for his support from the very beginning of Lithuania's Presidency.
"Within six months of the Presidency we have actively cooperated in creating a credible, growing and open Europe. We have discussed issues related to finances, the banking union, rural development, women's employment, the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, energy, trade and health in Europe," Leskevicius said.
In turn, Malosse and leaders of the EESC thematic working groups expressed their heartfelt gratitude for Lithuania's excellent Presidency of the EU Council. They stressed that Lithuania deserved special assessment for engaging civil society representatives in the Presidency's activities.
According to Leskevicius, this experience of the recent six months is unique for Lithuania, because it has given Lithuanians more strength and confidence.
During the Lithuanian EU Presidency, a total of 141 legislative and 283 non-legislative dossiers were concluded.
Established in 1957, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) is a consultative body of the European Union and an integral part of its institutional set up. The EESC advises the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union.The showing of a two-minute hardcore porno clip on a massive |
and brainstormed ideas to dilute the position of their opponents. As a consequence the IRS and DOJ scheme to weaponize the Dept. of Treasury began.
After discovery, Jack Lew became secretary of the Dept. of Treasury, insuring protection; and well, you know the rest of the political ‘hide-the-guilty-pea’ shell game. – HERE’s WHY – (w/ dozens of MSM embed links)
◊ Second Example – I firmly believe the Benghazi murder fiasco was blood on the hands of both the Democrats (Via Hillary Clinton/State Dept) -AND- The Republican party leadership (via Intelligence Oversight Gang-of-Eight).
Both presidential finding memos in 2011 (Libya) and 2012 (Syria) authorized the joint State Dept./CIA operations which included various covert arms deals that make Iran/Contra seem like childs-play. The oversight for both operations fell upon the Congressional Intelligence “Gang-of-Eight”. – HERE’s WHY – (w/ hundreds of MSM embed links)
However, despite my own opinion of these two examples being grounded in facts – that I can point to with specific reference and certainty – there’s also never going to be any accountability for either usurpation because both sides of the UniParty benefitted from them.
• The Democrats (White House and Leadership) and Big GOPe Republicans (Leadership) both benefitted from the Tea Party being targeted.
• The Democrats (White House and Leadership) and Big Gope Republicans (Leadership) both benefitted from hiding their duplicity in the Libyan/Syrian covert operations. Both sides of the UniParty (4 members each party – with oversight) have blood on their hands.
Thus neither of these two events can ever hope to find accountability. However, that doesn’t mean the truth underwriting my opinion isn’t real. It just means history will never find the exposition in the news media. 99+% of America is oblivious.
Here’s the disconcerting unfathomable part.
We could never reconcile, fully reconcile, how Senator Ted Cruz fit into the grand scheme of the GOPe roadmap. For the longest time we could find evidence of his affiliation, but never enough substance to identify the motive. Unlike all of the other “splitters” there simply wasn’t enough historical reference to rule in, or out, a specific motive.
Cruz took office in 2013 and announced his decision to run in March 2015. A short window to find the trail of evidence needed to determine motive. As a consequence we always granted him benefit of the doubt.
However, as time progressed throughout 2015 (post announcement) things clarified which made the October ’13 though July ’14 begin to make more sense. Sometime around late 2015, with mounting evidence of affiliations and activity, I realized with specific certainty that Cruz was NOT outside the roadmap, he was actually within it.
However, the final pixels needed for a clarified motive remained elusive. Well, that was until last week and the revelation which fit like the missing piece of the Cruz/GOPe puzzle.
The GOPe dislikes Ted Cruz for the same reason the larger majority of the U.S. is turned off by him, his transparently inherent ‘do-anything-to-gain-status’ selfishness. The original distrust born NOT because he’s an outsider per se’, but rather because he’s an INSIDER who decided the best way to advance himself was to bite the hand that fed him.
When Ted worked for George W Bush, he was angling for a bigger position than he received. As described, Cruz actually wanted to be the U.S. Attorney General.
Cruz was thinking (as a campaign lawyer who helped win the 00′ Florida election challenge) he had more pull than he actually did. Thinking he possessed more juice because of some of his Texas connections. His marriage to Heidi was supposed to solidify his position because she was actually held in higher regard than Ted within the Texas/GOPe sphere.
Ted Cruz was seen by the insiders as over ambitious, an opinion that was only reenforced by his ambitious reach and expectation to be named Attorney General.
So Ted Cruz decided since he knew the ins and outs of the GOPe (insofar as the GOP and Bushes were one and the same), and since he couldn’t advance any further within that sphere, that he would run against them.
He ran for Senate against a GOPe favorite in 2012 and won. Cruz hoping this would show the GOPe that he was a serious contender and they would welcome him back into the fold.
Except, his actions backfired, mostly because of Ted’s outsider rhetoric, and also because his freshman year (2013) was spent antagonizing the very political group he would need to gain additional influence.
The customary view of Ted Cruz choosing to run for POTUS, appeared on its surface to be a slap in the face Jeb Bush and the GOPe. However, in reality, when considered against the backdrop of the GOPe Roadmap, his run was an olive branch by Ted to the GOPe.
How? Because two-year Senator Ted Cruz entered the race to split the conservative vote in order to help Jeb win.
Cruz was never supposed to be in his current position after Iowa. New Hampshire, was always where Jeb’s path began. Cruz was a needed splitter in the SEC states, and if the race got down to him and Jeb, well, the fact that Ted isn’t natural born was going to come out, forcing him to drop out, leaving Jeb and his millions in donor money as the last man standing.
This is the classic GOP maneuver. An almost identical scheme to the process that allowed Mitt Romney to attain the nomination, with little support, in 2012. Why do you think Jeb always spoke about winning without the base, and also losing the primaries to win the nomination?
In hindsight, it all makes sense now, doesn’t it?
Again, Trump was the wildcard the GOPe didn’t expect. All other angles and players were carefully, strategically, and electorally mapped out. But Trump screwed up the entire plan. In July 2015, not knowing how it would all work out, Ted Cruz was sent to cozy up to Trump with a non-aggression pact, but Trump was no dummy.
Trump also knows the eligibility issue is a major problem, a major problem that can be beneficial at a contested/open convention.
However, no-one knows the scope and multi-trillion dollar consequences of the race better than those who constructed it (Battle Group #3). As an outcome, those who understand the scope of the current race, are also the same power-brokers who work earnestly to control every possible outcome.
Throughout the first two months of 2016; as the race began to take on increasing shape, and against the reality the Trump juggernaut of vulgarians were not going to be easily stopped, Trump’s “eligibility ace-in-the-hole“, would need to be diminished as an insurance policy against Trump being victorious.
How would such influential power-elites remove the risk inherent in the Trump Eligibility Card? Well, if you think deeply enough about it, they’d need to reference prior historical activity when such consequential presidential election decisions are made.
Who would ultimately be making such an emergency eligibility determination? The “Natural Born Citizen” argument has never been settled before. Mostly, because no-one with standing has ever faced a need to challenge its meaning.
But Trump has that “standing”. And Trump has that eligibility challenge available to him. So who would ultimately be charged with making such a consequential decision for all future American politicians to follow?
Follow the problem to its natural conclusion and you’ll find The Supreme Court of The United States. Who on that panel would be most likely to be considered an “originalist” within that body of constitutional decision makers – and who would be virtually guaranteed to side with Trump’s challenge?
Donald Trump won New Hampshire February 9th, 2016. Jeb Bush, who, according to the best laid plans – was supposed to begin rolling down the road of the GOPe roadmap, finished FOURTH.
Donald Trump won South Carolina February 20th. Jeb Bush, again, finished FOURTH with only 7.8% of the vote. Jeb suspended his campaign.
In between New Hampshire on the 9th, and Jeb’s exit on the 20th, was February 13th.
On February 13th, 2016 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the originalist, died unexpectedly, on a ranch in Texas….
…. as a direct and specific outcome, and as bizarre as it seems, against the backdrop of the 2016 Presidential election, both sides of the UniParty benefit.
Yet again.
Just a Reminder, this is an insurgency. – The modern enemy of Wall Street is Main Street vulgarians. The enemy of the RNC/GOPe is not Democrats, it’s Grassroots Conservatives, more vulgarians.
The Republican Party, and the Republican media apparatus, view us as their enemy. We are the enemy they need to protect themselves from:
In 2014, the RNC approved selection rules that govern how each state’s delegates are portioned out from the primaries. Under one of the changes, states holding their primaries between March 1 and March 14 will have their delegates doled out proportionately with election results, a change that will likely stymie a movement candidate.
States that have primaries on or after March 15 will be winner-take-all states. That’s important because another RNC rule change requires that a candidate must win a majority of delegates in eight or more states before his or her name may be presented for nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
With 18 GOP presidential candidates, for now, it will be that much harder for any candidate to win a majority in any state, let alone eight. (Article July 2015) Now, ask yourself, why would the RNC want to “stymie a movement candidate“? Who exactly does that benefit? Obviously, the “non-movement” candidate, ie “the turtle“. Isn’t the entire reason for campaigning in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina etc. to make a movement/momentum? In addition Rule #40 changed in 2014 from previously five needed state wins, to a newer threshold of eight (8): Officially, it’s Rule 40 in the RNC handbook and it states that any candidate for president “shall demonstrate the support of a majority of the delegates from each of eight (8) or more states” before their name is presented for nomination at the national convention. (article March 2014) Again, ask yourself who does this benefit? A candidate can win seven states outright, and still not have their name presented for nomination? These rules were made/affirmed in 2014 – Who or what exactly was the GOP concerned about blocking in 2016 that would necessitate such rules? When combined with other rule changes you can clearly identify a consolidation of power within the RNC apparatus intentionally constructed to stop the candidate of the GRASSROOTS from achieving victory. It’s all part of their GOPe Roadmap.
♦ Reference and Resources – (links to internal MSM references are contained within prior outlines): RNC Rule Changes RNC Rule Battles
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SOURCE: MinuumCHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - The House Judiciary Committee endorsed a bill Wednesday that would allow people who hold concealed carry permits to take guns onto school grounds and into most public meetings.
The committee voted 8-1 in favor of House Bill 114 after hearing two hours of testimony. The bill now goes to the House floor for debate.
The bill sponsored by Rep. Allen Jaggi, Lyman Republican, would allow people with concealed carry permits to take their guns to any public facility or gathering except courtrooms. Private businesses also would have the authority to disallow concealed guns on their property.
Supporters say the bill would improve public safety by discouraging or thwarting armed attackers and uphold basic constitutional rights. Opponents say schools and public places should be free of guns and that accidents with guns would be more of a problem than attackers.
Much of the discussion during Wednesday’s hearing centered on allowing guns at public schools and on college campuses.
Mr. Jaggi and others said gun-free schools have not prevented mass school shootings around the country.
He noted that Utah, which has allowed concealed carry guns at schools for 15 years, hasn’t had any mass school shootings.
Jillian Balow, the new state superintendent of public instruction, said schools are safer without guns, and she objected to forcing school districts to allow weapons.
“I just feel like this is a bit top-down, and we’re asking 48 school districts to make decisions that they may not want to make or that they may not be ready to make,” Ms. Balow said.
The University of Wyoming (UW) prohibits weapons on campus without approval from the UW police chief.
Chris Boswell, UW’s vice president for government and community relations, said the UW faces special challenges because of the use of alcohol and drugs by students and the stresses of college life that can arise.
“The university works to minimize the chances that stresses and challenges, including disagreements and conflict, might escalate,” Mr. Boswell said. “An enhanced presence of weapons on campus might further escalate such circumstances.”
At the least, he said, weapons should be prohibited from campus residence halls and athletic events.
But Christina Giarusso, a UW sophomore, said she was a victim of an off-campus assault and she wants the ability to protect herself on campus.
Ms. Giarusso said campus police aren’t able to respond until after something has happened.
Cory Schroeder, another UW student and a military veteran with extensive weapons training, said his request to carry a weapon on campus has been denied.
Asked by a committee member how he felt being denied a weapon on campus after fighting for his country, Mr. Schroeder said, “I guess surprised, but a little hurt as well.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC.Certain flour-dusted circles have been known* to build altars to Tartine Bakery’s Chad Robertson. They pore over his Tartine Bread and Tartine Book No. 3 with the intensity of medical students studying for their board exams. They rip apart his breads to stare longingly at the air holes and take tiny, meditative bites to gauge the flavors locked within its crumb.
It will be a decade before we’re able to assess the full influence on Robertson’s slow-rising, high-hydration, whole-grain-friendly baking methods on bread in America. Predictions are that it will be significant.
If you will accept recent meals at PizzaHacker, Long Bridge Pizza, Del Popolo and Josey Baker Bread (subject of The Bite column this week) as evidence, Robertson is also responsible for a new style of pizza being introduced to San Francisco.
Jeff Krupman, aka the PizzaHacker, was the first to fall under Robertson’s spell. Five years ago–long before Krupman opened his Bernal Heights restaurant–he was baking pies in his “Franken-Weber” grill in public parks and outside bars.
“I had just decided that I was going to reverse-engineer Tartine’s bread dough, because the pizza I had eaten at Apizza Scholl in Portland tasted so much like it,” Krupman says. He mentioned his new quest to local food photographer Eric Wolfinger, who was shooting pictures for Tartine Bread. “Eric laughed and said, well, you’re in luck because we need recipe testers.”
Studying the drafts of Robertson’s 40-plus-page method introduced Krupman to working with wild yeasts–bakers call these doughs “naturally leavened” to distinguish them from ones that rely on commercial yeast. Tartine also inspired him to incorporate whole-wheat flour in the dough (current ratio: 15 percent).
Krupman’s pizzas evolved as he familiarized himself with the Tartine method and tailored it for his own uses. He also introduced the dough to guys who worked gigs for him: Josey Baker, Rafi Ajl (Baker’s roommate) and Neal DeNardi. (Krupman also trained the staff at Forge Pizza in Oakland and Danville, who still base their pizzas on his recipe.)
Not long after Krupman’s conversion to the Robertson Way, Jon Darsky found himself in Tartine’s kitchens, befriending the staff and watching how they worked with dough. He had quit Flour + Water, where he’d made a name as the Mission restaurant’s resident pizzaiolo, and was having a wood-fired oven installed into a shipping container. In February 2012, his Del Popolo truck would launch.
Darsky says he first became captivated with the idea of working with wild yeasts drinking at Terroir, SoMa’s natural-wine bar. He wanted to find out how to do the same with his Neapolitan-meets-Californian pies.
“I noticed that when I used commercial dry active yeast that the flavor I loved was absent,” he says. “For me to create something that’s really unique— and not necessarily that it has terroir, but that it has certain flavor and textural qualities — it’s going to come from a naturally leavened bread.”
“[Wild] yeasts,” Darsky concludes, “bring out whatever flavors that are in your wheat.” Right now, he primarily uses refined flours, but he’s been plotting about how to introduce more whole-grain flour into the recipe.
Exhibit number 3: Long Bridge Pizza, which quietly opened in Dogpatch five months ago but is holding a grand opening, with expanded menu, in six weeks. The pizza world is minuscule; co-owners Neal DeNardi and Andrew Markoulis both worked for Jeff Krupman, and DeNardi spent two years at Tony’s Pizza Napoletana and put in several shifts at Del Popolo.
During DeNardi’s three years with PizzaHacker, DeNardi bought a copy of Tartine Bread, studying it so closely he still quotes sentences from the book as if reciting scripture. Several months before Long Bridge opened DeNardi began cultivating a Dogpatch-native starter. It’s the basis of all his pies. Like the others, there’s some whole wheat in there, which the pizzaiolo prizes for its earthy character.
Working with naturally leavened doughs is much more complicated than commercial yeasts. “It’s about patience, time, temperature, the smell of your leaven,” DeNardi says. He has to think in 24-hour cycles, prepping for the next service in the middle of the current one, making tiny adjustments to compensate for the atmosphere.
Josey Baker has made no secret of his admiration for Chad Robertson. But as he has evolved from an amateur to a professional and cookbook author, he’s taken his naturally leavened breads in different directions from Tartine’s. The pizza he now serves on Monday nights clearly comes from the same lineage as the other three pizzas, but it’s Josey’s own, too, made with 50 percent whole wheat, dusted with cornmeal and brushed with garlic oil. Like the other three, it is ridiculously tasty.
Just to be clear: This quartet of pizza makers are not the first or only bakers to use naturally leavened doughs. Anthony Mangieri of Una Pizza Napoletana has been cultivating wild yeasts for two decades, and Keith Freilich of Emilia’s Pizza in Berkeley eschews instant yeast as well. Tangy sourdough pizzas, such as the one at Arizmendi, have existed here for years.
But four Tartine-inspired pizzaioli who use naturally leavened, partially whole-grain doughs constitutes more than a trend. Jeff Krupman calls it–and not lightly, given pizza nerds’ obsession with taxonomy–a unique style. Talking to the four of them, even the word “style” proves too restrictive. Let’s call their approach to pizza making, instead, a way of life.How to vote in the August 2 election
The primary in August sets the stage for the November elections. Knowing the important dates, rules and your rights as a Michigan voter will ensure your vote counts.
July 14, 2016 - Author:,
Michigan voters will head to the polls on August 2 to vote in primary elections to select candidates for the November General Election. The offices up for election include the U.S. and State House of Representatives, judicial positions, and local elected positions, as well as other local races and a variety of local ballot proposals depending on the region. Unfortunately, only about 18 percent of Michigan voters will head to the polls this August, if recent history is any indicator. Since 2000, 18.4 percent has been the average voter turnout for the August primary in presidential election years in Michigan.
For those planning on voting in the August 2 election, or for those who didn’t know there was an election in August, here’s what you need to know before you head to the polls:
Am I eligible to vote? Michigan residents who are U.S. citizens, 18 years old, and registered to vote in the city or township they live in are eligible to vote. Voters can verify their registration status using the Secretary of State’s Voter Information Center website. July 5, 2016 was the deadline to register to vote in the August primary. For those who missed that deadline, but wish to vote in November, the registration deadline is October 11.
When do I vote? The August Primary Election is on August 2, 2016. Polls will be open from 7:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. If a voter is in line when polls close, they should remain in line as they will still be allowed to vote.
Where do I vote? Voters can find their polling location and see a preview of their ballot on the Secretary of State’s Voter Information Center website.
What am I voting on? The August Primary Election is used primarily to select candidates to appear in the General Election in November. Candidates for U.S. Representative in Congress, State Representative, County Commissioner, and other local offices will be on the ballot in the Primary Election. Some areas will also have local ballot questions on their ballots. Again, voters can visit the Voter Information Center to preview their ballot before election day.
How do I vote? Registered voters can vote by going to their polling location (available on the Voter Information Center website) on Election Day, or by requesting an Absentee Voter ballot from their city or township clerk. Simply fill out this Absent Voter Ballot Application and submit it to your local clerk. Absentee voter applications must be received by the local clerk by 2 p.m. on the Saturday before the election. Absentee ballots must be completed and returned to the clerk’s office by 8 p.m. on Election Day. These ballots can be sent in my mail, or dropped off in person, as long as they are received by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
The Secretary of State’s office asks that voters bring an acceptable form of photo identification to the polls on Election Day. However, a voter who does not have photo ID can still vote. A voter who lacks voter ID can vote by signing an affidavit at their polling location. Once the affidavit is signed, voters may cast their ballot and it will be counted with all other ballots.
Anything else? In 2015, the Michigan legislature passed a law to eliminate the option of straight ticket voting. However, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction, prohibiting enforcement of this law. While straight ticket voting is not an option in the August election because it is a primary election, Michigan voters will be able to vote straight ticket in November. In the August election, voters must choose whether to vote on the Republican or Democrat side of the ballot. They may not vote on both sides of the ballot in the primary.
For more information on elections, visit the Michigan Secretary of State’s Elections in Michigan page.
Those in Michigan State University Extension that focus on Government and Public Policy provide various training programs, which are available to be presented in your county. Contact your local Government and Public Policy educator for more information.
Tags: civic engagement, community, government, msu extension, public policyBulldog Lin Jong is helped from the field by trainers
THE WESTERN Bulldogs suspect Lin Jong has suffered a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament that will end his 2017 season.
Long was injured midway through the first term of the Bulldogs' 57-point loss to Melbourne on Sunday.
Full match coverage and stats
Jong was trying to get a kick away during the match at Etihad Stadium when Demons co-captain Nathan Jones smothered his effort, colliding with the midfielder's right knee.
Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge told reporters after the match that the club's initial diagnosis was Jong would require a knee reconstruction.
Five talking points: Western Bulldogs v Melbourne
"It always is (devastating). We've had too many of them, so it's disappointing," Beveridge said.
"But like the ones that have gone before him we just need to help him with his rehab and get him back as big and strong as he has been and we'll have him hopefully somewhere near the start of next year."
Jong will undergo scans on his knee with the results expected early next week.
WATCH: Luke Beveridge's full post-match press conferenceJoin us for CRM Evolution 2017!
April 24 - 26, 2017
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Fortunately, you can find the biggest collection of the brightest and most influential people in the CRM industry at the CRM Evolution conference. Conference Chair Paul Greenberg and the editors of CRM magazine are working together again to bring you some of the best CRM analysts and consultants, project leaders, and vendors in the industry.
Get the Conference AppThey repeat the great mantras of the era: The president is the president of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the president is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the president as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.” The words trickle into the streets: “Our relationship is not effective” lovers tell each other when they break up. “Effective,” “stability”: No one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.
One of Surkov’s many nicknames is the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz. They first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting anti-state actors (anarchists in the 19th century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR. Their first clients were actually Russian modernizers: In 1996 the political technologists, coordinated by Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and the man who first understood the power of television in Russia, managed to win then-President Boris Yeltsin a seemingly lost election by persuading the nation that he was the only man who could save it from a return to revanchist Communism and new fascism. They produced TV scare-stories of looming pogroms and conjured fake Far Right parties, insinuating that the other candidate was a Stalinist (he was actually more a socialist democrat), to help create the mirage of a looming “red-brown” menace.
In the 21st century, the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk with phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.By Mychal Hunter
Holy moly are the boys in Death Valley talented. If I were to keep the television show analogy from the past few posts alive and compare them to a program, I would compare them to… Deadwood. Think about it, what a cast, Ian McShane, Raylan Givens, Major Dad, the guy who digs fat chicks in The Perfect Storm, Powers Boothe, Ray Donovan’s wife and who could forget Sheriff Unser. That poor bastard.
Does anyone recall what the downfall of Deadwood? It was creator/writer/producer David Milch. That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the analogy ties in. Four years of Jaron Blossomgame, all four, and zero tournaments. In fact, 3 straight years the Tigers failed to win 18 games. That’s ridiculous. Cuonzo fucking Martin could win 20 with last years team.
Now, last season Brownell’s team did average over 70ppg for the first time in his tenure, and had an Adjusted Offensive Efficiency rating of 35 nationally according to KenPom. That’s pretty good for Brownell whose offense typically resembles the French military. I know, I really should have saved that joke for Virginia. Anyways, the only reason Brownell is still at Clemson is because Radakovich is both hamstrung by Brownell’s recent extension, and too busy fundraising (his forte) to be bothered to care about basketball.
All that said, why are they #10 in the ACC, Peacone? Well, even with the loss of Blossomgame, they have some really good players. It is a gamble on my part. I mean, am I really predicting Brad Brownell will finish above Boeheim in the final standings? Yeah, I am but that’s more about early entry draft prospects and Gerry McNamara not deserving any coffee (It’s for closers!) than Brownell being a good coach.
Anyways, lets get into it.
THE BAD
Big time losses
Jaron Blossomgame: a 6’7 combo forward out of Georgia, Blossomgame averaged 13.5 poing and 6.5 rebounds for his career. He also finished in the top 10 in player efficiency rating his last two years in college. A great player that was never showcased in the tournament. It’s a damn shame.
Avry Holmes: The sit 1 play 2 transfer from San Francisco was terrific for Clemson in his time there and especially last year. 10.3/2.4/1.3 with a steal per game along with less than a turnover averaged in 27 mpg. To round it out he also shot 44% from deep (69 made) and 81% from the line (though only attempting 81).
Sidy Djitte: The 6-10 center from Senegal averaged 6.5 points and 7.7 rebounds per contest for the Tigers last year. Not a shot blocker, but an imposing presence on the front line.
Other losses include Ty Hudson (transfer to Jacksonville State), Riley McGillian, Legend Robertin (transfer to Nicholls St).
Holmes and Blossomgame obviously hurt, points and senior leadership are hard to replace especially in this conference. The returning players are going to have to step up to fill the void.
THE GOOD
Finally. I was beginning to doubt myself writing the opening and the above section. But, at the end of the day, I’m fairly arrogant so I’m sticking with it.
The Tigers return 5 key contributors from last years squad, a high 3 star recruit who enrolled early and some helpful front court transfers. Lets take a look.
Elijah Thomas: The former Texas A&M player was eligible for 24 games for the Tigers last season as a RS Frosh. The true back to the basket player put up 7.5 points 4.2 rebounds and 1.5 blocks per game in 17 minutes. He is a super talented big man, but he has to stay out of foul trouble (3.5fpg in those 17 minutes). Some may remember John Collins had a similar problem at Wake Forest as a freshman. There is a learning curve in the ACC.
Donte Grantham: The senior forward out of Hargrave has always been solid, getting around 9 points per game for his career. The 6’8 swingman has just never been able to breakout. He may get the opportunity this year with Blossomgame leaving a sizeable hole at the position.
Sheldon Mitchell: The Junior transfer from Vanderbilt (another Stallings runaway) averaged 11 points, 2.3 rebounds and 3.4 assists per game last year for Clemson while shooting 45% from deep and roughly 80% from the line. He more than doubled his scoring output in 7 more minutes per game. A breakout may be imminent.
Marquise Reed: Yet another transfer, Reed came in from Robert Morris after averaging 15ppg as a freshman in the NEC. As expected those numbers dipped a bit but he still put up 10 a game while shooting 40% from 3 and 90% from the line. This is another player who could possibly break out.
Gabe Devoe: The glue guy. Does a bit of everything and will probably be the one that kills you in the last part of the game. Doesn’t really do anything great, but he does everything. He’s the guy will hang 14 on you when your best defender locks down Mitchell and Reed and you’ll still lose.
Also joining the squad this year will be AJ Oliver (High 3 star recruit) who joined the program for the spring semester last year and redshirted. He is now a freshman with a semester and summer of practice against some very good back court players under his belt. Joining Oliver are 3 stars Malik William and Aamir Simms. Both 6’8 forwards, William a swing, and Simms a post. Brownell will also welcome a couple transfers in Mark Donnal (Michigan) and David Skara (Valpo). Donnal is a big body who was utilized primarily as an on the ball screener in John Beileins pick and roll offense and Skara was a solid contributor (6.5 points 3.1 rebounds) for a good Valpo program. They will provide depth and size in a front court that needs both. Also, don’t sleep on incoming freshman Clyde Trapp, he has a funky looking jumper but he can score when he gets hot.
Overview
I think this club is solid. I think Reed, Mitchell and Thomas all have breakout potential. Brownell is a defensive coach but if he can find a way to loosen the reigns on the offensive end I think this team will score some points as they have shooters, though its more percentages than totals. If this team flounders this year Brownell has got to go, though if the football program keeps its recent pace, Brownell may not even have to try to stay at least one more year, trust me Radakovich has no inclination to make the hard decision. He’s the same guy that let Paul Hewitt run the Georgia Tech program in the fucking ground.
Projected Starting 5: Devoe, Reed, Mitchell, Grantham, Thomas.
It was 102 degrees in Raleigh today. As a guy from Maine, that’s too fucking hot.Use the ThingLink mobile app to tag images on smartphones and tablets.
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with a picture of Hillary Clinton and the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” Predictably, the left erupted. It’s the same old story: The liberal media latch onto everything Trump says, finding new ways to paint him as a bigot.
“Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David,” Trump tweeted Monday. His pal and former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, chimed in: “That’s the mainstream media trying to attack Donald Trump.” Trump’s former adviser, Michael Caputo, blasted “people in the media” who are trying “to try to shame Donald Trump. … This pattern that you’re seeing is being created by those people who need to bake this bigotry into the Donald Trump candidate model.”
Trump is right. For years, the media have conspired to make him look prejudiced. It started in 2011, when reporters played up his suggestions that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, was lying about his birth certificate, and might be a Muslim. In 2014 and 2015, bloggers pounced on Trump’s tweets saying that “President Obama has absolutely no control (or respect) over the African American community” and that “Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.” When Trump announced his candidacy last summer, journalists tried to embarrass him by posting video of him saying, during the speech, that immigrants from Mexico were rapists.
Then things really got nasty. The press put out quotes and videos showing Trump taking shots at his opponents’ backgrounds and religious beliefs: Jeb Bush’s Mexican American wife, Ben Carson’s Seventh-day Adventism, Sen. Ted Cruz’s Cuban ancestry, and the Hispanic heritage of Gonzalo Curiel, the judge in the Trump University fraud case. When Trump said he had seen thousands of Arabs celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11, journalists claimed they couldn’t find evidence to back him up. When he called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” they accused him of discriminating based on religion.
In the past six weeks, it has gotten worse. Here’s a chronology of the media’s cynical attacks:
May 27: Trump tells a crowd in San Diego that Curiel has been ruling unfairly against him in the fraud case, apparently because the judge “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” The Washington Post and other Hillary-loving outlets accuse Trump of prejudice.
May 30: Trump’s spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, tells CNN that Curiel is “connected” to protesters who brandish “Mexican flags” and are trying “to stop an American president from running for office.” Liberal CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota argues with Pierson on air.
June 3: Trump tells the Wall Street Journal that Curiel has “an inherent conflict of interest” and is unfit to preside over Trump’s case because the judge is “of Mexican heritage.” The Journal, a well-known shill for amnesty, portrays the remarks as racist.
June 5: Trump tells CNN’s Jake Tapper that Curiel is mistreating him because “he’s of Mexican heritage.” Tapper, in an attempt to embarrass Trump, asks him: “If you are saying he can’t do his job because of his race, is that not the definition of racism?” John Dickerson piles on, asking Trump on CBS whether a Muslim jurist might be similarly disqualified because of Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims. “It’s possible, yes,” says Trump.
June 12: Trump says people from the Middle East are too dangerous to allow into the United States. Even if they’re vetted, he points out, we have “no way” to “prevent the second generation from radicalizing.” Liberal reporters misrepresent Trump’s position as ethnic discrimination.
June 13: Trump says refugees are “trying to take over our children” by telling them “how wonderful Islam is.” Liberals accuse Trump of going beyond terrorism and attacking Islam.
June 14: Trump says “there’s no real assimilation” of “second- and third-generation” families from the Middle East. Reporters, imposing their bias, question whether that’s true.
June 27: NBC News says Trump, in a phone interview, called Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” This follows reports that he used the same term to describe Warren on May 27, June 10, June 15, and on other occasions earlier in the campaign.
June 29: Howie Carr, a radio show host and Boston Herald columnist, warms up the crowd at a Trump rally by using a Native American war whoop to mock Warren. Reporters imply that Trump is to blame.
June 30: In his Herald column, Carr writes that Trump told him not to apologize for the whoop. Carr says Trump, referring to anti-black comments made 28 years ago by sportscaster Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, told Carr: “Don’t apologize. You never hear me apologize, do you? That’s what killed Jimmy the Greek way back. Remember? He was doing OK ’til he said he was sorry.”
Now comes the Star of David ruckus, another case of agenda-driven media hype. As Trump’s representatives have explained, posting an image of a six-pointed star on a pile of money with a message about corruption is a perfectly innocent gesture. It’s just as innocent as Trump’s previous retweets of a message from “WhiteGenocideTM” and of fabricated black-on-white crime data from a neo-Nazi Twitter account. “These memes float around the internet,” says Trump’s adviser, Ed Brookover. “There’s nothing going on here. … I can’t believe that we keep coming back to this.”
I can’t believe it, either. Week after week, reporters who cover Trump’s latest remarks and tweets about blacks, Latinos, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and Native Americans come back to the same story. They keep trying to make Trump look like a bigot. But we won’t be fooled.
Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.Dallas Stars General Manager Jim Nill announced today that the club has reassigned left wing Curtis McKenzie and right wing Brett Ritchie to the Texas Stars, Dallas' top development affiliate in the American Hockey League.
McKenzie, 24, has appeared in 36 games for Dallas this season posting five points (4-1=5) and 48 penalty minutes. In 25 games with Texas this season, he has posted 17 points (6-11=17) and 64 shots on net.
The 6-foot-2, 210-pound native of Golden, British Columbia was selected by Dallas in the sixth round (159th overall) of the 2009 NHL Draft.
Ritchie, 21, has posted nine points (6-3=9) in 31 NHL games with Dallas this season. He scored his first career NHL goal in his first career NHL game on his first shot on Dec. 31, 2014 vs. the Arizona Coyotes. In 25 games with Texas in 2014-15, he has posted 18 points (11-7=18) and a +10 plus/minus rating.
The 6-foot-3, 220-pound native of Orangeville, Ontario was selected by Dallas in the second round (44th overall) of the 2011 NHL Draft.Like Sailor Moon? Want to eat Sailor Moon-themed food? Good news. Starting this fall, four Sailor Moon cafes are opening in Japan. Yes, four!
According to Rurubu, one is opening in Tokyo on September 22, while another opens in Osaka on September 28 and yet another begins business the following day in Nagoya. These cafes are open for a limited time only, and will run until late October (Tokyo) and early November (Osaka and Nagoya).
Details on the Fukuoka cafe will be announced at a later date.
These aren’t the first Sailor Moon-themed cafes, and they won’t be the last! Last year, for example, a Sailor Moon cafe opened in Tokyo and served up a burger with pink buns.
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For those who are interested in attending the latest cafes, here are some of the menu’s eats:
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Go ahead, stuff your face in the name of the moon.Berkeley denies permit for anti-Marxism rally
Some activists are trying to employ humor, such as wearing Groucho Marx masks, to protest the anti-Marxist event. Some activists are trying to employ humor, such as wearing Groucho Marx masks, to protest the anti-Marxist event. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Berkeley denies permit for anti-Marxism rally 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
The organizers of the latest rally in Berkeley, billed by right-wing activists as a demonstration against Marxism, have been denied a permit by the city.
In a letter, Deputy City Manager Jovan Grogan told organizers of the event planned for Sunday in Civic Center Park — the home in recent months to a growing number of such demonstrations — that the “totality of circumstances” prevented Berkeley from being able to safely host the event.
Organizers did not immediately return requests for comment.
On social media Thursday, the far-right event, advertised online as a “No to Marxism” rally, showed no signs of stopping.
Police in Berkeley have given no indications that they will stand down, and similar past events have moved forward, regardless.
Though other skirmishes in Berkeley in recent months have seen bloodshed, as well as arrests, Mayor Jesse Arreguin has expressed a heightened level of concern for this weekend.
Arreguin has said that racists are not welcome in Berkeley, and the mayor has repeatedly urged people of all political persuasions to avoid the park Sunday.
In three responses to organizers seeking to host events at the park Sunday, Grogan wrote that the applications lacked a number of measures to ensure safety.
They included, Grogan said: a lack of proper security, failing to provide proper identification of organizers and turning in applications late.
Grogan also alluded to “national events” in explaining the denial.
Recently, a large gathering of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va. — and the widespread condemnation of President Trump’s initial refusal to denounce them specifically — have ratcheted up racial tensions in the United States. A woman died in Charlottesville.
Organizers of the Berkeley rally have denied a racial motivation and have defended the need for the event.
Some have expressed loyalty to Trump, saying that the blue Bay Area is as good a place to stand up for their president — and for free speech — as any.
How to respond to the rally planned for Sunday has divided Bay Area activists, many of them left-leaning.
The loose collective known as antifa has pledged to meet those they call white supremacists in Berkeley, including violently, if they deem it necessary.
Others have advocated a more peaceful tack, saying they will use props and humor to try to keep the peace.
Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @michael_bodleyHouston (CNN) — It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Houston bar culture can be divided into two eras: B.B. and A.B. -- Before Bobby and After.
We are now in the year 8 A.B., for it was in 2009 that mixologist Bobby Heugel opened Anvil Bar in the Montrose district and changed the way generations of Houstonians drank, possibly forever.
Yes, Heugel has mentors and predecessors, but nobody brought the gospel of fresh, delivered the tidings of tinctures, nor handed down the arcane kabbalah of craft cocktails to the youth of Houston quite like "Bobby Huge."
You can't go wrong at any of those bars, but contemporary Houston's bar scene is far bigger than one man. This one-time shot-and-a-longneck kinda town has blossomed into one of the nation's most varied and respected bar scenes.
These seven bars, firmly in the A.B. era, offer a bevy of beverage experiences, from lolling in a hammock al fresco with a cool glass of craft beer to sipping Elijah Craig Bourbon in the Gilded Age splendor of downtown's old Cotton Exchange, with plenty of juleps, old-fashioneds and fine wines in between.
A chandelier-lit sliver of a room in a historic building on one of Houston's best-preserved downtown blocks, Moving Sidewalk is all about dishing out craft cocktails minus all the eye-rolling attitude you find too often in such bars.
The driven, friendly staff -- on the young side, though bar veterans all -- prepare all their tinctures, syrups and fresh-squeezed juices in a tiny kitchen they call the Workshop, as only the best are worthy of pouring in the shaker with their carefully selected assemblage of whiskeys, rums and agave spirits.
For devotees of a refreshing mouth-tingle, there's the sweet, sour and pungent Thunder River: Black Strap rum, tarted with apple ginger falernum, spiced with chili ginger tincture and carbonated with a touch of ginger beer.
If the weather's warm, and it might very well be, try the totally tropical, Indian-accented Sitar Wolf: dark rum meets mango, tamarind, coconut and lime, accented with sprinklings of curry and a splash of habanero bitters.
Their happy hours (5-8 p.m. daily) feature a delightfully oddball selection: adorable, stubby Miller High Life seven-ounce "Ponies" at a buck a pop.
Fun fact: The bar's name does not (necessarily) refer to the sensation you will feel after knocking back a couple of libations here.
The Moving Sidewalks were a trippy blues-rock combo that frequently played in a psychedelic club called the Love Street Light Circus a few blocks north. That band's leader, sharp-dressed Billy Gibbons, went on to found ZZ Top, and you know the rest.
Why, yes, of course you can imbibe on the eponymous icy, crushed mint and Turbinado sugar-laced bourbon concoction here.
In fact, you can wrap your hands around a cold nickel-plated cup containing any one of many daily shifting variants on the Derby Day libation.
There's always a traditional house julep, or maybe you'll opt for a "Southern" (with Pierre Ferrand 1840 cognac and Smith & Cross Jamaican rum replacing bourbon), or a "Sparkling," starring effervescent Gamay wine and cognac instead of Kentucky whiskey, just to name a couple.
Classic mint juleps are served in cold nickel-plated cups. Julie Soefer
It all depends on the weather and the whims of internationally renowned owner Alba Huerta, who learned the finer points of the trade with Heugel at Anvil.
The rest of the cocktail menu warbles verse after verse of a song of the South, ranging everywhere from New Orleans (Hurricanes and Sazeracs) to Mississippi (the Eudora: dry gin, sherry, honey, celery and soda) and up to Virginia via the Cherry Bounce Sour, Martha Washington's favorite tipple. (So that's why George chopped down that cherry tree!)
Housed in a reclaimed Victorian clothing factory, Julep's mellow vibe, graceful decor, small but delectable cold seafood menu (their seafood tower should be on your bucket list), and attention to detail have won it numerous accolades near and far.
Fun fact: Huerta has often said that Julep's drink menu, both in style and in substance, was shaped in part by recipes and graphics she discovered in a tall stack of vintage copies of Ladies' Home Journal.
Taking its name from a long-shuttered watch shop, this two-level craft cocktail lounge has an effortless speak-easy vibe.
The front door is easy to blithely blow past, and there are gigantic antique safes marooned, probably for all eternity, on the balcony and in the ladies room. (Thanks to its two-ton heft, a previous tenant built the bathroom around one of the safes rather than trying to haul it out.)
The tile floors and upstairs balcony railing are original, while the chairs upstairs were salvaged from an auction of furnishings from the Petroleum Club -- think the sort of establishment in which Houston's answers to J.R. Ewing would swing a deal, woo a mistress or organize a price-fixing cartel.
Old-fashioneds are the lifeblood of the place, and you can get them in four flavors: rye, bourbon, sotol or Haitian rhum, each for only $8. Happy hour is even more of a steal: half-price on all wine and select whiskey and Lone Star longnecks for $2.
Fun facts: The lofts in the upper stories of this building were once the regional offices for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Houston Watch Company shop was not merely a place to pick up a Timex -- it was also a sort of Prime Meridian for the railroad.
All the engineers and conductors synched their watches to the official time coming from 913 Franklin, a vital safeguard against train collisions.
And it was also the home of Houston's "time service." You remember that? When your watch stopped ticking or the power went out in your house, you'd dial some number and a robot would tell you what time it was?
Houston is not much in the way of natural beauty, so we've had to build our own wonder. That would be our majestic skyline, the subject of pretty much every postcard ever mailed out of this town.
And the best place to knock back a cold one and take in that view is unquestionably the Raven Tower, the taproom located on the White Oak Music Hall complex.
Housed in a former metal shop on what passes around here for a hill on the banks of White Oak Bayou, Raven Tower is an industrial variation on the concept of the rustic Texas icehouse-style bar -- indoor-outdoor, airy and lacking all four walls.
Raven Tower serves up cold brews and great Houston skyline views. Anne Marie D'Arcy
That absent wall is ideal here, because this place is all about the view. Oh, that and the two dozen beers on tap, full bar, and life-enhancing street tacos from the La Macro truck.
Go around sunset, and watch as Houston's supertalls change colors in the fading light from coke-bottle green and metallic blue to harvest golden and burnt orange, and then stick around as they start to sparkle from within under the stars.
Fun fact: Three short days before the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that secured Texas independence, city namesake and one-time denizen Gen. Sam Houston and his army broke camp somewhere very near this spot.
As a young man in Tennessee, the future president of the Republic of Texas lived with the Cherokee, who named him "the Raven." Years later, after a scandalous divorce, Sam hit the bottle, hard, and the Cherokee renamed him "the Big Drunk."
What could be more appropriate than a bar named after the Raven near the spot where Houston spent his first night in the mega-city that bears his name?
More and more, Houstonians are learning to embrace the outdoors, even during our brutally humid, sweltering summers. Nowhere is that more apparent than at Axelrad, a lush new beer garden surrounding a renovated 100-year-old grocery on Alabama Street, where the Museum District meets the Third Ward.
Axelrad specializes in local and regional craft beers (to match the local and regional art on the walls) poured into your glass via colorful tap handles created by a Venezuelan artist.
Grab your brew and head outside: Axelrad is home to Houston's first and only hammock grove, so you know this is a place where you can really and truly kick back.
Come sundown, you might see videos or films screened al fresco, or catch a live band: Axelrad is the Houston home of New Orleans jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, and that green, gold and purple-lit tree makes him, and any other Mardi Gras-lover, feel right at home.
It's dog- and kid-friendly (until 9 p.m.), and they've partnered up with adjacent Luigi's Pizza, home of some of Houston's finest pie, available by the slice or the whole shebang.
Fun fact: You get a 5% discount if you come by foot, bus, cab, ride-share, bike or even horseback -- anything other than driving yourself.
Housed beneath gold-accented vaulted ceilings in one of Houston's grandest rooms atop the High Victorian Cotton Exchange building, Public Services caters mainly to those who prefer wine or pure spirits served in a quiet but friendly atmosphere.
Justin Vann, former sommelier at James Beard Award-winning chef Justin Yu's recently closed Oxheart, serves up elusive wines -- a staggering array of varietals of red, white, rose and sparkling, and also extensive selections of sherry, port and Madeira.
On the spirits side, you can sample Scotches from a half-dozen distinct Scottish regions, not to mention whiskeys from Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, Spain and India.
Those who want to stay stateside can sample every variety of American whiskey from rye to sour mash to bourbon. Many, many bourbons: from dear Old Grand-Dad on the economy side to Elijah Craig Single Barrel at $42 a pour.
Fun fact: For the first 75 years of its existence, cotton was the undisputed king in Houston. At that time, the room that houses Public Services was Houston's equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange -- the very heart of the city's economy.
And then along came oil. Still, there is no better place to drink in the history of Houston than Public Services.
Public Services Wine & Whisky, 713-516-8897, publicservicesbar.com/
Denver-based international celebrity chef Richard Sandoval launched his first foray into Texas just in time for the Super Bowl when the doors to Bayou & Bottle opened in January.
B&B spotlights bourbon -- stocking 70 varieties and a bar that features a wall of personalized lockers for you to stash your bottles and a "Bourbon Baroness" to help you navigate the process.
From 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. you can grab your food and go from a purpose-built counter. And there's something new under the sun: a Topgolf Swing Suite, the first golf simulator of its kind on the planet.
Bayou & Bottle is one component in the Four Seasons' plan to transform itself into a self-contained urban resort: with the pool deck on the fourth floor, an overhauled fitness center/spa, to the Quattro/Vinoteca Italian restaurant/wine bar combo and Bayou & Bottle's fun and games, the Four Seasons is aiming for nothing less than status as "Houston's Living Room."
Fun fact: Though neither of Super Bowl LI's competing teams stayed in the Four Seasons, the hotel remains one of the choicest spots to rub elbows with celebs.It's possible that depression could be cured by reducing mild swelling in your brain. Neuroscientists have linked depression to brain inflammation before, and now a new study suggests further evidence for this theory. Here you can see the distinctive signature of a glial cell responding to swollen tissue in a brain — the cell's center is elongated, and it has many more branching fibers than a typical glial cell.
Neurologist Susana Torres-Platas and colleagues recently discovered that this type of glial cell also shows up in the brains of people who killed themselves. Are we witnessing the distinctive neuroanatomy of depression?
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Writing in Nature Neuropsychopharmacology, the researchers write that they dissected the brains of 10 people who had committed suicide and died after suddenly becoming depressed. They found noticeable differences between fibrous astrocytes, or star-shaped glial cells, in the brains of depressed people and a control group. Fibrous astrocytes are cells that provide support to neurons in the brain by aiding in their growth as well as neurotransmission, or chemical communication between neurons. There are two kinds of astrocytes in the brain, and the fibrous type is mostly in your brain's white matter.
Write Torres-Platas and colleagues:
It can be hypothesized that the hypertrophic fibrous astrocytes described here in depressed suicides reflect local inflammation in the white matter. Strong lines of evidence support the neuroinflammatory theory of depression. In particular, it has been well documented that patients suffering from depression have significantly higher levels of circulating pro-inflammatory cytokines.
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In other words, these super-active and enlarged astrocytes are likely a response to small areas of inflammation in the brain's white matter. This suggests yet another way that depression can be caused by physical changes to the brain itself. It may also help to explain why people who have suffered concussions are depressed afterwards — their brains are literally swollen.
Read the full scientific paper via Nature NeuropsychopharmacologySilicon Valley is the engine of the rapidly growing gig-economy. Consumers love the convenience of having goods and services delivered right to their door at the push of a button. Many workers are enjoying the benefits of making their own hours and minimal corporate oversight.
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Opinion: Governor’s health care proposal puts politics before patients But there’s one big problem: many of these workers are classified as 1099 contractors, rather than employees.
The 1099 system gives workers the flexibility to fully choose how and when they work, but it also demands very little from companies, who do not have to cover transportation costs, offer paid vacation, or contribute into 401(k) accounts.
That’s the perfect system for Silicon Valley’s tech start-ups. Most of them are in aggressive growth stages and are trying to expand to new cities, recruit new workers and bring on new customers. This way, they only pay workers for the actual time they spend on their service.
While debate about the merits of the gig-economy continues, it’s clear that it’s here to stay. If we are shifting to a system of self-employment, we need to rethink how we deliver crucial worker protections and services that our nation’s labor groups have fought for and won, including overtime protections, weekends, redress from unjust dismissal, and — most importantly — expanded and improved health insurance.
For decades, millions of Americans have received insurance through a patchwork quilt of employer-based insurance and government programs to cover vulnerable populations. With the rise of the gig-economy, the quilt is unravelling, presenting an opportunity to fix our country’s flawed healthcare system.
Employer-sponsored health insurance has never been the best option for workers, businesses or the economy.
First and foremost, our system is the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Second, it keeps people from pursuing better jobs or going back to school out of fear of losing their health coverage. Third, the rising cost of health insurance has kept wages static. Workers in their 50s and 60s, who are more expensive to insure, might be forced out of their jobs or unable to find new ones.
Finally, it fails to achieve universal coverage. A Medicare-for-All healthcare system is the clear solution to these problems.
If we were to shift to a system where the government was the primary insurer, we could help employees and businesses more freely make decisions about what is best for their careers, families, and growth.
People would be able to move jobs easily, innovate and build their own business, or work in the growing class of gig-economy jobs without the fear of bankruptcy from medical costs.
Businesses would lose the unpredictable and always increasing costs of insuring their workers, which means they can hire more people, expand to new locations and markets, and pay better wages. Ultimately, universal coverage would mean a healthier workforce, and eliminate the high costs of uninsured patients using the ER as their primary care facility.
As the structure of our economy and business-labor relations change, it’s clear that our healthcare system is falling behind. In every other industrialized country, healthcare systems have been designed around the idea that ensuring everyone has access to quality health insurance means there must be significant government involvement.
As a result, they’ve all created healthcare systems that cost significantly less and provide a higher quality of care. We can do the same in the U.S. with Medicare-for-All.
Charlie Simmons has worked and lived in Silicon Valley for 42 years, retiring from NetApp as VP of Corporate Development. He is a member of the Patriotic Millionaires and the Business Initiative for Health Policy. He wrote this for The Mercury News.Since receiving asylum in Russia in August, former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden has rarely been seen in person. That changed earlier this week when Snowden made a rare appearance in Moscow to accept the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.
See also: The 10 Best Political Memes of 2012
The award is given out annually by a group of former U.S. intelligence officials to colleagues they deem worthy of the recognition.
Snowden's appearance was captured on video, above, which WikiLeaks later posted to YouTube on Friday.
The series of six videos show Snowden, dressed in a dark suit and light-colored dress shirt, meeting several people in a nondescript banquet hall. The videos were recorded on Wednesday, according to WikiLeaks.
The ex-officials said Snowden expressed no regrets regarding his decision to leak top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs, and added that he is adjusting to life in Russia, the AP reported.
Watch the full set of videos on WikiLeaks, here.
Snowden’s temporary, one-year asylum in Russia expires on July 31, 2014.
Image: YouTube, WikiLeaksThere are enticing new findings in the search for materials that support fault-tolerant quantum computing. New results from Rice University and Princeton University indicate that a bizarre state of matter that acts like a particle with one-quarter electron charge also has a "quantum registry" that is immune to information loss from external perturbations.
The research appeared online April 21 in Physical Review Letters. The team of physicists found that ultracold mixes of electrons caught in magnetic traps could have the necessary properties for constructing fault-tolerant quantum computers -- future computers that could be far more powerful than today's computers. The mixes of electrons are dubbed "5/2 quantum Hall liquids" in reference to the unusual quantum properties that describe their makeup.
"The big goal, the whole driving force, besides deep academic curiosity, is to build a quantum computer out of this," said the study's lead author Rui-Rui Du, professor of physics at Rice. "The key for that is whether these 5/2 liquids have 'topological' properties that would render them immune to the sorts of quantum perturbations that could cause information degradation in a quantum computer."
Du said the team's results indicate the 5/2 liquids have the desired properties. In the parlance of condensed-matter physics, they are said to represent a "non-Abelian" state of matter.
Non-Abelian is a mathematical term for a system with "noncommutative" properties. In math, commutative operations, like addition, are those that have the same outcome regardless of the order in which they are carried out. So, one plus two equals three, just as two plus one equals three. In daily life, commutative and noncommutative tasks are commonplace. For example, when doing the laundry, it doesn't matter if the detergent is added before the water or the water before the detergent, but it does matter if the clothes are washed before they're placed in the dryer.
"It will take a while to fully understand the complete implications of our results, but it is clear that we have nailed down the evidence for'spin polarization,' which is one of the two necessary conditions that must be proved to show that the 5/2 liquids are non-Abelian," Du said. "Other research teams have been tackling the second condition, the one-quarter charge, in previous experiments."
The importance of the noncommutative quantum properties is best understood within the context of fault-tolerant quantum computers, a fundamentally new type of computer that hasn't been built yet.
Computers today are binary. Their electrical circuits, which can be open or closed, represent the ones and zeros in binary bits of information. In quantum computers, scientists hope to use "quantum bits," or qubits. Unlike binary ones and zeros, the qubits can be thought of as little arrows that represent the position of a bit of quantum matter. The arrow might represent a one if it points straight up or a zero if it points straight down, but it could also represent any number in between. In physics parlance, these arrows are called quantum "states." And for certain complex calculations, being able to represent information in many different states would present a great advantage over binary computing.
The upshot of the 5/2 liquids being non-Abelian is that they have a sort of "quantum registry," where information doesn't change due to external quantum perturbations.
"In a way, they have internal memory of their previous state," Du said.
The conditions needed to create the 5/2 liquids are extreme. At Rice, Tauno Knuuttila, a former postdoctoral research scientist in Du's group, spent several years building the "demagnetization refrigerator" needed to cool 5-millimeter squares of ultrapure semiconductors to within one-10,000th of a degree of absolute zero. It took a week for Knuuttila to simply cool the nearly one-ton instrument to the necessary temperature for the Rice experiments.
The gallium arsenide semiconductors used in the tests are the most pure on the planet. They were created by Loren Pfieiffer, Du's longtime collaborator at Princeton and Bell Labs. Rice graduate student Chi Zhang conducted additional tests at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Fla., to verify that the 5/2 liquid was spin- polarized.
Study co-authors include Zhang, Knuuttila, Pfeiffer, Princeton's Ken West and Rice's Yanhua Dai. The research is supported by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Keck Foundation.** I DO NOT promote the use of potentially harmful drugs or lifestyle choices.**
***My life and my battles are in no way glamorous, wholesome or impervious to failure. Conversely, I will not belittle or condemn anyone else for making their intrinsic choices. Everyone is going to make their own decision whether I say it's a bad idea or not. So, instead of failing to discorage, I'm focusing on HARM REDUCTION. As well as a safe place for anyone (myself included) to express themselves.***
I don't blow clouds, because I'm stuck laying out rails underground...
Call me Sharkie|| Somewhere over the rainbow|| Ex-Alcoholic, current drug user/ scientific twacked out philosopher
I've been using for as long as I can remember.. The only thing that's changed is my D.O.C
It use to be self-Deprecation
The real gateway drug is Loneliness
Please, talk to me any time about Harm reduction or emotional support. (Or whatever you need.)
God knows I can't fix myself, but I'd love to try and help anyone who needs it.
Kik = ResignedSharkeee
Feel free to ask anything. If I don't know the answer I'll be upfront with you. All I have are my opinions and experiences, but I'd be more then happy to share.
Let's be friends. Because I'm the best mistake you'll ever make.
~~~~~~~Fired FBI Director James Comey is scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee next Thursday, and a CNN report claimed he will say President Donald Trump pressured him to drop an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. If so, it will have political and possible legal ramifications for the Administration. But can the POTUS stop this from happening? He could use what is called executive privilege.
Spokespeople Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer haven’t ruled it out.
What is executive privilege, and what kind of leverage does it provide? It lets presidents keep executive branch communications confidential, even if Congress and the courts demand something. It stems from a 1974 Supreme Court decision. Ironically, it was a case a president lost. In United States v. Nixon, President Richard Nixon claimed he was immune from a special prosecutor’s subpoena because he had executive privilege.
The Court acknowledge some of his argument [emphasis ours].
The expectation of a President to the confidentiality of his conversations and correspondence, like the claim of confidentiality of judicial deliberations, for example, has all the values to which we accord deference for the privacy of all citizens and, added to those values, is the necessity for protection of the public interest in candid, objective, and even blunt or harsh opinions in Presidential decisionmaking. A President and those who assist him must be free to explore alternatives in the process of shaping policies and making decisions, and to do so in a way many would be unwilling to express except privately. These are the considerations justifying a presumptive privilege for Presidential communications.
But the Court ruled this power had limits. Presidents had to be specific about their reasons when using it, and these had to be convincing. From the holding [citations removed; emphasis ours]:
Neither the doctrine of separation of powers nor the generalized need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. … Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, the confidentiality of Presidential communications is not significantly diminished by producing material for a criminal trial under the protected conditions of in camera inspection, and any absolute executive privilege under Art. II of the Constitution would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under the Constitution.
If Trump evokes privilege to stop Comey from testifying, there will be different facts at play than in Nixon. Remember, the former FBI Director doesn’t work for the government anymore. It is conceivable Trump could pursue a restraining order, but nonetheless, he would still have to convince a judge he is using his authority in way that will benefit national security needs and the like.
Trump fired Comey on May 9, ostensibly for doing a bad job leading the FBI. This sparked skepticism and criticism since the feds were investigating his campaign for alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign. A New York Times report one week later claimed he asked Comey to drop a federal probe into Flynn. Another article claimed he asked him for “loyalty.”
Such alleged behavior has lead critics to wonder if the president committed obstruction of justice. A professor we spoke to, George Washington University Law School’s Jonathan Turley, advised restraint, however. The federal obstruction of justice statute is relatively narrow, and Trump’s reported behavior doesn’t seem to violate it.
[Featured Image |
ask me if it is safe to connect to the server,” he said. “They don’t allow their little children to connect to the Internet. I say, ‘I know it’s safe.’ ”
The mesh software, called Commotion, is a major redesign of systems that have been run for years by experts across Europe, said Mr. Meinrath, who is now director of the New America Foundation’s X-Lab. The idea, he said, was to take the technology out of what he calls “the geekosphere” and make it accessible to the public. (Commotion is available to download free from the project’s website.)
The open Internet is difficult to operate securely, in part because it acts as both a routing system for data and a sort of giant electronic phone book. The simplest action — say, calling up a website or sending an email — involves communicating with multiple servers and routers along numerous paths.Amidst the calls for Trump staffers to be harassed at restaurants, gas stations and department stores, we thought it a good time to look back at what Mark has said about the left's preference not for winning the debate but for shutting down the debate - by any means necessary. This was taped last year - just hours before the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and others at a GOP team practice for the Congressional baseball game. Click below (or here) to watch: If you haven't yet experienced the delights of The Mark Steyn Club, you'll find more information here. And, don't forget to book now for the inaugural Mark Steyn Club Cruise from Montreal to Boston this September at the height of foliage season. We will have a grand time.
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Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Palestinians allowed into UN cultural body (ABC News)
The United Nations' top cultural body UNESCO has voted to grant full membership to the Palestinians.
The move could boost the chances of recognition for a Palestinian state at the wider UN and will give Palestinians the right to nominate ancient cultural sites for inclusion on the world heritage register.
But the vote in Paris has angered Israel and the United States and both countries consider the peace process is now more in danger than ever.
The motion, which specifically used the name 'Palestine', was passed by a substantial majority.
The vote was greeted with loud cheers of "Long Live Palestine", as nearly two thirds of UNESCO nations defied warnings from Israel and the US to vote in support of Palestinian membership.
Fourteen members voted against the bid - among them Australia, the US and Canada - and 107 voted in favour.
More than 40 countries abstained, including Britain and Japan.
The vote will give Palestinians the right to nominate archaeological sites for the World Heritage register - among them the Dead Sea, Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, where Jesus was supposedly born, ancient biblical sites near Hebron and Jerusalem, the ancient sea port in Gaza, and archaeological sites near Jericho and Nablus.
"The full membership will open doors for us", said Palestinian tourism minister Khouloud Daibes.
"Especially to face the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage by the occupation, and start to preserve the Palestinian sites which are eligible to be on the world heritage list."
Palestinian leaders, including spokesman Ghassan Khattib, are now hoping the UNESCO vote will boost the bid for full membership at the UN itself.
"I think the success of the Palestinians to achieve membership in the UNESCO is important in terms of the Palestinian attempts to get recognition of Palestine as a state," he said.
"It's part of the build up in the Palestinian efforts towards achieving international recognition."
But the US has vowed to veto the bid for full UN membership and has announced it will stop financial contributions to UNESCO.
"We were to have made a $US60 million payment to UNESCO in November and we will not be making that payment," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
The US funding makes up 22 per cent of UNESCO's budget.
Israel's ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, says the UNESCO vote will severely damage the prospects of Middle East peace negotiations resuming.
"We regret that the organisation of science has opted to adopt a resolution which is a resolution of science fiction," he said.
"Unfortunately, there is no Palestinian state and therefore one should not have been admitted today."
ABC/wires
Topics: world-politics, history, archaeology, palestinian-territory-occupied, france
First postedA scion of the Mellon banking dynasty has been appointed chairman of a new trade association for Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
Matthew Taylor Mellon II, a sixth-gen of the family behind the predecessor bank to BNY Mellon, is the founder of two digital currency companies, Coin.co, which processes payments, and Coin Apex, an incubator for start ups in the industry.
Now, the New York-based heir, who is also a consultant to family offices, has been become executive chairman of the Chamber of Digital Commerce – an appointment that was announced this week.
Launched in July, the industry association aims to educate the public and policymakers about digital currencies. It will launch its first major public policy campaign in January.
The digital currency industry has an estimated value of $8 billion, and this is expected to grow to $1 trillion in the next six years, the Digital Chamber says. “Digital assets will soon be as important as email, web browsing, and e-commerce,” it said in a press release, at its launch.
However, digital currencies are currently viewed with a mixture of uncertainty and scepticism by policymakers.
Last year, US Treasury said congress and regulators continued their efforts to determine the legality, legitimacy, and regulatory framework for virtual currencies.
A report released by the European Central Bank in 2012 stated: “A virtual currency can be defined as a type of unregulated, digital money, which is issued and usually controlled by its developers, and used and accepted among the members of a specific virtual community.”
Founded in 2009, Bitcoin is one of the most well known digital currencies, but its price has fluctuated significantly, reaching upwards of $1000 earlier this year, but worth almost a third of that today.
Earlier this year, Bitcoin Investment Trust chief executive Barry Silbert told CampdenFB that family offices accounted for a large number of the fund’s investors.
Silbert said family offices tended to come at Bitcoin from opposite ends of the risk-return spectrum – viewing the alternative asset either as either a substitute for gold, or as the equivalent of a high tech start up.
Outside Bitcoin, Mellon’s holdings include online art auction service Paddle 8, in which artist Damien Hirst and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg also have a stake, and clothing line Hanley Mellon, which he started with his wife Nicole Hanley Mellon.
He is the former chairman of the New York Republican Party’s finance committee.Severe restrictions do not prevent abortion. They do not protect anyone. Instead they place women’s lives at risk. And it’s high time we put an end to that.
Last week, the activist group Centro Las Libres drew attention to six women serving 25 to 30 year prison sentences in the Mexican state of Guanajuanto. All six were charged, and convicted, of homicide. The reason? All six, in some form, terminated a pregnancy.
This situation is not unique to Mexico. All across Latin America and the Caribbean, countries have banned or criminalized the procedure with very few, and in some cases no exceptions.
Yet, Instead of reducing the number of abortions, these draconian laws are simply forcing the procedure underground, making it unsafe and all too often deadly.
Severe restrictions do not prevent abortion. They do not protect anyone. Instead they place women’s lives at risk. And it’s high time we put an end to that.
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Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua have banned the procedure outright, even when an abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life. Other Latin American and Caribbean countries severely restrict the procedure with very limited exceptions, such as to preserve a woman’s life (Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, Venezuela), health (Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay), or in cases of rape or incest. Only Cuba, Guyana and Puerto Rico have legalized the procedure completely.
Yet, according to the most recent data from the Guttmacher Institute, women in Latin America and the Caribbean are undergoing 4.1 million abortions each year, the majority of which – 3.9 million – are unsafe. So unsafe that, according to IPAS, the international women’s health organization, thousands of women in the region are dying each year from complications related to unsafe abortions.
No matter how you feel about abortion, the truth of the matter is that restrictions on abortion don’t change the reasons women have them.
Instead they make women feel isolated and alone, driving them to ever more desperate measures. The jailing of these six women in Guanajuanto sends a message: and that message is that should you find yourself pregnant and scared, don’t dare get caught.
How many more women will have to be jailed, or die before we realize that these strict policies aren’t working? For how much longer will we have to watch as unrealistic legislation is imposed on women’s lives and bodies – legislation that is dramatically out of touch with women’s realities? For each woman convicted to a 30 year jail sentence, imagine how many more will die as the result of taking unsafe medication or undergoing an dangerous procedure, all in the hopes of terminating a pregnancy?
For the sake of the women of Latin America and the Caribbean, we must work to reduce maternal deaths from unsafe abortion and advance women’s reproductive health and rights. We must promote a comprehensive abortion care approach that takes into account the various factors that influence a woman’s individual health needs—both physical and mental—as well as her personal circumstances and her ability to access services. We must work to end the criminalization of abortion in the region.LA Galaxy great Landon Donovan is reportedly part of a push to bring the USL -- and possibly MLS -- to San Diego.
According to Keaton Robbins of the Ottawa Sun, Donovan and FOX analyst Warren Barton are seeking to found a USL team in San Diego. The goal of the ownership is to bring an MLS side to a city that has been without top flight soccer for decades. Robbins reported back in December that Donovan and Barton had teamed up to buy the San Diego Flash.
Can confirm @landondonovan and @warrenbarton2's new #SanDiego soccer team will be pursuing #USL expansion team. Will NOT be in #NPSL in 2016 — Keaton Robbins (@Keaton_Robbins) January 10, 2016
Donovan and Barton might not be alone in the fight to bring MLS to San Diego, however. According to San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Mark Zeiger, San Diego Padres owner John Moores is also interested in funding a stadium plan that could see an MLS team come to the city.
In an interview with Sports Illustrated in December, MLS commissioner Don Garber stated that the league has had conversations with groups in San Diego, but according to a league source quoted in Zeiger's article, the talk is "very preliminary."
UPDATE: Landon Donovan denied the rumors that he is interested in buying a USL team via Twitter on Tuesday.
Donovan quote tweeted the report and stated, "This is an entertaining story and interesting idea but there's no truth to it. "
This is an entertaining story and interesting idea but there's no truth to it. https://t.co/XyVCvrYVeE — Landon Donovan (@landondonovan) January 12, 2016
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Do you think Landon Donovan will bring the USL to San Diego?Many parents say when their second child is born that their first child suddenly appears to have grown overnight. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 16 have an explanation: until the birth of the new child, those parents were subject to a "baby illusion," routinely misperceiving their youngest child as smaller (and younger) than he or she really was.
"Contrary to what many may think, this isn't happening just because the older child just looks so big compared to a baby," says Jordy Kaufman of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. "It actually happens because all along the parents were under an illusion that their first child was smaller than he or she really was. When the new baby is born, the spell is broken and parents now see their older child as he or she really is."
Kaufman and his colleagues made the discovery first by asking 747 mothers if they remembered experiencing a sudden shift in their first child's size after the birth of a new infant. The researchers found that 70% of the mothers did.
To further explore that perceptual shift, the researchers asked mothers to estimate the height of one of their young children (aged 2 to 6) by marking a blank wall. When the researchers compared those height estimations to the child's real height, they found something very interesting: mothers significantly underestimated the height of their youngest child by 7.5 cm on average. In contrast, height estimates for the eldest child were almost accurate.
"The key implication is that we may treat our youngest children as if they are actually younger than they really are," Kaufman says. "In other words, our research potentially explains why the 'baby of the family' never outgrows that label. To the parents, the baby of the family may always be 'the baby.'"
The findings are a useful reminder of just how filtered our own perceptions of the world around us can be.
"We cannot trust the accuracy of our perceptions," Kaufman says. "In this case, it shows that our feelings and knowledge of our children affect how we actually perceive them. But it's important to consider that this misperception may actually make it easier to quickly distinguish one's youngest child from the other children."
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Current Biology, Kaufman et al.: "Parental misperception of youngest child size"Advertisement
After you’ve configure a new Mac from scratch or reloaded macOS, installing a dozen or more apps is an overwhelming job. Visiting all the right websites and setting the apps up according to your needs is a hassle.
You can solve this problem with a package manager. Homebrew is a package manager for macOS that simplifies the installation of free Unix tools and GUI apps. We’ll show you how to install apps with Homebrew and keep them up-to-date without any trouble.
What Is Homebrew?
Homebrew a free and open source package manager that lets you easily install command line tools and GUI apps on macOS. With a single command, you can search, install, uninstall, or update free Unix tools. Before installing Homebrew, you’ll need the following:
Terminal, located in the /Application/Utilities folder.
folder. macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or higher.
Command Line Tools, or Xcode from the Mac App Store.
How to Install Homebrew on Mac
If you have Xcode installed, there’s no need to install Command Line Tools, since the package is already baked into Xcode. But if not, you don’t have to install Xcode just for Homebrew.
After installation, Xcode consumes around 10GB of disk space, which is no small amount. If you’re just getting started with these commands, then installing Command Line Tools (roughly 150MB) will get the job done.
Step 1: Install Command Line Tools
To install Command Line Tools, press Cmd + Space to launch Spotlight and search for Terminal. Then type:
xcode-select --install
As you type this command, a popup will appear with the message The “xcode-select” command requires the command line developer tools. Would you like to install these tools now? Click the Install button to proceed with the installation.
In my case, since the package is already installed, this shows an error message.
Step 2: Install Homebrew
To install Homebrew, copy and paste the following command into the Terminal:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
When you paste this command, you’ll see a series of lines about what the script will install and where. Press Return again to continue, or any other key to cancel.
Then enter the administrator password to begin the installation. Installation takes a bit of time, depending on the speed of your Mac and internet connection. On completion, you’ll see an Installation successful message.
Step 3: Verify the Homebrew Installation
Run this command to validate the Homebrew installation and check for any errors:
brew doctor
If you see any Warnings messages, you can safely ignore them, but you should check out common issues that might affect a Homebrew installation. In most cases, you won’t see any errors if your copy of macOS and Command Line Tools/Xcode are up to date.
You should this check for any pending updates in the App Store before you install Homebrew.
Installing Popular Unix Tools With Homebrew
Since Homebrew is a package manager, it automates the entire process of installing, updating, and removing apps from the system. It compiles packages and handles all the dependencies for you.
For example, one app might rely on two others to work properly. Rather than installing those other apps yourself, Homebrew installs them and configures them to work with your requested app without any issues.
Here are a few handy tools you can install with Homebrew:
youtube-dl : Lets you download videos from YouTube and other more sites.
: Lets you download videos from YouTube and other more sites. geoip : Gives you the geolocation data for a particular IP address. Useful for system administrators, security researchers, and web developers.
: Gives you the geolocation data for a particular IP address. Useful for system administrators, security researchers, and web developers. wget : Lets you download data from the web and FTP. You can download a file or even an entire website with this tool.
: Lets you download data from the web and FTP. You can download a file or even an entire website with this tool. cask : This one lets you install macOS apps with a GUI.
: This one lets you install macOS apps with a GUI. htop: Command line alternative of Activity Monitor. It gives you thorough information on CPU, memory, processes, and more.
Manage Unix Tools With Homebrew
Running these Homebrew formulas is easy. Just type:
brew install [formula name]
To install youtube-dl, for instance, type in:
brew install youtube-dl
Type the following to see the list of commands that Homebrew supports:
brew help
You can browse a big list of available commands on the Homebrew formulae page. And use the following commands for more options:
search: Search for a formula uninstall: Uninstall a formula list: List all the installed formulas upgrade: Fetch the newest version of Homebrew from Github upgrade [formula name]: Install updates for a particular formula
How to Install Homebrew Cask on Mac
Homebrew Cask extends Homebrew and lets you easily install macOS GUI apps directly from the command line. With this simple script, you can install and manage many apps without needing to download them individually and go through the typical drag-and-drop routine.
To install Cask, type this into Terminal:
brew tap caskroom/cask
Just after installing Cask, type this:
brew tap homebrew/cask-versions
The second Cask command is intended for installing alternate versions of Casks. For example, they include betas, development versions of browsers you might want to install, latest versions of legacy open source apps, and more.
With Cask installed, you can also enter this command:
brew cask
This syntax will tell you commands that Cask supports. Every time you use a command, don’t forget to prepend with brew cask. The most frequently used commands you need to remember are:
install: Installs the given cask uninstall: Uninstalls the given cask list: Lists installed casks outdated: List all outdated casks upgrade: Upgrades all outdated casks
You don’t have to remember the commands. If you ever forget a command, type in brew cask to see the list. You can also take a printout of the manual page and open it in the Preview app.
This syntax will export the man page output to Preview.
man -t [Command Goes Here]|open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app
For example, the below string will open the manual page for brew cask in Preview:
man -t brew-cask|open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app
Once the man page opens in the Preview app, choose File > Export As PDF to save the file as a PDF document for future reference.
Installing Mac Apps With Cask
You probably have a list of frequently used apps you install on every new Mac. Instead of doing so individually, you can install those apps through Cask. To search for an app, use this syntax:
brew search
Let’s see if there’s a Cask for Firefox. To do so, type this into Terminal:
brew search firefox
As you might know, Firefox supports many different release channels. Mozilla uses these channels to slowly roll out updates to users, starting with daily Nightly builds to more Stable builds. If you want to install Nightly build of Firefox, you would type:
brew cask install firefox-nightly
Or to install the Google Chrome Beta, try this:
brew search chrome
Once you get relevant matches, enter:
brew cask install google-chrome-beta
Sometimes, you might not remember a particular app name. Thankfully, you just need to enter some relevant keywords and Cask will search for apps that contain them. The below screenshot shows what happens when you enter this command:
brew search sync
Uninstalling Apps With Cask
To uninstall Chrome Beta, simply type:
brew cask uninstall google-chrome-beta
For uninstalling Firefox, use:
brew cask uninstall firefox-nightly
The app gets uninstalls completely with no traces left behind. Once you install an app with Cask, it’s fine to update the app even if Cask doesn’t show updates. Don’t forget to check for configuration issues to further mitigate any problems. You can do so with this command:
brew doctor
Before checking for any Cask upgrade, don’t forget to periodically update the Homebrew core and casks. To do this, type:
brew upgrade
GUI Versions of Homebrew and Casks
Although there is no GUI app to install Homebrew and Casks, there are third-party apps that lets you update Homebrew core, check configuration issues, install and update apps from Cask repository, and much more.
Cakebrew is a free, open source app that works in tandem with Homebrew. It lets you see the list of formulas you’ve installed, plus it can run a quick search and show the description of formulas you want to install. This is functionality the command line version doesn’t have.
If you like Homebrew, but don’t want to use the command line for every purpose, this app will prove useful to you. To install Cakebrew, type in:
brew cask install cakebrew
Homebrew and Cask Workflow for Alfred lets you easily install, uninstall, and manage Homebrew and casks in tandem. The script filters brew and cask with support for doctor, install, list, search, uninstall, and more.
Then launch Alfred, type in brew or cask, and you can manage your apps right there in Alfred. You need to have the Alfred Powerpack installed to use this and other workflows.
Install These Open Source Mac Apps
Homebrew is a great package manager to install free Unix tools and macOS apps. If you’re setting up a Mac from scratch or work in a company where you manage multiple Macs, Homebrew can save you a lot of time and energy.
It’s easy to get lost with all these commands, but you don’t have to hurry. Go slow with these steps and take notes frequently. You might also bookmark this guide to Mac Terminal A Beginner's Guide to Using the Mac Terminal A Beginner's Guide to Using the Mac Terminal The Terminal app on Mac lets you accomplish all sorts of tasks using the command line. Here's a guide for Terminal beginners. Read More for other commands and help down the road.
Although you might want to install common Mac apps at first, take a look at some lesser-known open source Mac apps 15 Free Open-Source Mac Apps You Must Install 15 Free Open-Source Mac Apps You Must Install Want to use some open source software on your Mac? These macOS apps are open-source, awesome, and best of all... free! Read More and install them with Homebrew Cask too.Instead of making a litany of excuses, the Democratic Party needs to take an in-depth look at why they were soundly defeated in November, Karl Rove argued today in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The architect of George W. Bush's two presidential election victories said that whether it's FBI Director James Comey, white supremacy or the Electoral College, Democrats are refusing to face reality.
In the article, Rove debunked these arguments, including the idea that electors should choose Hillary Clinton because she won the popular vote.
It isn’t the Founders’ fault that the Clinton campaign failed to turn out African-American voters in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee. The Electoral College didn’t force blue-collar voters and rural Democrats in the Midwest to defect from the Democratic Party.
What about the notion - most recently argued by the Clinton campaign's communications director Jennifer Palmieri - that Trump won the White House by giving "a platform to white supremacists"?
Rove wrote:
If Mr. Trump had appealed to white supremacy, it would have provoked a reaction in the form of a larger minority turnout for Democrats. Yet Mrs. Clinton received fewer African-American votes—and a smaller percentage of them—than Democrats did four years ago.
And of course, many Democrats believe that FBI Director James Comey is the biggest reason Clinton lost due to his October announcement about the FBI looking into additional emails from her private server.
Rove called that "baloney."
Mr. Comey’s real electoral intervention came in July, when he overstepped his bounds and decided in the Justice Department’s stead that Mrs. Clinton would not be charged over her private email server. The FBI director did more to help Mrs. Clinton in the election than to hurt her.
And on the hacked emails given to WikiLeaks, Rove said those disclosures "did not create any new questions about Mrs. Clinton’s character," as millions of American voters already held doubts about her honesty.
He concluded that, "Democrats refuse to face the truth: They lost the presidency principally because voters demanded change. Mr. Trump promised it in abundance, while Mrs. Clinton represented the status quo."
Rove joined Martha MacCallum this morning, advising Democrats to move off of their message of "big government" solutions and come up with a platform that works across the country, not just in coastal blue states.
Watch his comments above.
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Oops! Stein's Recount Turns Up More Votes Than Voters in DetroitThiruvananthapuram: M.T. Ramesh, general secretary of the Kerala BJP, reportedly broke into tears in the state leadership meeting held at Thiruvananthapuram. He was demanding stringent action against some of his fellow leaders who “hatched a conspiracy to tarnish his image” by leaking an internal enquiry report about the Medical Council of India (MCI) scam involving certain party leaders. The inquiry committee, comprising senior leader K.P. Sreesan and minority cell leader A.K. Nazeer, was constituted by the party state president Kummanam Rajasekharan.
The meeting was held after Asianet News, a TV channel owned by NDA leader Rajeev Chandrasekhar, reported that the probe committee’s report found that R.S. Vinod, BJP cooperative cell convener, had accepted Rs 5.60 crore from R. Shaji, chairman of the Varkala-based S.R. Educational and Charitable Trust for securing MCI clearance for his medical college. The report indicated that this amount was routed through Delhi as a hawala transaction. Ramesh’s name was also mentioned in the report in connection with another medical college in Palakkad district, though he denied the link before the media. Stung by the media exposé and the subsequent discussions across the country, the BJP had to oust Vinod from the party.
The leaders who spoke to the media after the top-level meeting put forward an extremely strange defence. According to national executive member P.S. Sreedharan Pillai and state general secretary K. Surendran, what happened was a “clear case of cheating” by an individual (Vinod) and had nothing to do with the party. They kept mum about the leak of the committee report, saying that was an internal party matter. They stood behind Ramesh, denying his involvement in the alleged scam.
The state government has already initiated a vigilance inquiry into the matter, for which BJP leaders have pledged their wholehearted support. CPI(M) parliamentarian M.B. Rajesh raised this issue in the Lok Sabha as well, with Congress support, resulting in a ruckus and the House being adjourned. The opposition, who wanted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to respond to the allegations in the report, was denied permission to take up the issue in the House. “This scam involves not just the Kerala BJP leaders but also the national BJP leaders. This is a case where a bribe was paid for favours from the MCI and hence it has larger dimensions. Immediately after we raised the issue in the Lok Sabha, the parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar came to me in person and inquired about the whole matter, and asked me to provide a translated copy of the same, which means they know it is serious but they are not ready to discuss it in the parliament,” Rajesh said.
These graft charges against the BJP are coming from a state where the party is neither in power nor the main opposition. The party’s central leadership has reportedly directed the state unit to submit a detailed report on the matter.
Not the first scam for Kerala BJP
This is not the first time that Kerala BJP leaders have come under a cloud of allegations while their party rules at the Centre. During the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime, BJP leaders had allegedly accepted crores of rupees as bribes to allocate petrol pumps. Then as well it was an internal probe report that resulted in the undoing of several leaders, including former organisational secretary P.P. Mukundan. The inquiry panel, after hearing the testimonies of various leaders, including former state president K. Raman Pillai, had come to the conclusion that the Kerala BJP leadership made Rs 18 crore in petrol pump-related bribes while Vajpayee was in power, but a coterie led by a top RSS nominee in the party pocketed a substantial part of that amount. The report had also indicated that the money had been used to fund ‘anti-party activities’. There was also a fixed scale for bribes to allocate petrol pumps during the 2003 scam, the report said. In 2006, the Indian Express, quoting a top BJP leader from the state, reported that the Kerala unit had been “allowed” by the national leadership to “accept donations” in return for allocating petrol pumps, but the party made the mistake of allowing a caucus to handle the exchange and keep the money themselves. They didn’t properly handover this money and obviously, given the nature of the exchange, the party did not have access to legal recourse.
A probe was ordered into these allegations after the dismal performance of the party in the Lok Sabha by-polls in Thiruvananthapuram in 2005, when its former state president C.K. Padmanabhan polled just 37,000 votes (the party got over a lakh votes in the elections before that).
The 2005 inquiry committee warned the party that the credibility and the vote base of the BJP in Kerala was at stake. The party in Kerala, however, survived the scare and thrived in the coming years, recording its first ever win in the previous assembly elections, thanks to the so-called ‘Modi wave’ across the country. Mukundan was stripped of his role as an RSS pracharak and was asked not to interfere in the Kerala matters, and Pillai drifted away from the BJP and formed his own regional party.
A history of factionalism
The 2006 report submitted by the committee comprising Mohan Shanker, Manjeri Narayanan and former state DGP and BJP state human rights cell chief R.P.C. Nair had clearly indicated towards the factionalism that had gripped the party, right from top to the bottom. Even though the party recorded significant growth in the last decade, factionalism, which had engulfed all Sangh parivar organisations, was thriving. There were always two or more rival groups within the party wanting to wrest power from each other. Every time the battle worsened, the RSS would crack the whip. Rajasekharan was a surprise appointment by Amit Shah when factional bickering was at its peak.
Rajasekharan is said to have told the national leadership that he had set up the MCI scam internal committee confidentially and was not expecting the report to be leaked. Many in the state party leadership feel that the leak was aimed at Ramesh, who is very close to expelled leader Vinod. There are still many lose ends relating to controversial middle man Satheesh Nair, who is still at large in the national capital. Nair, a former air force staffer from Thodupuzha, Kerala, allegedly has access to many top offices, including the prime minister’s office. He is known to be Rajasekharan’s right-hand man whenever he visits Delhi.
The MCI scam has opened a Pandora’s box for the Kerala BJP. It seems to be lost in a morass of allegations and explanations. Immediately after the medical college scam, a string of fresh allegations against party leaders of different strata have come up – massive irregularities in the implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Aushadhi scheme being one of them. Local leaders have allegedly taken bribes amounting to Rs 4 lakh as ‘donations’ to sanction each Jan Aushadhi outlet. The PMO has initiated an inquiry into the issue. Several cases of unauthorised ‘donations’ in the name of party programmes are surfacing across the state. According to one such report, party leaders from Thrissur sent letters to businessmen asking them to donate up to Rs 5 lakh for implementing the prime minister’s projects.
After an impressive performance in the state assembly elections last year, nothing has been going right for the Hindu nationalist party in Kerala. Allegation after allegation have created much embarrassment for the BJP, which time and again calls other parties the ‘champions of corruption’ in the state.
The BJP has been on the backfoot after the police seized fake currency notes worth lakhs and a currency-minting machine from the house of two brothers, who were BJP Yuva Morcha leaders in the Thrissur district. They have subsequently been expelled from the party. The latest scam allegations have added insult to injury for the saffron party, which was already limping.
“You know the state of affairs in our party. It had been like this for long and I can’t see any immediate solution,” said a BJP leader who asked not to be named. “People like me expect a much more positive intervention from the sangham (RSS), which could patch the issues up to a certain extent,” he added.
Even though leaders say that the party has full confidence in Ramesh and it is “101% convinced of the young and vibrant leader’s innocence,” not all seems to be well within the state BJP.
Rajeev Ramachandran is an independent journalist based in Kochi.Share. Is a full update coming at E3? Is a full update coming at E3?
Exit Theatre Mode
BioWare has revealed development on the next Mass Effect title is progressing well, explaining that it's somewhere around the middle of development.
In a tweet, BioWare Montreal studio director Yanick Roy responded to a fan asking whether the game was in the early or late stages of development to explain neither statement was technically accurate.
@Jackmayall5757 Too late for one, too early for the other... So I guess we're somewhere in the middle? :-) — Yanick Roy (@YanickRRoy) April 30, 2014
While we have no idea about when the game will be released, we do know that we're due an update sometime this year. So far all we've had are a few teaser images, word that it'll apparently be fresh but recognisable, and may not relate to Shepard at all.
BioWare has said in the past that it doesn't want the game to be viewed as Mass Effect 4, as such a title does it a disservice. Whatever it ends up being called, our money's on new info coming our way at E3. Not long now, folks.
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter.A Virginia winery owned by President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s son Eric has requested permission to bring in nearly two dozen foreign workers, according to a new report.
The Trump Winery in Virginia is seeking 23 workers from overseas to plant and harvest grapes there this spring, BuzzFeed reported Thursday.
The Department of Labor published a request from the winery, which is also known as Trump Vineyard Estates LLC, earlier that day.
ADVERTISEMENT
Thursday’s posting says potential workers will earn $11.27 hourly working at the 1,300-acre estate from April 3 to as late as Oct. 27.
The workers are being sought using the federal H-2A visa program, which permits U.S. employers to hire foreign agricultural laborers for temporary work as long as no qualified Americans want the jobs instead.
The H-2 visa program has brought more than 100,000 foreigners into the U.S. annually since 2003, BuzzFeed reported, and the initiative has benefited businesses relating to the Trumps.
BuzzFeed added that companies owned by President Trump or bearing his name have sought to hire at least 286 foreign workers since he launched his White House run in June 2015.
Many laborers now work as servers and housecleaners at Mar-a-Lago, the report said |
kedi neighborhoods and taken youths from their homes, firing AK-47s into the air to clear the streets and prevent interference. Human Rights Watch said in a report that 18 people had been killed, most of them by Kabila’s elite Presidential Guard, in the lead-up to the elections.New Delhi: The exit poll published by Dainik Jagran in contravention of election laws right after the first phase of voting ended in Uttar Pradesh was supplied by a senior business executive at the mass circulation Hindi daily – who just also happens to be an activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, The Wire has established.
The poll showed the Bharatiya Janata Party surging ahead of its rivals and though it was was quickly taken down, the ‘news’ it conveyed was widely circulated by BJP and RSS activists across UP via WhatsApp.
Acting on a complaint filed by the Election Commission soon after the publication of the exit poll, the Uttar Pradesh arrested the online editor of Dainik Jagran, Shekhar Tripathi, even though the newspaper’s CEO Sanjay Gupta had admitted the exit poll was “carried by our advertising department.”
It has now emerged that the controversial exit poll was sent to the newspaper by Tanmay Shankar, then the business and marketing head at Jagran Prakashan and MMI Online Ltd – the holding company for the Jagran group’s digital products – and published with the clearance of MMI head Sukriti Gupta.
In an email to Jagran’s various editorial departments on February 10, Tanmay Shankar instructed that “a pre_poll analysis from http://rdiindia.com” run “on our P1 Slot.”
In his email, Shankar mentioned the source of the poll as “http://rdiindia.com”. The trail mail shows that he received the poll from one “Sunil R” with the email address “drsrdi@gmail.com”. While the URL belongs to Resource Development International, a human resources management firm in Gurgaon that has nothing to do with election surveys, the initials RDI are common to another company, Research and Development Initiative, with the URL http://rdiindia.org, which not only has conducted election surveys in the past but whose promoter, Devendra Kumar, has worked with BJP leaders like Arun Jaitley and Vasundhara Raje in the past.
Although the Election Commission’s complaint named Resource Development International, its head, Rajeev Gupta denied any involvement and EC officials acknowledge on background that Dainik Jagran clearly misidentified the company. On his part, Devendra Kumar of Research and Development Initiative told The Wire that he knows nothing about the Jagran poll and that his company was not involved in the matter.
The keys to the mystery, of course, lie with Tanmay Shankar.
Asked for the full name of ‘Sunil R.’ – the man who sent him the poll that he had forwarded to the editorial department of Dainik Jagran – Shankar told The Wire that he did not know. Nor could he explain why he had mentioned http://rdiindia.com as the polling agency in his email.
A call to the offices of the Research and Development Initiative failed to yield any information about ‘Sunil R’ and email queries to the drsrdi@gmail.com have also gone unanswered.
While the EC and UP police are likely to consider Tanmay Shankar a person of interest in their ongoing investigation into the the exit poll, the Jagran executive’s Facebook page provides some clues about his political links that may shed light on the identity of the authors of the poll.
In the wake of The Wire‘s questions, Shankar appears to have edited his Facebook page to delete all traces of his association with the RSS. However, screenshots and photos downloaded before he could do so paint a picture of a man committed to the RSS, attending its ‘shakhas’ and paying obeisance to its revered leader, ‘Guru’ Golwalkar.
“Today is the birthday of two great human beings who devoted their lives to uniting and awakening the self-pride of Hindu society – the second sarsanghchalak of the Sangh, the revered Shri Guruji (Golwalkar) an Chhatrapati Shivaji”, Shankar’s status update said on February 19, 2017. This entry now stands deleted, as do all his photographs at RSS events.
Ironically, the attempt by Shankar to hide his association with the RSS provides a clue to the shadowy forces that appear to have used him as a pawn in their attempt to boost the BJP’s prospects in the assembly election.
Just how crucial was the ‘exit poll’, published in violation of the Representation of the People Act? Consider this analysis by the psephologist Praveen Patil – described by the veteran journalist Vidya Subrahmanyam as “a self-confessed BJP and Modi fan” – on the way the BJP sought to overcome the disastrous first round:
“On Saturday evening, the 11th of February, when the import of BJP’s underperformance in the Jatland of western UP which went to polls in the very first phase began to sink in, there was a sense of déjà vuabout Bihar 2015 where again the party had begun to possibly stare at defeat from the throes of victory. The degree of underperformance of BJP in phase 1 is debatable, but what made it ominous was this was the zone where a saffron sweep was expected and bad beginnings usually demoralise a political party in lengthy election seasons where micro-news travels very fast among the cadre. Possibly whispers were already being heard among the BJP-Sangh circles on what was going wrong.”
The RSS, Patil wrote on February 21, is “great at organisational level in building strong socio-political networks but fails to win narrative battles that require machinations”. This was where Amit Shah found a solution:
“One man seems to have understood this inherent weakness of the BJP and is bringing that much needed strategic depth to the organisation. Thus on that Saturday evening, after phase 1 of Uttar Pradesh, BJP simply did not let go unlike Bihar. Instead it fought back at every level. For instance, there were widespread media reports in the Hindi medium about “BJP sweeping western UP” with even ‘leaked exit polls’ that went viral in the WhatsApp universe along with a strong message of the party’s intent. Cadre morale was not allowed to sag, especially in those areas that were to immediately follow by insulating those networks. Also what we could notice was that the campaign in Lucknow and Kanpur, the 2 big cities from where information generally flows down to smaller towns was redoubled with virtual carpet bombardment. For instance, a day before 2nd phase polling, in the Azam Khan stronghold of Rampur there were widespread WhatsApp messages of “90% Hindu consolidated turnouts” happening all over UP which mostly quoted sources from newspapers of Lucknow. Amit Bhai Shah had learnt his lessons after Bihar and he was not going to take it lying down.”
“I don’t know if Mr. Patil has inside knowledge, or he was simply guessing,” Vidya Subrahmaniam, who first drew my attention to his piece, wrote on March 7, “but what he has to say correlates with what happened from the second phase onward. In fact, I was in west UP when Dainik Jagran published a fake poll showing huge numbers for the BJP in the first phase where, contrary to the poll numbers, the party was widely seen to have lagged behind its rivals. The driver of my cab and several people we met quoted the poll approvingly, though it was taken down almost immediately on the EC’s orders.”
Was the illegal, “leaked exit poll” that Dainik Jagran ran part of the Sangh and BJP strategy of not taking a possible electoral debacle “lying down”? Who is the mysterious ‘Sunil R’ who funnelled the poll to a loyal RSS dupe who was working in the newspaper? Who convinced Sukriti Gupta and Sanjay Gupta – the Jagran group’s owners – to defy the law by running the poll? The hapless Tanmay Shankar has since been moved out of the newspaper to another one of Jagran-MMI’s properties, thebakerymart.com. But he has left behind enough crumbs for the Election Commission and UP police to crack this case – if they really want to.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Jan. 9, 2016, 12:30 AM GMT / Updated Jan. 9, 2016, 12:38 AM GMT By Pete Williams
The U.S. Supreme Court takes up a case Monday that could deal a crippling blow to unions representing millions of the nation's public employees.
The justices are asked to decide whether state government workers who choose not to join a union can nonetheless be required to pay a share of union dues to cover the cost of negotiating contracts.
At stake is the future power and financial health of public sector unions in the 23 states where they have a duty to bargain for both members and non-members alike.
A loss for the unions "would call into question thousands of public-sector contracts covering 9.5 million public employees and affecting scores of critical services, including police, fire, emergency response and, of course, education," said David Frederick, who will argue the case for union teachers from California.
The Supreme Court has long held that requiring non-union members to pay the full amount of union dues would violate their right of free expression, forcing them to subsidize a union's political activities whether they agree with its goals or not.
But since 1977, the high court has said non-union employees can be required to pay a portion of union dues to cover the cost of collective bargaining and prevent "free riders" — workers who get the benefits of a union contract without paying for it.
Now, in a case brought by non-union teachers in California hoping to get the earlier decision overturned, the justices are asked to decide whether even that requirement violates free expression.
"In this era of broken municipal budgets and a national crisis in public education, it is difficult to imagine more politically charged issues than how much money local governments should devote to public employees, or what policies schools should adopt to best educate their children," said Michael Carvin, a lawyer for the challengers.
He argues that the government has no legitimate interest in enhancing a union's treasury at a dissenting employee's expense.
As a fallback, the challengers urge the court to rule that teachers should not have to "opt out" of paying the full amount of dues by filling out a form once a year. Instead, teachers should "opt in" if they wish to pay the full amount, they ask.
The union, the California Teachers Association, urges the court not to overturn its earlier ruling, which held that a state's interests in an orderly workplace outweigh the modest interference with employee expression involved in paying a portion of union dues.
The positions the union takes in negotiating contracts involve "bread-and butter employment issues. Collective bargaining does not resemble the wide-ranging, open, and public debate that the First Amendment traditionally protects," said Frederick, the lawyer for the union.
In two recent rulings, the court's conservatives have signaled a desire to overrule the 1977 decision allowing the collection of a portion of union dues.
"I would not feel very good about my prospects if I were the unions, given what we've seen from the Roberts court in the past two years" said Erin Murphy, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who specializes in federal appeals court cases.
A ruling against unions in this case would not lead to a destruction of public sector unions, she said, though they "might not have the same money and the same power."
But Professor David Cole of Georgetown University's law school sees it differently.
"I think public sector unions have long seen this as a real threat to their continued effective existence at a time when unions are on the decline generally," he said.
Supporters of the union position say represented workers generally make more money.
A study by the National Women's Law Center found that women represented by public sector unions are paid 24 percent more and are more likely to have employer-based health insurance. More than half of union-represented workers in the public sector are women.by @thoughtontracks
Last month, I received a nondescript album submission from Huntronik, an electro-infused trio from Brooklyn. It was the type of email that typically gets buried in the siege of PR spam that floods our inbox on a daily basis. If I was a more intelligent man, I would spend my days designing an algorithm that filters e-mail based upon whether it was sent by a press agency or the band itself. Unfortunately, I only recently learned how to spell algorithm, so that venture will have to wait until a later day.
Within the submission was Huntronik’s debut, self-titled LP. The album features nine, concisely crafted, imminently danceable tracks that straddle the line between krautrock and more traditional, synth-heavy electronic fare. From the initial listen, it was apparent that Huntronik had more going on than the typical bedroom DJ and electronic dance output that has become so trite since multi-track home recording became the right of the everyman a decade or so ago.
The tracks combined textures and tones from a wide swath of influences. The lyrics were both cerebral and playful, growing in depth as each sonic layer was peeled back. I was immediately taken with the release, and wanted to know more. So I reached out Huntronik’s architect and lead vocalist Greg Hunt about doing an interview.
Below, you’ll find the culmination of two chats with Hunt. For readability’s sake, I’ve combined our two discussions. During the interview, we talked about Hunt’s recording process, his goals for the release, his influences – music and otherwise. We talked at length about Hunt’s fascination with the theories of scientist and designer of artificial intelligence, Hugo de Garis. De Garis is a mathematical physicist and leading researcher in the field of evolvable hardware, which uses genetic algorithms to evolve neural networks using three dimensional cellular automata inside field programmable gate arrays. You know, just your everyday music chat. Stream Huntronik’s debut LP, and read the bulk of our interview below.
Connect with Huntronik via Facebook | Twitter
Interview
How was your vacation?
I went to some, random. exploited Carribean island, and drank some girly drinks with big umbrellas on them. I went with my girlfriend and my family. It’s good to be back in our studio. I’m here now – in Greenpoint. I live in Brooklyn. Steve lives in Jersey, I think he’s moving to Brooklyn. John lives in Brooklyn. I’m originally from a town called Acton, right outside of Boston.
What brought you to New York originally?
I moved here four years ago. Just music. I had always played music my whole life, and I just really wanted to buckle down and grind it out in New York.
What kind of music were you into initially?
Initially, I was playing piano when I was about eight, and I played jazz music off and on. It would start and stop from eight to twelve, and in high school I started up again and kinda got into electronic music. I dunno. I listened to maybe like Chemical Brothers or something in high school and was kind of fascinated with two guys and these strange terminals and consoles that were actually kind of conducting this dance music, which I wasn’t at all familiar with. But I started getting into a combination of rock and electronic.
What made you make Huntronik a full band project, as opposed to something you’re just trying to accomplish on your own?
I really wanted to play everything as instruments. Even the electronic sounds. When we play live, we play those with our hands. There is actually only a few loops. Like two drum loops. I’m not a fan of loops or looping anything. It’s like 70s rock. I like that. But I do really like electronics that are kind of grimy and old and kind of feel like they grew out of something. I don’t like clean sounds. My favorite synth is EMS 50 from 1970. It’s like the greatest thing ever. It’s one of the first synthesizers ever made.
Talk about your writing process a little bit. Are these songs that you pretty much construct on your own and take them to the other two members?
Maybe half of the songs, I would just do on my own. Some of them were slower than others, as the process goes. When it was slower, we would tend to do a group thing. But that also worked really well. The song “Rabies” was definitely a really slow, group process that took a few months and the same is true for “Deeper Watts” which went through a number of different versions. It started out as something completely different, and then it just became this kind of groove-oriented song. But most of them, like say “No Deceiver” for example, I just did pretty much on my own and then we just framed it as a group.
Talk more about the various versions of “Deeper Watts” and how the band wound up settling on the end result.
Originally, the song had words and it was structured in a difficult way. In other words, I think we all agreed that it wasn’t enough of a song as it was when we started. And then we just decided to take the elements of the song that we enjoyed the most and re-work the song. So it ended up being kind of a more mellow. It worked as something to put in between songs with words. Cause we do like instrumentals. We like a lot of scapes.
A lot of people talk about music as math in language form, or something like that. And I’m not a musician, but music doesn’t register in that way for me. It’s more of a combination between creativity, technical skill and somebody’s ability to effectively communicate. You said that you don’t like loops, and prefer these dirty electronic sounds that feel like they grew out of something. Talk more about what you mean by that, and where that gets lost with most electronic music.
A great example is Conrad Schnitzler. He’s this guy who was one of the founding electronic composers back in the late 60s and 70s on up to his death a few years back. And, what he did was use these really obscure synthesizers to make music that sounded like some kind of alien communication or something. It’s very strange. It sounds completely organic. I think that there’s a certain sense of wonder that come from that kind of electronic music that you’ll never really get from that more mechanistic stuff. I also like German minimal house or something. But it’s almost like a different thing completely.
I mean, this term electronic to me is confusing, because there’s an argument that you could make that guitar music electronic. So it’s a confusing distinction to try to draw. But it just means more that I want to hear something that sounds like it’s alive I suppose.
What are some examples of stuff that you’re listening to these days?
Well for rock, I like bands like Iceage, The Men, and Cave. Cave actually came out of Indiana, I believe. It might’ve been Illinois. It’s either Indiana or Illinois. [They’re currently based out of Chicago] For older rock, I like kraut bands like Can. For electronic stuff, I like this guy Pole, whose name I think is Stefan Betke. For older electronic stuff I like guys that were using really big, strange boxes. I have a bunch of really obscure records that are just crazy sounding today that people don’t really make. I guess Oneohtrix Points Never is like one example of contemporary electronics that I dig.
I remember when we were exchanging emails you mentioned Super Meat Boy, are you a gamer?
Yeah, a little bit. I played Super Meat Boy, X-Com. That was fun my friend has that. Yeah, you know. It’s fun.
On tracks like Deeper Watts, I get like subtle influences of video game sounds. Are those conscious influences at all or not so much?
I think so. I like 8-bit type sounds. I just like texture a lot. It’s odd, because I like melody a lot, but I also like texture. It’s one of those things I think people who are 30 or under grew up with. They were around video games and I think it permeated their brains or palate if you will.
Are there any other non-musical influences that informed this record at all?
Definitely. This guy who is a professor of computer science named Hugo de Garis. The song “We Can Build You” is basically just me trying to deal with a lot of his ideas and theories about computers. It’s hard really to articulate this, but I think today people do not associate rock music – at all – with computers. I guess if you say “computers and music,” most people are thinking of electronic music, and that definitely plays into it. But when you say computers, you don’t really think of rock music and I was trying to make a serious rock album that dealt with the future and what the future might be about for humans. I think Hugo de Garis has an interesting approach to rock.
I haven’t read his books, does he address something about music specifically. Or how did you apply what he was talking about to music?
That was the big challenge. It wasn’t all him. I don’t think he ever talks about music, but my big challenge was that if I want to approach taking this seriously. If I want to write a song like “We Can Build You,” for example. If I want to write a song about a higher intelligence and put it into the framework of rock music. Is that even doable? Will it still be interesting? I thought it turned out okay. I think, maybe it’s not something people will get all the way. Like, a lot of people will say, maybe this means something else. And that’s part of the fun. I don’t ever want to put something on a silver platter and say this is what this is. I like when people have their own interpretations.
I watched like two-thirds of that 21-part interview with de Garis. It’s fascinating stuff.
I remember when I watched that, I was pretty disturbed by it. I dunno. I work through a lot of ideas anxieties and problems through music. So, now I actually feel nothing about it. But yeah, I remember feeling really disturbed. But yeah, it’s interesting.
He’s most concerned with this issue of species dominance and its potential to inspire mass violence, but you said that you were less concerned with the pros and cons of what this technological evolution is causing. And that you were more interested in how it’s affecting our interactions with each other right now. I just wondered how you were able to push off that “threat” for lack of a better term.
That’s a great question. I think, for me, the way I see looking into the feature. I think the scientific community, generally the rule is, if you can view it, it can be done. So I just kind of internalized that, and said forget it. Whatever anxiety I have, there’s really not much to worry about, because whatever is going to happen will probably just happen. In other words, if I feel fear or anxiety about where technology is headed, there’s no point in me fighting something that can’t be stopped. I feel, not complacent, but I feel content that the direction technology is headed. But I don’t feel good about the way that people see themselves or see others, necessarily?
What do you mean by that?
For me, I know that there is a tendency now to be distracted and to lose focus on one thing, simply because there’s more distractions and there are more things coming at us. So, in that light, interacting with other people can become sitting in a room looking at a screen rather than being physically present. It’s that thing you’ve heard over and over: Oh, give a person a call and go hang out. But, I’m not necessarily sure that technology’s not good for socializing with people. It’s just something I wonder about.
You wrestle with some serious topics on the debut. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people who hear the record, or see the band play live are not going to be digesting these songs on that level. So why do you think Huntronik’s music resonates beyond the heady stuff? What do you think allows it to reach listeners on other levels?
Mostly because it’s not a joke. The music is rhythmic, but the instrumentation that we use is a little strange. I use synths. I play a sampler like a keyboard. But I think fundamentally, it’s because the song structures and the grooves resonate on a musical level. I think you’re absolutely right. If you’re just casually listening to some band and you’re hearing these songs, I don’t think you would necessarily make the connection of what I had in mind. But it’s possible to come up with your own interpretations that will satisfy you as a listener.
How did the band come together initially?
Basically, it was me and this other guy playing bass originally. The other guy left, and John – the drummer – joined up, and then Steve joined up. Now, we have to swap out John because he can’t afford the band – he has to go and work. But there’s been a few different members. But it was originally just a duo, and now we’re a trio.
You said the other member has to go to work, does that mean you don’t have a day job?
Well, I vacillate between walking dogs and working at restaurants. Anything I can do to pay the rent.
Keep fightin’ the good fight. What are the plans for 2013?
For 2013, I’d like basically to get the album heard by as many people as we can, so that we can tour. I’ve got a lot of ideas about new music. I hope the other group members will be into it, and we can work on that. But pretty much, just playing shows and trying to get people to hear the record.
Are you planning to continue to explore this theme of technological evolution? What kind of ideas are you wrestling with?
I think I’m going to move away from the technology thing. Aesthetically, I think it will be similar. This is just guesswork at this point, but I think we might grow in a way, harsher. Not more abrasive, but I’d say more attacking or aggressive. I keep hearing these sounds, rhythms and stuff and I want to try to get to them. But I think lyrically, there are other things that I may want to try to approach. More along the lines of just being a person, and not framing it with science or theories or anything like that.
Interview and introduction by Rob PeoniFormer President Barack Obama released a statement in warm memory of late Steelers chairman Dan Rooney, who died Thursday at age 84.
Rooney, in addition to his ownership duties with the Steelers, a franchise founded by his father, served as U.S. ambassador to Ireland during Obama’s first term. Rooney was a lifelong Republican who endorsed Obama in 2008 and became one of his strongest supporters.
“Dan Rooney was a great friend of mine, but more importantly, he was a great friend to the people of Pittsburgh, a model citizen, and someone who represented the United States with dignity and grace on the world stage,” Obama wrote in a statement. “I knew he’d do a wonderful job when I named him as our United States Ambassador to Ireland, but naturally, he surpassed my high expectations, and I know the people of Ireland think fondly of him today.
“And I know the people of Pittsburgh, who loved him not only for the Super Bowl championships he brought as the owner of the Steelers, but for his generosity of spirit, mourn his passing today. Michelle and I offer our condolences to the Rooney family, some of the most gracious and thoughtful people we know - even as we celebrate the life of Dan Rooney: a championship-caliber good man.”
Rooney is also credited for helping instate the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” which stipulates teams must interview at least one minority candidate for general manager and head coaching vacancies.
Steelers players paid tribute to Rooney on Thursday as well.This is the third post analyzing rental postings in Vancouver. Here are links to the first and second posts.
We expect some new measures aimed at cooling the housing market if the NDP and Greens sucessfully form government. Wouldn't it be great to see if anything is working? Ideally, we would look at housing sale prices but the released aggregates are clear as mud. Instead, let's use our rental data as a proxy. Since changes in buying sentiment shifts the rent vs. buy equation, we should be able to observe effects indirectly.
To do this, we have to start recording data now to serve as a baseline. So, I'm going to start writing these rental reports on a monthly basis. Each report will summarize that month's data along with comparisons to the historical trend. Ready? Let's go.
For the month of May, we saw rental volumes pulling back slightly (-3%) across the city. Decreasing volume was mainly driven by lower supply in Sunset and Marpole. In the other 4 rent-dense areas (Downtown, Mount-Pleasant-E/W, and Point Grey) volumes have been stable MoM.
On the price front, the median cost of rentals have been stable for 1 ($1850) and 2 ($2500) bedrooms. However, prices for Studios (+3.22%) and 3 bedrooms (+1.78%) have risen slightly.
So, despite all the sales news, the rental situation in Vancouver has stayed mostly the same in the last few months. Is this the calm before the storm?
PricesGaruda is a part of state insignia in India, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. The Indonesian official coat of arms is centered on the Garuda. The national emblem of Indonesia is called Garuda Pancasila. The Indian Air Force also uses the Garuda in their coat of arms and even named their special operations unit after it as Garud Commando Force. [9]
Garuda is described as the king of birds and a kite -like figure. [5] [6] He is shown either in zoomorphic form (giant bird with partially open wings) or an anthropomorphic form (man with wings and some bird features). Garuda is generally a protector with power to swiftly go anywhere, ever watchful and an enemy of the serpent. [1] [6] [7] He is also known as Tarkshya and Vynateya. [8]
The Garuda ( Sanskrit : गरुड Garuḍa ; Pāli : गरुळ Garuḷa ) is a legendary bird or bird-like creature in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain mythology. [1] [2] [3] He is variously the vehicle mount ( vahana ) of the Hindu god Vishnu, a dharma-protector and Astasena in Buddhism, and the Yaksha of the Jain Tirthankara Shantinatha. [2] [3] [4]
In Hinduism, Garuda is a divine eagle-like sun bird and the king of birds.[5] A Garutman is mentioned in the Rigveda who is described as celestial deva with wings.[10][11] The Shatapatha Brahmana embedded inside the Yajurveda text mentions Garuda as the personification of courage. In the Mahabharata, Garutman is stated to be same as Garuda, then described as the one who is fast, who can shapeshift into any form and enter anywhere.[10] He is a powerful creature in the epics, whose wing flapping can stop the spinning of heaven, earth and hell. He is described to be the vehicle mount of the Hindu god Vishnu, and typically they are shown together.[10]
According to George Williams, Garuda has roots in the verb gri, or speak.[11] He is a metaphor in the Vedic literature for Rik (rhythms), Saman (sounds), Yajna (sacrifices), and the atman (Self, deepest level of consciousness). In the Puranas, states Williams, Garuda becomes a literal embodiment of the idea, and the Self who attached to and inseparable from the Supreme Self (Vishnu).[11][12] Though Garuda is an essential part of the Vaishnavism mythology, he also features prominently in Shaivism mythology, Shaiva texts such as the Garuda Tantra and Kirana Tantra, and Shiva temples as a bird and as a metaphor of atman.[12][13][14]
Iconography Edit
[15] Relief depicting a portable Garuda pillar, one of the oldest images of Garuda, Bharhut, 100 BCE.
The Hindu texts on Garuda iconography vary in their details. If in the bird form, he is eagle-like, typically with the wings slightly open as if ready and willing to fly wherever he needs to.[6] In part human-form, he may have an eagle-like nose, beak or legs, his eyes are open and big, his body is the color of emerald, his wings are golden-yellow. He may be shown with either two or four hands.[6] If he is not carrying Vishnu, he holds a jar of amrita (immortality nectar) in one hand in the rear and an umbrella in the other, while the front pair of hands are in anjali (namaste) posture. If he is carrying Vishnu, the rear hands provide the support for Vishnu's feet.[6][7]
According to the text Silparatna, states Rao, Garuda is best depicted with only two hands and with four bands of colors: "golden yellow color from feet to knees, white from knees to navel, scarlet from navel to neck, and black above the neck". His hands, recommends the text, should be in abhaya (nothing to fear) posture.[6] In Sritatvanidhi text, the recommended iconography for Garuda is a kneeling figure, who wears one or more serpents, pointed bird-beak like nose, his two hands in namaste posture. This style is commonly found in Hindu temples dedicated to Vishnu.[6]
In some iconography, Garuda carries Lord Vishnu and his two consorts by his side: Lakshmi(Thirumagal) and Bhūmi (Bhuma-Devi).[8][16][better source needed]
Garuda iconography is found in early temples of India, such as on the underside of the eave at Cave 3 entrance of the Badami cave temples (6th-century).[6][17]
Mythology Edit
Garuda is found in Vishnu temples; Above: in Belur, India.
Garuda mythology is linked to that of Aruna – the charioteer of Surya (Sun god). However, these Indian mythologies are different, inconsistent across the texts. Both, Aruna and Garuda, developed from egg. According to one version, states George Williams, Kashyapa Prajapati's two wives Vinata and Kadru wanted to have children. Kashyapa granted them a boon.[18] Kadru asked for one thousand Nāga sons, while Vinata wanted two, each equal to Kadru's thousand naga sons. Kashyapa blessed them, and then went away to a forest to meditate. Later, Kadru gave birth to one thousand eggs, while Vinata gave birth to two eggs. These incubated for five hundred years, upon which Kadru's eggs broke open and out came her 1,000 sons. Vinata eager for her sons, impatiently broke one of the eggs from which emerged the partially formed Aruna, who looked radiant and reddish as the morning sun but not as bright as the midday sun.[18][19] Aruna chided his mother, Vinata for her impatience since he was born without legs and warned her to not break open the second egg but wait. Aruna then left to become the charioteer of Surya, the sun god.
Vinata waited, and after many years the second egg hatched, and Garuda was born. Garuda later went to war with his step brothers, the Nagas.[18][20]
Some myths present Garuda as so massive that he can block out the sun.[21] The text Garuda Purana is named after him.[22]
Garuda is presented in the Mahabharata mythology as one who eats snake meat, such as the story about him planning to kill and eat Sumukha snake, where Indra attempts to intervene.[23] Garudas are also a race of birds who devour snakes in the epic.[23]
The Suparṇākhyāna, a late Vedic period poem considered to be among the "earliest traces of epic poetry in India," relates the legend of Garuda, and provides the basis for a later, expanded version which appears within the Mahābhārata.[24][25]
Symbolism Edit
Garuda's links to Vishnu – the Hindu god who fights injustice and destroys evil in his various avatars to preserve dharma, has made him an iconic symbol of king's duty and power, an insignia of royalty or dharma. His eagle-like form is shown either alone or with Vishnu, signifying divine approval of the power of the state.[11] He is found on the faces of many early Hindu kingdom coins with this symbolism, either as a single headed bird or a three-headed bird that watches all sides.[26]
Throughout the Mahabharata, Garuda is invoked as a symbol of impetuous violent force, of speed, and of martial prowess. Powerful warriors advancing rapidly on doomed foes are likened to Garuda swooping down on a serpent. Defeated warriors are like snakes beaten down by Garuda. The Mahabharata character Drona uses a military formation named after Garuda. Krishna even carries the image of Garuda on his banner.[citation needed]Prep Time: 10 Minutes
Cook Time: 35 to 45 Minutes
Now that summer is almost here the markets and fruit stands are filling their bins with fresh fruits and vegetables. This is the perfect time of the year to make this delicious fresh fruit cobbler. This is such a simple recipe and so delicious. I consider this cobbler a comfort food.
When I was growing up I loved when summer came. I knew during the summer my grandmother would be baking her fresh fruit pies and cobblers. Our home would smell so wonderful during this time of year. Grandma loved to make all of her jams, jellies, canned fruits and vegetable for the long winter months ahead. I remember spending hours in the kitchen stealing the slices of fresh fruit she had cut into her bowl. When her back was turned was the perfect time to reach in and grab a few slices.
No matter how many peaches, nectarines, or strawberries the farmers delivered to our home none tasted as good as the ones grandma had cut. All summer long |
Hugh (Glass House, September 19, 2016).
NEW-NEW: 22 (Thursday) 7 pm — The Regulator Bookshop (The Durham Armory) Colson Whitehead, “The Underground Railroad”. Whitehead is the author of the brilliant post-apocalyptic zombie novel Zone One. Here: “Prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead comes to The Regulator to discuss his new book, The Underground Railroad, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage, and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share. This event is free and open to the public.”
OCTOBER 2016
NEW-NEW: 7 (Friday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Emma Donoghue – ‘The Wonder’. “The author of Room and Frog Music visits with a powerful psychological thriller. Emma Donoghue shares The Wonder on Friday, October 7, at 7 pm. An English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle – a girl said to have survived without food for months. She soon finds herself fighting to save the child’s life in a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, and a story of love pitted against evil.”
11 — NC author book release day for The Perilous Journey of the Much Too Spontaneous Girl by Leigh Statham (Month9Books, October 11), a follow-on to The Perilous Journey of the Not So Innocuous Girl.
NEW-NEW: 14 (Friday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books presents Jodi Picoult – ‘Small Great Things’ (ticketed off-site event). (Fiction.)
15 (Saturday) — The Charlotte Mariott City Center hosts Carolina Book Fest 2016 with a huge author lineup, followed by the annual “Monster Mash” dance party.
NEW-NEW: 17 (Monday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Karim Dimechkie – ‘Lifted by the Great Nothing’. (Fiction.)
18 — Durham author book release day for Six Wakes by Mur Laffert (Orbit Books).
18 — Pittsboro author book release day for Hamster Princess: Ratpunzel by Ursula Vernon (Dial Books).
18 — NC author book release day for Scepter of Fire by Vicki L. Weavil (Month9Books, October 18), Book 2 in her Snow Queen Saga.
20 (Thursday) 7:30 pm — The Durham Performing Arts Center hosts astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, presented in partnership with UNC’s Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.
NEW-NEW: 21-23 (Friday to Sunday) — Cosplay America 2016 at the Sheraton Chapel Hill Hotel (1 Europa Dr, Chapel Hill).
25 — Raleigh author book release day for The Flash: The Haunting of Barry Allen by Clay and Susan Griffith (Titan Books, October 25), a “crossover” novel with The CW’s Arrow.
25 — NC author book release day for Into the Fire (Night Prince) by Jeanine Frost (Avon).
NOVEMBER 2016
11-13 (Friday to Sunday) — NC Comicon 2016 at the Durham Convention Center.
NEW-NEW: 18 (Friday) 7 pm — The Regulator Bookshop presents Community Conversation with Roy Scranton, “War Porn”. Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, and this is his first novel.
DECEMBER 2016
NEW: 4 (Sunday) 10 am to 4 pm — Raleigh Comic Book Show at the Hilton Garden Inn Crabtree (3912 Arrow Dr, Raleigh). Free admission.
JANUARY 2017
TBA (Friday to Sunday) — illogiCon with author guest of honor Daniel Jose Older.
MARCH 2017
18-19 (Saturday and Sunday) — Oak City Comicon 2017 at the Raleigh Convention Center.
MAY 2017
23-28 (Tuesday to Sunday) — The Durham Performing Arts Center presents Finding Neverland, which “tells the incredible story behind one of the world’s most beloved characters: Peter Pan. Playwright J.M. Barrie struggles to find inspiration until he meets four young brothers and their beautiful widowed mother. Spellbound by the boys’ enchanting make-believe adventures, he sets out to write a play that will astound London theatergoers.”
JUNE 2017
1 — NC author book release day for The Sweetest Burn (A Broken Destiny Novel) by Jeanine Frost (HQN Books).
– END –This is supposed to be a serious discussion? Inflation is at 1,5% and republicans are trying to restrict FED's freedom of setting the threshold for the inflation target that, roughly, allows for respecting the employment target, "because they need to make sure inflation will not exceed 2%"?????
This is just making employment a "secondary-target" (in fact a non achievable target), canceling the current mandate, just not calling it that.
The basic problem that democrats have to address is that the current mandate does not specify who (e.g., which body or institution) *and how* should define "maximum employment" for the current state of the economy, and if it the target value of interest is a medium term average or a threshold. To make this reflect targets set by government (leaving instruments to the FED), the institution defining "maximum employment" should be part of the government. In my opinion, the "how" of defining "maximum employment," should be set by legislation and not under Treasury control.
At the same time, the FED should be allowed short-term biased targeting of inflation against employment and the other way round, in difficult times (i.e., if only the economy is -already- in a weak state; such states need to be defined and the FED should report on them).‘We discovered that bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from. We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before. (Children from Blackawton)’.
Real science has the potential to not only amaze, but also transform the way one thinks of the world and oneself. This is because the process of science is little different from the deeply resonant, natural processes of play. Play enables humans (and other mammals) to discover (and create) relationships and patterns. When one adds rules to play, a game is created. This is science: the process of playing with rules that enables one to reveal previously unseen patterns of relationships that extend our collective understanding of nature and human nature. When thought of in this way, science education becomes a more enlightened and intuitive process of asking questions and devising games to address those questions. But, because the outcome of all game-playing is unpredictable, supporting this ‘messyness’, which is the engine of science, is critical to good science education (and indeed creative education generally). Indeed, we have learned that doing ‘real’ science in public spaces can stimulate tremendous interest in children and adults in understanding the processes by which we make sense of the world. The present study (on the vision of bumble-bees) goes even further, since it was not only performed outside my laboratory (in a Norman church in the southwest of England), but the ‘games’ were themselves devised in collaboration with 25 8- to 10-year-old children. They asked the questions, hypothesized the answers, designed the games (in other words, the experiments) to test these hypotheses and analysed the data. They also drew the figures (in coloured pencil) and wrote the paper. Their headteacher (Dave Strudwick) and I devised the educational programme (we call ‘i,scientist’), and I trained the bees and transcribed the childrens' words into text (which was done with smaller groups of children at the school's local village pub). So what follows is a novel study (scientifically and conceptually) in ‘ kids speak ’ without references to past literature, which is a challenge. Although the historical context of any study is of course important, including references in this instance would be disingenuous for two reasons. First, given the way scientific data are naturally reported, the relevant information is simply inaccessible to the literate ability of 8- to 10-year-old children, and second, the true motivation for any scientific study (at least one of integrity) is one's own curiousity, which for the children was not inspired by the scientific literature, but their own observations of the world. This lack of historical, scientific context does not diminish the resulting data, scientific methodology or merit of the discovery for the scientific and ‘non-scientific’ audience. On the contrary, it reveals science in its truest (most naive) form, and in this way makes explicit the commonality between science, art and indeed all creative activities.
1. Introduction
(a) Once upon a time …
People think that humans are the smartest of animals, and most people do not think about other animals as being smart, or at least think that they are not as smart as humans. Knowing that other animals are as smart as us means we can appreciate them more, which could also help us to help them.
Scientists do experiments on monkeys, because they are similar to man, but bees could actually be close to man too. We see bees in the natural habitat doing what they do, but you do not really see them doing human things—such as solving human puzzles like Sudoku. So it makes you wonder if they could solve a human puzzle. If they could solve it, it would mean that they are really smart, smarter than we thought before, which would mean that humans might have some link with bees. If bees are like us in some way, then understanding them could help us understand ourselves better.
To get ready to do the experiments with the bees we first talked about science being about playing games and making puzzles. We then got into groups and made up games to play using random pieces of physical education equipment. This gave us experience of thinking of games and puzzles. We then had to explain our games to other people. After talking about what it is like to create games and how games have rules, we talked about seeing the world in different ways by wearing bug eyes, mirrors and rolled-up books. We then watched the David Letterman videos of ‘Stupid Dog Tricks’, in which dogs were trained to do funny things. Next, we too had to learn to solve a puzzle that Beau (a neuroscientist) and Mr Strudwick (our headteacher) gave us (which took an artificial brain 10 000 trials to solve, but only four for us). Afterwards, we started asking questions about bees, and then more specific questions about seeing colour using the bee arena (figure 1). Figure 1. Conditions and responses to ‘test 1’ (control). (a) The pattern of colours that the bees were trained to and tested on in their first test (see text for explanation). (b) The selections made by all the bees tested (dots show where each bee landed and tried to get sugar water). (c) A table showing the preferences of each bee during testing (see text for explanation).
We came up with lots of questions, but the one we decided to look at was whether bees could learn to use the spatial relationships between colours to figure out which flowers had sugar water in them and which had salt water in them. It is interesting to ask this question, because in their habitat there may be flowers that are bad for them, or flowers from which they might already have collected nectar. This would mean that it is important for bees to learn which flower to go to or to avoid, which would need them to remember the flowers that were around it, which is like a puzzle.
To test this we gave the bees a series of challenges to see if they could complete them or not, and then tested them to see if they solved the puzzle and how they solved it. It was a difficult puzzle, because the bees could not just learn to go to the colour of the flower. Instead, they had to learn to go to one colour (blue) if it was surrounded by the opposite colour (yellow), but also to go to the opposite colour (yellow) if it was surrounded by blue. We also wanted to know if all the bees solved the puzzle in the same way. If not, it would mean that bees have personality (if a bee goes to the blue flower every time, it tells us that it really likes blue).
2. Material and methods
(a) The bee arena
The bee arena, which was made out of Plexiglas, had six sides. The arena was 1 m high, 1 m wide and 1 m deep, and two of the side panels had three doors each. It had a vertical lightbox at the end opposite the side through which the bees entered by a small hole. The lightbox was made out of aluminium, with a Plexiglas screen in front of the six fluorescent lights. An aluminium cross was placed in front of the Plexiglas screen, and this cross had grooves in its sides so that we could slide four black aluminium panels into the cross. Each panel had 16 cut-out circular holes in four rows of four circles each. Each circle was 8 cm in diameter. The holes were covered by the Plexiglas screen. In the centre of each circle was a Plexiglas rod with a small hole in the middle in which we put sugar water, salt water or nothing. Behind each hole there were slits so that squares of coloured gel filters could be slotted in, making the light shining through each hole coloured. It was like putting a piece of coloured see-through paper on a light to let the colour of the paper shine through.
(b) The bees
The bees had black and yellow stripes with white bottoms. The type of bee was Bombus terrestris. The beehive was delivered from Koppert (UK).
(c) Training phase 1
To teach the bees to go to the Plexiglas rods as if they were flowers, all the circles in every panel were kept white, and all the rods had sugar water in them. Once the labelled foragers learned that the flowers contained a reward, which took four days, we marked the bees, and then set up the puzzle.
(d) Marking bees
We let the foragers into the arena and turned the lights off, which made the bees stop flying (because they do not want to fly into anything). We picked the bees up with bee tweezers and put them into a pot with a lid. We then put the tube with the bees in it into the school's fridge (and made bee pie ). The bees fell asleep. Once they fell asleep, we took the bees out, one at a time, and painted little dots on them (yellow, blue, orange, blue-orange, blue-yellow, etc.). We put them into the tube and warmed them up and then let them into the arena. No bees were harmed during this procedure.
(e) Training phase 2 (‘the puzzle’ … duh duh duuuuhhh)
We set up a puzzle for the bees as in the following. Imagine having a panel with 16 circles, with a large square of 12 yellow circles on the outside and a small square of four blue circles in the middle. This was the case for two panels, but the other two panels were the opposite, and instead of yellow on the outside as the larger square and blue on the inside as the smaller square, we had blue on the outside and yellow on the inside. The sugar reward (1 : 1 with water) was only in the middle four flowers inside each panel of 16 flowers. Every 10–40 min, we swapped the locations of the panels around the different quadrants so that the bees could not learn the locations of the rewarding flowers. We also cleaned the Plexiglas stems so that the bees could not use scent to tell the other bees that flower had the reward. Instead they had to learn: if there was blue on the outside ring of each panel of 16 circles, then they had to go to the inner four yellow circles. If, however, there was yellow on the outside ring, then they had to go to the inner four blue circles. During the first 2 days of training, sugar water was placed only in the four middle flowers in each panel and nothing in the outside ring (so that they would get the hang of it). During the second 2 days we added salt water to the flowers in the outside rings. We did this so that they would learn not to go just to the colours, but had to learn the pattern. Otherwise they might fail the test, and it would be a disaster. After training, we tested the bees to see if they solved the puzzle.
(f) Testing the bees
We tested the bees using the same pattern of colours, but without sugar water or salt water, to see which flowers they would go to. We also moved the locations of the panels so that the layout was different from when they were just trained. We let the labelled foragers into the arena one at a time so that they would not copy each other (as humans might). We tracked their flower choices using a sheet of paper with the 64 circles marked into the four quadrants. Whenever the bees landed on a flower and stuck their tongue (proboscis) into the Plexiglas rod, we would mark the matching circle on the sheet. We marked each circle with a ‘1’, a ‘2’ or a ‘3’ and so on, to track where they went to see how their behaviour might have changed with time. After a while, the bees might have got annoyed because they were not getting a reward, and might have started making mistakes or searching randomly. So we let each forager make only around 30 choices before stopping the test. Each bee was tested three times (see §3).
3. Results
After training the bees in the arena, we tested them three times to see if they had learned anything during training.
(a) Test 1 (the control)
In the first test the bees were given the same pattern we had trained them with. After training, we moved the colours of the panels clockwise once, so that the colours of the quadrants would be different for the bees, and they could not just go to the same place as last time to get a reward (see figure 1a for a hand drawing of the test). If the bees had solved the puzzle, they should land on the flowers in the middle of each quadrant and stick their tongues (proboscis) in the flower, as during training this is how they would have had a reward (during the test, they did not get a reward).
Figure 1b shows where four of the bees went during the test (unfortunately, one of the bees (called ‘yellow’) did not come out of the hive during this test). Each dot in figure 1b is an attempted forage. The figure shows that the bees went to the middle flowers 126 times, and to the outside flowers in the four quadrants a total of 13 times (see ‘total’ in figure 1c). So, out of 139 attempted forages, 90.6 per cent were to correct flowers (correct means flowers that would have had sugar water during training).
Figure 1c shows how many times each individual bee went to correct and incorrect blue and yellow flowers. We did this so that it would be clearer to see where each bee went during the test. ‘Orange’ (O) bee selected seven correct (middle) yellows and only one incorrect (outside) yellow. She also went to 29 correct blue and only one incorrect blue. This bee prefers blue in the middle, but also prefers yellow in the middle. This bee did extremely well, because it went to both colours at correct locations in the flowers. ‘Blue/yellow’ (B/Y) bee went to neither outside yellow flowers nor middle yellow flowers. Instead it went to 25 correct blue flowers (middle) and only four incorrect blue flowers (outside). So this bee preferred blue to yellow. The ‘Blue/Orange’ (B/O) bee went to 31 correct yellow flowers and four incorrect yellow flowers, and never went to blue flowers. The ‘Blue’ (B) bee went to 33 correct yellow flowers and only three incorrect yellow flowers, and selected the correct blue flowers only once. These results are shown in figure 1c. We conclude that one bee went to a mixture of colours in the correct locations, but the rest preferred one colour over the other. However, although they preferred one colour, they only went to the middle of the panel that had that colour (as this is the flower that would have had a reward). This test shows that altogether the bees solved the puzzle very well, as their choices collectively were divided between all blue and yellow rewarding flowers. We then presented the bees with two more tests to see how they solved the puzzle they were trained for.
(b) Test 2 (the first experiment)
Test 2 was very similar to test 1, except that the middle flowers in each quadrant were green. We did this to see whether the bees learned to go to the colours or to the location of the rewarding flowers during training. If the bees learned to go to the location of the rewarding flowers, then they should land on the green flowers in test 2. See figure 2a for a hand drawing of this test. Figure 2. Conditions and responses to ‘test 2’. (a) The pattern of colours that the bees were tested on in their second test (see text for explanation). (b) A table showing the preferences of each bee during test 2 (see text for explanation).
Figure 2b shows a table of the choices made by the bees during this test. In total, the bees went to the green middle flowers only 34 times, and to the outside blue and yellow flowers 76 times (see total in figure 2b). So, out of 110 attempted forages, 30.9 per cent were to the middle flowers. If the bees were guessing, they should have selected the green flowers 25 per cent of the time, which is very close to 30 per cent. So we conclude that the bees did not solve test 1 by only going to the middle flowers of each quadrant (‘dah dahhh dahhhhhh’). However, two of the bees (labelled B/O and B) went most often to the green, middle flowers. So they seemed to have learned a different rule to the other three bees.
(c) Test 3 (the second experiment)
In the third test, instead of having large squares of yellow and blue around the outside of each panel, and a smaller square of yellow and blue on the inside of each panel, we took the four inside flowers and put them in the corners of each panel. See figure 3a for a hand drawing of what this test looked like. We did this because we wanted to see if the bees solved test 1 by learning during training to go to the colours of each panel that were fewest in number. We could also see if they still preferred to go only to the middle flowers. If the bees had learned to go to flowers that were fewest in each panel, then they should go to the flowers in the corners. Figure 3. Conditions and responses to ‘test 3’. (a) The pattern of colours that the bees were tested on in their third test (see text for explanation). (b) A table showing the preferences of each bee during test 3 (see text for explanation).
The table in figure 3b shows where all five bees went during the test. You can see that the bees as a group went to the corner flowers 59 times, and to the ‘not-corners’ 86 times (see ‘total’ in figure 3b). So, out of 145 attempted forages, 40.1 per cent were to the corners. This is very different from what they did in test 1. When the same flowers were not in the corners but in the middle as in test 1, they selected them 90.6 per cent of the time, which is 2.2 times more often. We think that the bees in test 3 selected the flowers randomly, and conclude that the bees did not learn to go to the flowers that had the fewest colours in each panel. Also, this time, the B and B/O bees did not prefer the middle flowers in each panel. This means that in test 2 they must have used the larger square of blue and yellow flowers to decide to forage from the middle green flowers.
4. Discussion
This experiment is important, because, as far as we know, no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment before. It tells us that bees can learn to solve puzzles (and if we are lucky we will be able to get them to do Sudoku in a couple of years' time). In this experiment, we trained bees to solve a particular puzzle. The puzzle was go to blue if surrounded by yellow, but yellow if surrounded by blue.
Test 1 showed that the bees learned to solve this puzzle. We know this because the test results showed that they mostly went to the flowers that they were supposed to go to, because those were the ones that had contained a sugar reward before. However, we also noticed that the bees solved the puzzle in different ways, and that some were more clever than others. Two bees preferred yellow and two others preferred blue flowers. The B bee was best at understanding the pattern in the first test, because it had the most correct answers compared to incorrect answers. It also went both to correct yellow and correct blue flowers, although it preferred the blue flowers.
What is important about this puzzle is that there is more than one strategy the bees could use to solve it. One strategy would be to use two rules: (i) go to the middle four flowers in each panel, and (ii) ignore the colour. Another strategy would be to go to yellow if surrounded by blue or blue if surrounded by yellow. They could also learn to avoid the surrounding flowers, and as a result only go to the middle flowers. Or they could go to the fewest number of coloured flowers in each panel. Of course they could also have chosen randomly, and they might get them right or they might get them wrong. Or they could have just gone to a colour, but then they would not have solved the whole puzzle, only half of it.
Test 2 tested whether the bees had learned to go to the middle of each panel and ignored the colour. If this was true then they should have gone to the green flowers. If they had learned to go to only middle blue and yellow flowers, then they should have gone either to the surrounding blue and yellow flowers or no flowers at all. The results tell us that three of the bees preferred to go to the colours that they had learned before, and avoided the middle green flowers. Two of the bees, however, mainly went to the middle flowers, including the B bee, which went to both correct yellow and correct blue flowers during the first (control) test. So they had learned to solve the puzzle using different rules. Test 3 also showed that one of the rules was not just to go to any middle flower, as they rarely went to the middle flowers, or to go to the flowers that had the fewest colours in each panel, because they did not prefer the corner flowers. Instead, they seemed to select the flowers at random, but funnily continued to go to their ‘favourite’ colour.
We conclude that bees can solve puzzles by learning complex rules, but sometimes they make mistakes. They can also work together (indirectly) to solve a puzzle. Which means that bees have personality and have their personal ‘likings’. We also learned that the bees could use the ‘shape’ of the different patterns of individual flowers to decide which flowers to go to. So they are quite clever, because they can memorize a pattern. This might help them get more pollen from flowers by learning which flowers might be best for them without wasting energy. In real life this might mean that they collect information and remember that information when going into different fields. So if some plants die out, they can learn to find nectar in another type of flower.
Before doing these experiments we did not really think a lot about bees and how they are as smart as us. We also did not think about the fact that without bees we would not survive, because bees keep the flowers going. So it is important to understand bees. We discovered how fun it was to train bees. This is also cool because you do not get to train bees everyday. We like bees. Science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before. (Bees—seem to—think!)
Acknowledgements We thank the whole of the Blackawton community, who truly engaged with the science research, including the George Inn—where the manuscript was written—for the free Cokes for the children (and pints for others). We thank the local parish for the use of the Norman church, where the experiments were run, and the parents for letting their children ‘work’ outside ‘normal’ school hours. Of course none of this would have happened without the innovative and enthusiastic support of the teachers of Blackawton. We are also indebted to Larry Maloney and Natalie Hempel de Ibarra for their openness to possibility and time, effort and detail in writing the commentary, as well as Dale Purves, Lars Chittka, Read Montague, Karl Friston and Geoff North (Current Biology) for their sage advice. Finally, we thank Chris Frith and Brian Charlesworth for their open-mindedness. The project was funded privately by Lottolab Studio, as the referees argued that young people cannot do real science.
FootnotesA decade after government officials passed around his confidential medical files in what appeared to be an effort to discredit him, veterans' advocate Sean Bruyea has successfully defended a master's thesis calling upon Ottawa to do more to assist retiring soldiers as they transition to civilian life.
It has been a long road for Mr. Bruyea, a former Air Force intelligence officer who returned from the Gulf War with post-traumatic stress disorder so severe that he had lost his ability to read a page of text. His nearly 200-page thesis received top marks last Thursday from his professors at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.
His drive to obtain respect and fair compensation for those who have served their country has never wavered, even as he fended off what he describes as attempts on the part of government to use his psychiatric record to portray his advocacy as the manifestation of an unstable mind.
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After the privacy breach was exposed, the government paid him a settlement out of court and issued a formal apology. But the episode left its scars.
"For them to personally attack me really speaks to the most base and vindictive motives on the part of government," Mr. Bruyea said. "That took huge tolls on me. It took huge tolls on my family life. And I need to understand that I was separate from them. I wasn't their vindictiveness, I wasn't their revenge, I was something more than that. And I continue to want to be more than that."
Mr. Bruyea's public ethics thesis, which he hopes will be published as a book, looks at the conditioning required of soldiers, sailors and air force men and women to make them part of the cohesive and unquestioning collective that is the Canadian military – and the jarring loss they experience when they leave it.
"Every Canadian that joins the military undergoes an incredible transformation process where there is a fundamental change to who they are, and to their identity, to become military. And yet, they receive absolutely no assistance whatsoever to get out of the military," he said after being congratulated for his work by the professors who evaluated it.
"My thesis," he said, "proposes that we have an obligation to each and every military member to help them shrug off those military influences that may not be helpful in civilian life."
He pulls no punches in the document. "Why are CF [Canadian Forces] members required to adhere so stringently, with life threatening implications, to principles of consistency and reciprocity with 'Canadian society' when Canadian society has absolutely no requirement whatsoever to reciprocate with CF members on any level?" he asks in the final chapter.
He says it is wrong that the amount of compensation provided to veterans has become tied to the ups and downs of the economy and the size of the government purse. Veterans, he said, are owed for their service, regardless of governments' fiscal priorities.
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"Canada needs to reflect and reciprocate the same sacrifice that every military member gives in uniform," Mr. Bruyea said. "They need to reciprocate that sacrifice and assist everyone to transition out of the military, with more than just job-seeking assistance, but in every manner possible – in their psychological, social, emotional, spiritual well-being – to become part of the very society for which they were willing to sacrifice themselves."
In 2005, Mr. Bruyea was the first Canadian to point out the flaws in the New Veterans Charter, which was drafted by a former Liberal government and enacted by the Conservatives in 2006. It replaced a lifetime pension for disabled soldiers with a system based largely on lump-sum payments. He said it left current disabled veterans with much less than their predecessors got.
By 2010, the outcry from Mr. Bruyea and those who joined his campaign for a better deal, or who started their own, was creating headaches for the Conservative government, which prided itself on being a defender of the military and its members. As the violations of Mr. Bruyea's privacy were coming to light, veterans were protesting in the streets and in the news media.
A veterans affairs minister was fired, and the Conservative government began enhancing benefits used to compensate former members of the military for the illnesses and disabilities they incurred as a result of their service. The most recent Liberal budget continued that, although many veterans say there is still a long way to go.
Louise Richard, a retired navy lieutenant who was among the earliest veterans to start demanding a better deal, credits Mr. Bruyea with forcing the government to look at veterans' compensation.
"There's just no words to express the valuable work that Sean has done through the years for, mainly, the modern-day veterans," said Ms. Richard, who has worked with Mr. Bruyea and attended his thesis defence. "Just to be witness to [the] journey he has had and the difficulties he has overcome, he is a true Canadian hero."
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Today, Mr. Bruyea is enjoying life as a father to his four-year-old son, Wilfred, and husband to his wife, Carolina, who has been with him though all his travails. And he plans to expand his advocacy with his new academic credentials.
One of his fights will be for a workable transition process to civilian life for those who are still in the Forces.
"Veterans deserve more than rhetoric and lip service and words like'sacred trust' and'moral obligation,'" he said. "We need to define what that means. Veterans need something tangible to help them to become civilians again."Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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After Obama’s populist-sounding jobs speech, it’s understandable that a lot of us are asking, “Where has this Obama been?” He exuded verve, not wonk; he pointed fingers at the GOP (though he still insists on running against “Congress,” making Dems seem as obstreperous as Repubs); and he hit the right angry-but-controlled tone. As Howard Fineman writes, “Friends and foes alike had to wonder watching him tonight: where has that Barack Obama been?” Ad Policy
Actually, that Barack Obama has been popping up from time to time all along—so fleetingly, though, that we keep asking the same question as if for the first time, in a sort of liberal’s version of 50 First Dates.
In July, when Obama talked tough at a press conference on the debt ceiling, TPM headlined a post “Where Has This Obama Been?”; a Huffpost commenter echoed, “Where has this Obama been all this time? Love it! I’m so damn in!”
In April, when Obama gave a rousing speech calling out Paul Ryan’s Medicare-killing budget, most people I knew, including me, asked WHTOB? After his 2010 State of the Union address, in which Obama called out the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, the question rang out; and two days later, after POTUS publicly whip-lashed Republicans at their own House retreat, here was Salon: “Democratic operatives around Washington watching it had pretty much the same reaction: ‘Where the hell has this guy been?’ ”
If we keep repeating the question, it’s not only because we suffer American amnesia. It’s also because, after long bouts of kowtowing to the right, Obama has kept us on edge, ready to give up on him, until, at a minute before midnight, he comes out swinging. We’re so relieved to see the man we thought we voted for that we can only welcome him back, all sins forgotten.
Invariably, though, the pattern re-emerges: his combative tone dissipates and his principled policies melt into Republican-lite mush.
Yet what may be different this time is that, after allowing the Tea Party to bring us to the brink of default and now to a probable double-dip recession, Obama faces an existential crisis. Not existential in the newer sense of existing at all (as in, his presidency faces an existential |
’s no bear. He doesn’t just refrain from ridicule. He starts telling stories. Stories he’d rather not remember. Stories told in confidence that probably won’t be told many more times in his life, but will never be forgotten. That Lieutenant Colonel says lots of things, but it all adds up to one important message.
“There is nothing wrong with you.”
He doesn’t mean that in a “you ain’t hurt, drive on”, Patton way. He means it in a very genuine, spiritual way. There is nothing wrong with that Captain because EVERYONE feels that way. We are either all lepers or we’re all fine. Either way, there is no reason for that Captain to feel like he’s untouchable, outcast, damaged goods. The Lieutenant Colonel chooses to believe we’re all okay. On this night, he’s successful in convincing the Captain that this is true.
“Is there a gun in the house?”
It’s the right question to ask. There isn’t one. But the Captain is holding his car keys in his hand and has a bridge in mind. That the Lieutenant Colonel cares enough to ask is all it takes to remove the notion.
“I’ll see you at work tomorrow. We’ll figure this out– together.”
And that’s how my long, slow crawl out of the cave began.
That Lieutenant Colonel said all the right things in all the right ways. You can’t train a doc to do that, or write it down in a field manual. You can’t teach it to Cadets at West Point or illustrate it on a power point slide. How do you get more leaders to be like that Lieutenant Colonel? The answer, sadly, is that we’ve got to save as many people going through it as possible, and keep them in the fight. They’re the ones who are innoculated against it. They can recognize it, acknowledge it, and help others to fight it. They possess a compassion and empathy no one else can. How do we save the ones currently dealing with it when we have so few who are innoculated? I don’t know, but I wish to God someone figures it out. In the meantime I keep watch over my buddy while he watches ridgelines. So much for the extent of my PTSD expertise.
I know how people here feel about Sassaman’s memoir, but there was one passage in it that is worth reading the whole book to see.
“A part of me will always be a broken-hearted 40-year-old Battalion Commander.”
He says that in reference to the death of Captain Eric Paliwoda, an event that shook him to the core. I suppose it resonates with me because part of me will always be a broken-hearted 26-year-old Captain. I’ve learned how to keep that part of me from causing the great suffering that nearly destroyed my life, but I still feel it. I feel it every time I see a friend scan ridgelines, or listen to someone talk about watching another human being bled out and die in some godforsaken wheat field that no one will ever remember or care about. I feel it, and by feeling it I’m able to relate. And while we relate to each other and share the heartbreak, that person is able to breathe easy in the cave, because there’s one thing in there that they can be sure isn’t a bear. It’s another leper holding onto them. Life isn’t scary, and it’s worth living another day.The man and woman drank while driving from Connecticut to Virginia, police say
A stock image of a police officer. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Blame it on the alcohol, or possibly small bladders. Maybe it was the jam on the radio.
Either way, a couple from Connecticut urinated and then proceeded to dance at the parking lot of Pennsylvania State Police's Loganville barracks on Friday, according to a news release.
At 9 p.m., a trooper walked out the front door of the barracks when he heard loud music coming from the far side of the lot. He then saw a man and woman dancing beside a vehicle.
When the trooper walked over, the couple — later identified as Rickelvin D. Castro-Morel, 25, and Naomi Elizabeth Worrell, 32, both of Danbury, Connecticut — got back inside their vehicle, from which the smell of alcohol was permeating, the release states.
The two then told the trooper they had been driving on Interstate 83, headed to Virginia from Connecticut, when they decided to stop off Exit 14/Leader Heights to drink alcohol. When they finished drinking, they again headed south, but soon realized they had to use the bathroom, according to the release.
They pulled off at Exit 10/Loganville and into state police's parking lot, where they both urinated, the release states.
"Once finished urinating a good song came on the radio and they decided to turn the music up and began to dance," according to the release.
Castro-Morel and Worrell were charged with public drunkenness, disorderly conduct and open container violations, the release states.
The two pleaded guilty at Central Booking and were released, according to District Judge Nancy Lee Edie's office. Once the paperwork reaches Edie's office, Castro-Morel and Worrell will be sent their respective fines by mail, according to Edie's office.
Neither Castro-Morel nor Worrell could be reached for comment Tuesday.
Contact Ted Czech at 717-771-2033.
Read or Share this story: http://on-ydr.co/1MkHuxIEvery once in a while a high-profile woman will divulge the dirty underbelly of trying to be a woman in the work world. I remember the first time I saw it. It was when Brenda Barnes stepped down from a huge career at Pepsi to be with her kids. And she announced that she felt like a bad parent spending so much time away from them. Thereby implying that the other moms with huge jobs like hers were also ignoring their kids.
This week, there is another ground-breaking example of a woman stepping down from a very high place: Anne-Marie Slaughter (pictured above). She is a dean at Princeton and she was director of policy planning in the State Department. She wrote a breathtaking article in the Atlantic titled, Why Women Still Can’t Have it All, about stepping down from her State Department job to take care of her two teenaged boys. She says, in the article, that she is taking much better care of them when she is not away from them.
This shouldn’t be groundbreaking to say. But after twenty years of deafening feminist diatribe it is actually controversial to say that a mom is a better mom if she is home with her kids. So that in itself makes the Atlantic article worth reading.
Here’s another thing Slaughter does that I love. She takes down Sheryl Sandberg for telling other women to be like her and spend their days working insane hours for startups. I have written before about how ludicrous is is for Sandberg to think she’s a role model for women when there is a huge amount of research to say that women who have kids want part-time jobs. Sandberg assumes that women want high-powered jobs like hers and don’t have those jobs because there are no role models. Slaughter sets the record straight: women don’t want high powered jobs because they want to be home with their kids.
It’s ridiculous that it’s controversial to say that most women want to parent differently than most men. It’s ridiculous because there is scientific basis for this and a social basis for this and the women who argue against it are always women who do not have school-aged kids and a high powered job. So you know what? If you are going to argue in the comments section that women can have a high-powered job and school aged kids, please qualify yourself with the age of your kids and the number of hours you work per week.
Here’s how many hours I worked at my startup when I had young kids: 80. And my investors thought I was part-time—which I was, compared to how many hours other startup founders work. I’m just putting a number out there so you can have a benchmark for what high-pressure, high-powered jobs demand. Slaughter traveled almost nonstop for her job. And so do most people at that level.
So I loved Slaughter’s article. And I loved that women are coming forward to say that it is literally impossible to have a high-powered career while you have young kids, if you want to be involved in your kids’ lives. The best thing older women can do for younger women right now is to tell the truth. It’s hard to tell the truth because if you are trying to do the high-powered job and the kids, you will kill your career by admitting that it’s impossible.
But here’s the truth for women: You should not plan your life so that you work until you’re 30 and then have kids, and also have a huge career. Because you will be taking care of kids during the very time when all the men you worked with are working harder and longer hours than ever before. Men who have kids are in a great position to climb the ladder. They have wives at home. Women cannot go full speed ahead until the kids are grown up. Slaughter has great evidence for this. But you should be able just to look around and see that this truth. My favorite example: All the male Supreme Court Justices have families. Two of the three women do not. And the one who does, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did not start her career until her kids were grown.
Slaughter lays out a great plan. It’s tucked into the article, among a lot of other calls to action. But she says, if you want to have a huge career, have kids when you are 25 so your kids will be grown when you are 45, because there will still be time to have a huge career.
Of all the ideas for having a big career and being a mom, this is the best one out there. Young women should use what we’ve learned so far and do things better than the generations that have come earlier. It’s too late for Generation Y since most of them have past the age when they would need to be finding a guy to marry. But there’s hope for the women of Generation Z.
Women from age 20 to 25 should focus on finding a guy to marry, and then build your career slowly, while you have kids. Which is what other generations did—they just started having kids five or ten years later.
This also means women will need to start dating men who are older than they are. This also seems like a good idea. Men, of course, love younger women. But more than that, women who are in their twenties are in their prime in terms of self-confidence. They are physically very desirable, and they are doing better at work than men. Men, on the other hand, are at their nadir of self-confidence in their twenties. They are not making money, which is something that is very valuable on the dating scene. And they are not doing as well as women at work. Men look way better in their 30s when the women have left the workplace and the men have a more solid grip on their earning power.
So men and women dating in their 20s is a lot like girls and boys slow dancing when their are 12. The girls are so much farther along developmentally that it’s absurd.
So look. Here’s my first post directed solely at Generation Z women: Spend the years from age 20-25 focused on getting married. There is no evidence that doing well in school during that period of your life will get you worthwhile benefits. There is no evidence that waiting longer than 25 makes a better marriage. And there is not evidence that women who do a great job early in their career can bank on that later in their career. There is evidence, though, that women who focus on marriage have better marriages. There is evidence that women who have kids earlier have healthier kids, and there is evidence, now, that women who have grown children by age 45 do better at getting to the top in the workforce than all other women with kids.From the time of 1765 forward, the American people, in fits and starts, began moving closer and closer to breaking ties with Britain and declaring independence. They grew increasingly angry at being dragged into [or paying for] the wars of the Crown. The King had largely held a hands-off approach with the colonies, who largely learned the self-governance necessary to carve a new nation out of wilderness. As the colonies became more prosperous, though, the King saw potential. He saw the potential to tax them as Englishmen but without giving them the full rights and representation of those in the home country. He tried to impose English hands-on governance upon a people who had learned to exist without such meddling. And this meddling was NOT appreciated.
We focus, and rightly so, a lot of energy and time on the Declaration of Independence and July 4, 1776. It is the watershed moment in our rise from loosely-joined colonies into a nation. But there’s more to the story.
For those who view today’s America as the culmination of the vision of the founders, it is right to view Independence Day as a day of remembrance of things past. For those of us who consider our current government (being the establishment since the New Deal and only accelerated by GWB and BHO) to be antithetical to the ideals that founded this nation and still rest latent within its people, it’s instructive to look at this from a far wider perspective.
July 4, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence, was one of the most important steps in the American Revolution. But it was only a step, and that step was squarely in the middle of the game, not the beginning. In fact, it occurred over a year after armed hostilities erupted at Lexington and Concord, and the Battle of Bunker Hill took place the prior month. In terms of our nation, the Declaration of Independence is important because it marks the point at which our hostilities against the British became a struggle for independence, rather than a struggle for reparation. But in terms of the history of the struggle, the stage was truly set over the course of the prior decade.
There is not enough space to delve deeply into the history here. For reference, I heartily recommend A Leap In The Dark by John Ferling, and The Ideological Origins of The American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn. To summarize, one of the watershed moments of the lead-up was the Stamp Act of 1765. This was a tax on most paper products in use at the time, and it was a very visible and direct tax. It hit many colonists close to home, and was a new tax to these shores. The tax ignited protests a decade in advance of actual hostilities. For many, these protests were some of their first concrete actions in opposition to policies of their government.
But it was just a tax. Americans at the time considered it a piece of bad policy foisted upon them by the King, and when the King rescinded the tax, things simmered down. There had not yet developed an adversarial relationship between the colonists and the Crown. Over the next decade, though, a King who wanted to claim control over the colonies engaged in consistent escalation of his taxation and attempts to rein in what he considered improper actions of “his subjects”.
Throughout this decade, independence was never a foregone conclusion. Many in the colonies were not opposed to British rule, they simply wanted a hand in direction of that rule. Most people in the colonies viewed themselves as Englishmen first, citizens of their colony second, and Americans third. There was a very strong emotional connection to the Crown and to the people — many of them family — of the home country. The path to Independence was a jerking motion as the Crown bullied the populace, the populace resented the Crown, and all through that time voices towards independence helped frame the debate.
Samuel Adams was one of those key voices early on. In 1765, he was already advocating against Britain and — although difficult to speak out publicly for Independence — it is clear that he saw an American rift with Britain coming in the future. During the ensuing decade, Samuel Adams was a key instigator and key voice in framing the debate for Independence. He was instrumental during the “quiet period” of 1770-73, when the British somewhat reduced their acts of encroachment on the colonies. During this time, as anti-British sentiment waned, Samuel Adams was the key voice keeping the narrative of colonies vs. Crown in the minds of the people. It was never ONLY what the Crown did that led to independence; it was the voices of the rabble-rousers who saw the end game of subjugation to the crown who brought it to bear.
How did they bring it to bear? They changed the perception of the people. Prior to the Stamp Act, most colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen and saw the Crown as their legitimate government. Over that decade leading to July 4, 1776, that perception changed. The colonists increasingly saw the Crown as an arbitrary government willing to completely abrogate their rights in order to achieve its own ends. It saw the Crown treating the colonists in ways they believed it would never treat a true Englishman. They, as a people, ceased to give the government their consent.
This was a decade-long (and possibly extending farther back) effort. Few at the days of the first Stamp Act protests were likely envisioning a war of Independence brewing. Few are today.
In 2005, the Supreme Court found in Kelo that Americans could have their homes seized, at will, for nearly anything a local government claimed a “public use”, including handing it to developers who will build private-use structures. This hits every American in their homes. It makes every American understand that the whim of the government can take their highest-value, most cherished possession and give it to someone they think will make better use of it.
Since 2005, the United States Government has engaged in domestic wiretapping programs without judicial oversight, proving that the United States Government can listen in on your phone calls at the discretion of any civil-service bureaucrat who deems it necessary. It has created a terrorist watch-list of over 1,000,000 names, without any clear discussion of who is on that list, why, or how to have your name removed. If you’re on that list, you can expect to be hassled endlessly if you choose to engage in mundane civil activities such as air travel. During that time, it was learned that the United States Government has been engaged in “enhanced interrogation techniques” that — whether they’re technically defined torture or not — curl your hair to think about. Waterboarding is one that likely doesn’t sound as bad as it feels, but I defy anyone to support a government who engages in crucifixion.
In late 2008, in the midst of a financial crisis unlike any we’ve seen since the Depression, the United States Government decided that it could take $700B and simply hand it out to banks — more accurately, force banks to take it — and don’t have any real duty to the public regarding oversight of those funds. In the same time, the Federal Reserve and United States Treasury have either used or promised guarantees to over $14T in assets — larger than the GDP of the nation.
Since the election of Barack Obama, the United States Government passed a $787B stimulus bill not supported by a majority of Americans. The United States Government has de facto nationalized and illegally bankrupted two domestic automakers, rewriting the rules of bankruptcy in order to give out sweetheart deals to unions and the government. Most recently, the House Of Representatives has passed an enormous 1200-page Cap and Trade proposal (hidden tax) that included a 300-page amendment added only hours before the final vote. To believe that our “representatives” actually read this bill or its amendment is laughable. It is likely that over the next several months, the United States Government will pass a bill speeding us down the road to the nationalization of the healthcare industry, and to pay for it, enact a VAT to give them yet another revenue stream to extract the fruits of our labor.
Throughout all this time, the United States Government pays lip service to the Constitution, but routinely acts contrary to both its letter and its spirit at every turn. It is therefore defying even its own supreme blueprint.
If the United States Government is willing to act against the will of Americans, and if our “representatives” are willing to pass bills that they cannot and have not read — bills often giving law-making ability to unelected bureaucracies like the EPA, how can we really believe that we are a representative democracy? If the United States Government engages in barbaric acts such as crucifixion, how can we support it? If we have truly reached, as I believe, a point where our government views us not as citizens but as subjects, we must denounce the United States Government as illegitimate.
On this anniversary of the date of American Independence, it is right to celebrate. It is right to remember the valiant and principled action of the Founding Fathers to take on the world’s great superpower and assert their rights — many lost their lives in the effort. We have a nation worth celebrating.
But in remembrance of those who we are celebrating, it is important to understand their significance in a historic context (again, see the books recommended above). It is important to remember that the principles they are fighting for are again in peril. And it important to realize that in order for those principles to be recovered, we must tirelessly call the United States Government for what it is — illegitimate.
The time between the Stamp Act and the Treaty of Paris was 18 years. Between the Stamp Act and the Declaration of Independence, it was only the efforts of those who were willing to call the actions of their government deplorable that ensured that the yoke of that government would be lifted. It is now time for those of us who love our country and despise the United States Government to stand up and do the same. The American people are an industrious people, and often have little time to devote to paying attention to the actions of our government. They have a media more focused on the daily lives of TV celebrities than the outcome of legislation that will affect everyone’s daily life. They have been educated quite literally by the state to see the United States Government as a trusted friend and helpful assistant. This must change, and it is the work of those of us who believe in liberty to keep the fires stoked and educate them to the truth. This is not going to be a small job, and won’t happen quickly. But if we do not continually work towards this goal, we are resigning ourselves to a future led by a government by the power brokers, of the power brokers, and for the power brokers.
Today is a remembrance of America’s Independence Day. It is also a day to remember that committed citizens, in the cause of freedom, can break the chains of the greatest superpower seen on earth and claim their rightful liberty. It is a day to remember and celebrate those who did it before, but it’s also a day to steel yourself — there’s work to be done again.
UPDATE: Welcome readers from Let A Thousand Nations Bloom, and of course the many thousands arriving from Google News.
UPDATE 2: Welcome Carolina Sons Of Liberty readers!VIENNA (Reuters) - Two top far-right Austrian candidates for next month's EU parliamentary elections quit on Tuesday, under fire from their own party ranks, bucking a trend of Eurosceptic parties in the ascendancy.
The co-lead candidate for the anti-immigrant Freedom Party said he had lost his party's trust after making racist comments, while the daughter of late Austrian right-wing populist leader Joerg Haider gave up on re-energizing her father's BZO party.
Far-right anti-establishment parties are expected to fare well across much of the EU in May's election, mining voter dissatisfaction with high unemployment and entrenched centrist parties seen as out of touch, and fear of immigration.
But the comments by the Freedom Party's Andreas Moelzer that the European Union's aggressive regulation made Nazi Germany look liberal by comparison and his warning the bloc could become a "conglomerate of negroes" risked alienating potential voters.
The Freedom Party (FPO) is scoring around 27 percent in Austrian national opinion polls, ahead of the governing Social Democrats and conservative People's Party.
But how to handle Moelzer had become a tricky test for the party, which treads a fine line in positioning itself as a mainstream party electable by voters fed up with creeping EU centralization but who would not see themselves as far-right.
Pressure had mounted on the party's leadership to fire the 61-year-old veteran EU parliamentarian, who was supposed to be one of its two top candidates.
Moelzer told the Austria Press Agency he was not prompted to quit by pressure from other political parties, the media or other external critics. "It is the obvious loss of confidence in my party that prompts me to do this," he said.
HAIDER'S CHARISMA
The daughter of Joerg Haider also quit as the BZO's top candidate for the EU polls after less than a month of campaigning, citing criticism from within the movement's ranks.
Ulrike Haider-Quercia, a university professor in Rome, had hoped to recapture her father's charisma and political acumen for the floundering Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO), which has been polling only around 2.0 percent in opinion surveys.
Joerg Haider, who helped bring anti-immigrant politics into the European mainstream, created the right-liberal BZO after quitting the far-right Freedom Party he had previously led. The BZO's popularity has dwindled since his death in 2008 car crash.
His daughter told the Austria Press Agency (APA) she could not follow her own political line in the face of party critics.
"Criticism was raised against my pro-European positions and my views on security policy in Europe. Therefore, I am no longer available as lead candidate for the BZO list," the 37-year-old wrote in an email to APA.
BZO leader Gerald Grosz said in a statement: "I am naturally disappointed in the step taken by Dr Ulrike Haider-Quercia, although I can only respect and understand her withdrawal from the candidacy."
Separately, the pro-business party created by Austro-Canadian billionaire and Magna International founder Frank Stronach said it would not run for the EU parliament.
Team Stronach leader Kathrin Nachbaur said the party, which scored a disappointing 6.0 percent in last year's Austrian elections, needed to concentrate on coming provincial and national polls.
"One has to be realistic. I know our polling scores. For us it is important to use our resources in a sensible way. The EU parliament is in any case a toothless apparatus," she told Der Standard newspaper in an interview for Wednesday's edition.
(Reporting by Michael Shields and Georgina Prodhan; editing by Ralph Boulton)A senior official from Samsung was recently arrested by the South Korean police officers while trying to steal the company’s confidential information related to 14nm and 10nm technology. The report contained information that Samsung is planning to use a 10nm Exynos chipset in the Galaxy S8 next year. Now, we’ve come across more details regarding the next high-end Exynos chipset from Samsung.
According to the information we’ve received, the Galaxy S8 could use an Exynos 8895 processor with ARM’s new Mali-G71 GPU. The new GPU is said to be up to 1.8 times as powerful as the Mali-T880 MP12 GPU used in the Exynos 8890-powered Galaxy S7. Moreover, this GPU is reportedly faster than the one from the Snapdragon 830 according to GFXBench results.
The Mali-G71 GPU uses ARM’s brand new Bifrost architecture, which is claimed to offer high-end 4K and VR experiences. It is also compatible with Vulkan, OpenGL ES 3.2, GPU Compute, and Android RenderScript APIs. Running at 850MHz, the 16nm GPU can provide a throughput of 27.2Gpix/s, which is double than that of the Mali-T880 GPU running at the same frequency. However, it needs to be seen what frequency Samsung ends up using.
It is being rumoured that Samsung might use a 4K display in the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 edge for a better VR experience. You should take this with a pinch of salt as it is preliminary information, and things can change by the time Samsung unveils the Galaxy S8 early next year.Mixed-race couples across America have hit back at racists who unleashed a torrent of abuse at Old Navy for featuring an interracial family in one of their tweets.
Couples from across the nation posted photos of their own mixed-race relationships and families using the LoveWins hashtag, after bigots accused Old Navy's innocuous sales advertisement of being'mixed race propaganda'.
One man, who serves in the military, shared of a photo of himself and his wife in uniform and their young daughter writing, 'From our families to yours. Thank you!'
Scroll down for video
Old Navy found itself under attack this weekend after posting this ad, which featured an interracial couple and their child, to advertise an ongoing sale on their website
People immediately commented on the retailer's tweet, writing that it was propaganda for 'race-mixing' and miscegenation
A torrent of vile abuse had earlier been directed at the company for posting an ad of a happy interracial couple and their child to advertise an ongoing sale on its website.
'Oh, happy day!' Old Navy's tweet reads. 'Our #ThankYouEvent is finally here. Take 30% off your entire purchase.'
The ad shows the couple dressed in bright summer clothes, the child wrapped around his father's shoulders.
Racist trolls immediately began accusing the brand of 'race-mixing' and miscegenation, an antiquated term used to define sexual relations or marriage between two people of different races.
'Stop promoting miscegenation or else I'm taking my $$ elsewhere!' wrote one user.
'My family and I will never step into an @OldNavy store again,' wrote another. This miscegenation junk is rammed down our throats from every direction.'
Anti-miscegenation laws were first introduced in the United States in the late seventeenth century. They were also utilized in Nazi Germany and South Africa as part of the apartheid system.
The antiquated term is used to define sexual relations or marriage between two people of different races
Another user compared Old Navy's sale ad to 'white genocide'.
'Old Navy HATES white babies!' they wrote. 'It takes a White mother and a White father to make a White baby. Stop #WhiteGeocide (sic)'.
'Absolutely disgusting,' another Twitter user complained. 'What's next? Gender neutral bathrooms? Pedophilia acceptance propaganda?! Never shopping here again.'
A number of the Twitter users who spoke out against the tweet indicated on their Twitter bios that they were supporters of the 'Alt-right' movement and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
But while Old Navy may have lost some customers with their ad, a number of others pledged that they would be running to scoop up the retailer's clothes.
But haters aside, the ad also inspired a number of Twitter users to share photos of their own beautiful interracial families and spouses
'@OldNavy on some real s*** though im on my way to buy a bunch of your clothes just because racist white people mad,' one user wrote.
'Ain't sported their s*** in forever, but now im down,' one of the user's friends replied. 'Bout to be old navy on deck!'
And countless other users pledged their support and thanked Old Navy for the tweet.
'This is a lovely ad,' wrote one. 'Thank you for portraying real world families in your advertising.'
The ad also inspired a number of Twitter users to share photos of their own beautiful interracial families and spouses.
The ad got plenty of support from the Twitterverse and Old Navy was soon trending on the social media site as people pledged to buy even more of the retailer's clothes to show their support
'Hey, @Old Navy, my family and I thank you for the diversity in this ad!' wrote Khary Penebaker, a Democratic candidate for Wisconsin's 5th Congressional District.
'#LoveWins no matter the color.'
'LOVE has no color! Thank you.' wrote another user named Janel, who shared a picture of her and her girlfriend.
'From our families to yours, Thank You!' wrote user TJ Willis, who shared a photo of both him and his wife in uniform and their young daughter.
'Families like our will continue to succeed and grow in number!''Working-class gong' scrapped by John Major to be taken up by prime minister, who wants to reward those doing voluntary work
The British Empire Medal (BEM), described as the working-class gong, is to be revived as David Cameron reverses one of John Major's signature reforms that was designed to create a classless society.
The prime minister, who is consulting the Queen on the change, hopes the revived medal will be awarded to people involved in voluntary work.
Downing Street, which has been looking for ways to revive the prime minister's big society initiative, believes that people involved in the voluntary sector are often overlooked in the current honours system. The prime minister hopes that people who are not considered senior enough to receive an MBE or OBE will be able to receive a BEM.
The move may come as a surprise to some Conservatives after Major scrapped the medal in 1993 on the grounds that it was out of date and entrenched class divisions. The medal was established in 1917 for people not of rank. Unlike the OBE and MBE, which are awarded personally by the Queen or Prince of Wales, the BEM is awarded by a local lord lieutenant.
The National Archive confirms that the BEM was traditionally awarded on the basis of rank and not achievement. It says of the original intention for the award: "The British Empire Medal (BEM) was awarded to ranks below warrant officer for the same services as OBE and MBE."
Major made clear that he thought the medal was out of date when he outlined reforms of the honours system in 1993. He increased the number of MBEs to make up the shortfall, and told MPs: "The distinction between service meriting the award of an MBE and that meriting a British Empire Medal has become increasingly tenuous.
"It can no longer be sustained. I therefore intend in future to increase the number of recommendations for MBEs and to discontinue recommending awards of BEMs."
Announcing the plan during his visit to Perth for a Commonwealth summit, Cameron will maintain that class divisions are not on his mind and that he simply hopes reviving the medal will ensure that people involved in voluntary work are properly recognised.
The prime minister will say: "I am delighted that we are going to start using the British Empire Medal again. The medal will be handed out in recognition of the dedication and hard work so many people devote to their communities. At the moment the number of people being honoured for the services they provide for their local communities is disproportionately low. I am determined to change that and redress the balance."
Major indicated that he was troubled by one factor that will occur again when the old medal is revived – the inability of recipients of BEMs to attend a royal investiture.
In 1993, Downing Street persuaded Buckingham Palace to increase the number of investitures for MBEs to allow people who would have received a BEM to be recognised by a member of the royal family.An internal military investigation has concluded that two civilians were killed in a U.S.-led coalition airstrike against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, two defense officials confirmed to The Daily Beast, marking the first time the U.S. military has acknowledged killing a civilian since the air campaign began nine months ago.
In that time, the U.S.-led coalition has conducted more than 3,500 strikes and either destroyed or damaged more than 6,000 targets, according to the Defense Department. Previously, the U.S. military had said it had no evidence that a civilian had ever been killed in the air campaign against ISIS, a claim that even military officials privately acknowledged was hard to believe, given the high odds of unintended mistakes.
Indeed, with no U.S. soldiers on the ground to assess the damage inflicted by airstrikes, the coalition’s air campaign is built on U.S. intelligence collected from drones, satellites, and reconnaissance aircraft, as well as information from local troops.
The findings of two civilian deaths come as one human rights group has alleged that coalition airstrikes on April 30 in the Syrian village of Bir Mahli killed as many as 64 civilians. Bir Mahli sits in Aleppo Province, east of the Euphrates River, and about 30 miles south of the northern city of Kobani. The allegation, which the U.S. military said it has no evidence to corroborate, is the highest civilian death toll accusation leveled at the coalition.
The U.S. military’s claim of no civilian casualties in its campaign against ISIS, coupled with the lack of detailed accounting of what effect the strikes are having, has only underscored the opaque nature of the battle, fought largely from the air with uncertain outcomes.
Officials with U.S. Central Command, which conducted the investigation, could release details of their findings as early as this week, the defense officials said, declining to elaborate on those findings.
CENTCOM officials had previously said that they were investigating allegations of civilian deaths in four cases—two in Iraq and two in Syria—from August 8, 2014, when air campaign began, to around mid-March of this year. At least three of those internal investigations were prompted within the U.S. military, CENTCOM officials have said.
CENTCOM officials declined to comment about the investigation’s findings, saying, in a statement, “We will make additional information about the investigation available when the process is complete.”
But officials stressed that they are committed to reducing civilian deaths.
“No other military works as hard as we do to be precise in the application of our airstrikes. We have significant mitigation measures in place within the targeting process and during the conduct of operations to reduce the potential risks of collateral damage and civilian casualties,” CENTCOM spokesman Army Maj. Curt Kellogg said in a statement. “I can assure you that before any mission, every precaution is taken to ensure civilians are not harmed. Our efforts stand in stark contrast to the tactics of [ISIS], who continues to kill, torture, and abuse civilians as well as embed their combatants in civilian areas.”
In Bir Mahli, the Britain-based based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the U.S. military offer widely varying accounts of what happened in the April 30 strikes. Shortly after the attack, the U.S. military said it killed 50 ISIS fighters and struck ISIS fighting positions in a largely abandoned village. Since then, two defense officials told The Daily Beast that the decision to launch the strike was based, in part, on information from Kurdish forces on the ground that there were no civilians remaining in the small village as well as U.S. intelligence findings that ISIS fighters were operating there.
“We currently have no indication that any civilians were killed in these strikes,” CENTCOM spokesman |
rolling everywhere but eventually we found the source. Several packets of rice purchased in Spain were alive with the little blighters.
Weevils! They had invaded packets of pasta, cornflour and breakfast cereals. I had learned to accept these as part of my diet in Libya, but neither of us could do with them crawling all over the boat like some kind of interactive wallpaper.
So all the contaminated food went over the side, the boat was doused liberally with insect repellent which gave us both headaches.
It took us all day. We were exhausted, but someone had to do the next watch. "Unlucky, Mary"!
Power consumption and battery charging
We have a single fuel tank of 175 litres capacity. Our three cylinder 27hp Nannidiesel uses about 1.5 litres per hour in pushing Alacazam along at 5 knots in a flat sea. We had a further 25 litres in a plastic jerry can as a reserve. Consequently we had a maximum of 130 hours of engine usage available to us.
I think this is plenty, but other skippers were aghast that I intended to set of with'so little' fuel. One skipper of a 53 foot Amel Super Maramu 2000 intended to run his engine (or generator) up to 6 hours a day just to charge the batteries.
Unbelievable! This push-button boat had electric everything; sail controls, microwave, watermaker, washing machine and tumble drier, air conditioning, dishwasher, two electric flush heads, even toothbrushes probably. It was new so I suppose everything worked, but just imagine when the appliances start to get a bit tired in a few years time. A full time janitor will be required.
But Alacazam had no such luxuries and needed only about 120 amp hours a day to keep things ticking over. Two 140Ah house batteries provided this power and were charged by the combination of two 50 watt Solarex solar panels, a Rutland 910 wind generator and a 65A alternator on the engine. A separate 140Ah battery provided power to start the engine. The alternator charged through an Adverc TWC. Net current draw and battery voltage was monitored by an Adverc Digital Current Monitor.
The DCM registered a net current input during the day due to the solar panels, and a net draw at night due to the navigation lights. The downwind rolly conditions were not good news for the wind generator, which contributed probably no more than 60Ah per day.
The solar panels contributed a further 35 amps hours, leaving a deficit of about 25Ah, which was made up by running the engine for about an hour each day.
The solar panels would have performed much better, perhaps avoiding the need to run the engine at all, had I not done something particularly crass before leaving Plymouth. I had mounted the radar scanner on the gantry, along with the radar reflector, above the solar panels. This together with the wind generator, various aerials and the anchor light all conspired to throw shadows across the panels. I have also mounted the panels on a ply base, which reduces ventilation under the panels, further affecting their performance.
The wind generator, radar scanner and reflector will now be moved further outboard, and all the other stuff resited, and the ply dispensed with to give the solar panels a chance to perform to their optimum.
Even so, when we arrived in Guadeloupe we had used less than half a tank of fuel.
We never did achieve the 200 mile day though. Our best noon-to-noon run was 177 miles, and our average daily run was 150.3 miles.
So what broke in 3,000nm of sailing the ocean? Nothing! (unless you count the tomato and avocado incident).
You are here: Home > Sailboat Cruising > Sailing the OceanIn April this year, a court disqualified Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, for eight separate counts of corrupt and illegal practices in his “ruthless” and “dishonest” election. The ruling by the judge, the indefatigable Richard Mawrey QC, came 10 years after he presided over a similar case of widespread fraud in Birmingham; in that case, he noted practices that would disgrace “a banana republic” and warned that election fraud would “continue unabated” unless the law was tightened.
A decade on, we have yet fully to implement in Great Britain the system of individual electoral registration which has operated successfully in Northern Ireland for 14 years: no longer in the Province do the dead turn out to vote. Yet under Labour and then the Coalition, state officials on the mainland have gone slow on taking the necessary measures to stop postal voting fraud and false registration.
In Tower Hamlets, police and council staff failed to tackle intimidation – often in foreign languages – both inside and outside polling stations. Just as we have seen with child sexual exploitation in places such as Rochdale and Rotherham, institutionalised political correctness can lead to the state turning a blind eye to criminal conduct. But the law must be applied equally and fairly to everyone. Integration and good community relations are undermined by the failure to do so.
Photo: Rex
The problems go deep – despite years of warnings of misconduct in Tower Hamlets, the state watchdogs gave the borough’s electoral system a gold-star rating for integrity in inspection reports. We still have a series of tick-box inspections of town hall returning officers that are as ineffectual and useless as those once practised by the now-abolished Audit Commission.
As a minister, I found within Whitehall a complete reluctance by officials to take action on the warnings from local councillors and journalists of systematic corruption in the Tower Hamlets mayoral administration. Yet when I subsequently sent forensic investigators into Tower Hamlets, they quickly found shocking financial irregularities. These were only the tip of the iceberg – further cases of alleged planning irregularities and financial misconduct couldn’t be followed up due to documents disappearing or written records not being kept.
I believe electoral malpractice is far more common than just one isolated London borough. But there is a collective state of denial: if you don’t bother to lift the rock, you won’t see what’s crawling underneath. The respected anti-corruption expert, Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, last year estimated that there were 6.5 million “ghost voters” on our electoral registers – those who have moved, died, or were mistakenly or fraudulently entered on to the register. Insufficient checks are made to ensure voters are genuine. If a town hall can demand identification to borrow a library book, it’s not beyond the wit of officialdom for the same body to check when someone casts a vote at a polling station.
Photo: Yui Mok/PA
Despite the fact that there are London elections next year, a sizeable minority of those voters signed up in Tower Hamlets remain unverified and could be fakes. In Hackney, the situation is even worse, with almost a quarter of the electorate unverified and potentially non-existent. We urgently need to clean up these registers. Across the country, electors from abroad are not properly checked to ensure that they qualify to vote when they register. Fraudulent registration is frequently tied to illegal immigration, as illegal migrants sign up to make it easier to get credit or a mobile phone. Such illegality feeds through to further crimes, such as benefit and housing fraud.
The new Conservative Government is no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to Britain’s modern-day rotten boroughs. I welcome the recent action of the new Cabinet Office Minister, John Penrose, to accelerate the introduction of individual registration and remove phantom voters. Over the next few months, I will be gathering evidence before reporting to the Prime Minister on what further steps are necessary to stamp out voter registration fraud and error; postal voting fraud; impersonation; bribery; and undue influence and intimidation.
Our nation has a proud heritage as the mother of Parliaments, yet the worrying and covert spread of electoral fraud threatens that reputation. While all politicians want high turnouts, we cannot sacrifice integrity and confidence in our democracy through misplaced political correctness or woolly concerns over “political engagement”. It is time to awake from our state of denial and take action against the electoral crooks who threaten our elections. British democracy should not be reduced to the level of a phone vote in an X Factor contest: “vote early, vote often” is the problem, not the solution.
Sir Eric Pickles is the Government’s Anti-Corruption Champion and former Secretary of State for Communities and Local GovernmentIcardi: ‘CL still possible’
By Football Italia staff
Inter captain Mauro Icardi insists “I believe strongly in third place” and is “very confident” they can get there.
The Nerazzurri suffered a blow to their Champions League ambitions with defeat to Roma on Sunday night, but the striker believes they can still qualify.
“You always need to leave negative results behind and look forward, especially when you’ve been on the level of your opponent,” Icardi told Gazzetta dello Sport.
“We’re not out of contention until the numbers tell us we can’t qualify. I believe strongly in third place, we all believe and the objective is always the same.
“We have a duty to push all the way, I’m very confident.
“We have to acquire a winning mentality, we can’t just show it in a few games, it’s the consistency of high-level talent which makes the difference. And we haven’t found that yet.
“We need to get used to winning, it has to become a regular thing, not an exceptional thing.”
The Beneamata have faced both Juventus and Roma in recent weeks, which of the two Scudetto contenders is the stronger?
“They’re both strong, with different styles. However, in the end trophies talk.
“If Juventus have won the Scudetto for the past five years, if they’re always the team to beat, that means that they play the best. The rest is just chatter.”Open By Appointment! Kids
Love Us! Some Donation Required! Tourist Trap? Art House? Gallery? Creepy Abode?
WHAT IS THIS!? We have always considered ourselves an old fashioned part of roadside America. Trundle Manor is currently the headquarters of the Secret Society of Odd Acquisition and is curated by the eccentric Mr Arm and Velda Von Minx. Built in 1910, Trundle Manor has become a place where a culmination of years of insane collecting and creating has found its niche. Want to be a little creeped out? Need something different to bring your chick to? Like horror movies and want to see the beginnings of a serial killer's obsession? Well, come on down and experience all of this and more. If you are Steampunk, Goth, rockabilly or just a little weird you will love Trundle Manor and want to come back often. Come and see our vast array of jarred animals, antique taxidermy, things for which to murder with, old world charm, sadistic medical devices, coffins and coffin like items, Steampunk influenced creations, cryptozoology, and any other thing your twisted mind will want to look at. Nothing in the Manor is rubber, latex, or fake, (except Uncle Trundle)! We pride ourselves on not filling our shelves with cheesy, fake memorabilia.How brilliant is this? Designer Patrick Sung’s Universal Packaging System is meant to precisely fit anything that needs shipping. The individual cardboard sheets are scored with a triangle pattern that can either be fitted to an oddly shaped object, or formed into a custom fitted cardboard box:
Potentially massive savings would result from all the extra shipping space saved–cutting down on how much space each package takes up, and therefore the number of gas-guzzling trucks needed during shipping.
There’s just a few niggles. For one, would anyone really put up with the added hassle of folding a custom-sized box, given all the added complexity? And two, the space savings issue might be more complicated than it seems: If people pack things in oddly shaped boxes, there’s every possibility that these all don’t fit together well enough to actually save space. (That’s why square-shaped boxes are so efficient.) But still, with a few tweaks–such as printed guidelines for easily creating boxes of different size–this could be the cleverest thing since the Puma shoebox redesign.0 St. Johns County homeowner told to take down Blue Lives Matter flag
Jeff Gaddie says a Blue Lives Matter flag has flown outside his daughter’s home in St. Johns County for years.
Gaddie told Action News Jax it’s flown to honor him -- and many other family members -- who work in law enforcement.
The homeowner is asking that we do not identify the St. Johns County neighborhood in fear of backlash.
Man in custody after fatal shooting at Markets at Town Center
“If you drive by and see that flag, it kind of makes you feel a little bit better, that there’s a family that supports what I’m doing,” Gaddie said.
Recently, his daughter received a letter asking her to remove the flag, saying it doesn’t fit the rules and regulations of the homeowners association.
"She called to ask why," Gaddie said. "They told her they had received a complaint that it was considered racist, offensive and anti-black lives matter.”
She said she was asked to submit a form for permission to fly the flag -- so she sent in the request.
The request was denied.
To learn more about the neighborhood’s rules, we called First Coast Association Management, the company who enforces the regulations.
The company said only American and military-themed flags are allowed to fly in the neighborhood, but we found other flags displayed in the neighborhood.
Portions of the neighborhood code say no flags will be displayed without approval.
LOCAL NEWS: Search continues for car after longtime Duval County teacher found dead at home
Gaddie wants neighbors to know the flag is nothing but a show of support.
“We’ve got black officers, we’ve got Asian officers, we’re got every race," Gaddie said. "I mean for them to say it’s racist, blue is not a race, it’s the furthest thing from it.”
The family is planning to appeal the decision at next month’s homeowners association meeting.
This flag is causing controversy in one SJC neighborhood. Homeowner being asked to take it down, neighbor complained to HOA @ActionNewsJax pic.twitter.com/Q5rEWNKh5h — Beth Rousseau (@BethANJax) March 21, 2017
© 2019 Cox Media Group.28 mayors replaced with trustees by Turkish government
ANKARA
AA photo
Turkey’s Interior Ministry appointed trustees to 28 local municipalities across the country on Sept. 11 on the grounds that they allegedly provided support to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETÖ), which was accused of staging the failed coup attempt of July 15, sparking angry reaction from the opposition.A total of 28 mayors, 24 of whom were allegedly linked to the PKK while the other four were allegedly linked to FETÖ, were suspended from their duties as part of a recent decree law under the state of emergency, the ministry said in a statement issued on its website.The new mayors began their duties as of 9 a.m., it said.Among the suspended were 24 district mayors, the mayors of the eastern province of Hakkari, the southeastern province of Batman and two town mayors. Twelve were already under arrest, according to the ministry.The recent appointments were predominantly in eastern and southeastern provinces from municipalities run by the Democratic Unity Party (DBP), the sister party of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), including the Silvan and Sur municipalities of Diyarbakır, four municipalities in Mardin, Van and Batman, and two municipalities in Şırnak. The mayors were either replaced by deputy governors or district governors.The other four mayors, three from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and one from the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), were suspended over their alleged links to FETÖ in the districts of Adana, Erzurum, Giresun and Konya to be replaced by municipal councils in the districts.Commenting on the assignments, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ said the move was “to protect the democratic constitutional state,” accusing the municipalities in question of financing terror.“If mayors and council members finance terror by transferring money, which is sent for serving the public, to terror organizations and allow the usage of municipal vehicles, equipment and facilities for the terror organization’s attacks, they lose their democratic legitimacy,” Bozdağ tweeted, vowing to continue the government’s fight against terror within the law.He also noted that being elected did not give anyone the right or authority to commit a crime.Environment and Urbanization Minister Mehmet Özhaseki also said the appointed trustees would show “what municipal work is” with infrastructure, water, green space and transportation even though it is not their actual profession.Meanwhile, the HDP issued a statement following the decision, describing it as unacceptable.“Such an unlawful regulation which disregarded the voters’ will and deactivated elected local administrators and councils is null and void for us,” the party said, adding that the assignments violated international conventions and laws.It also stressed that there was no difference between the mentality of the July 15 coup attempt and the recent assignments.Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Istanbul deputy Gürsel Tekin also described the assignments as a coup.“Such an implementation is first and foremost a coup against the TBMM [the Grand National Assembly]. The regulation, which had been withdrawn by negotiations after reaching a consensus there, came onto the agenda with a KHK [decree law]. The Interior Ministry already had the authority to discharge a mayor linked to terror. While there can be a new mayor election within the municipal council, taking such steps by disregarding all rules with a totalitarian view is unacceptable,” Tekin said.In addition, the assignments also sparked protests in various districts and provinces of the eastern and southeastern regions with police dispersing crowds which had gathered to protest the seizure of power.Security forces in Hakkari did not allow HDP co-mayors Fatma Yıldız and Şaban Alkan to enter the municipality building following the imposition. A group of protesters later began to gather around the municipality building.However, police dispersed the crowd after they refused to leave the scene. Four people, including Deputy Mayor Mikayil Erdal and HDP district organization head Asım Özcan, were detained but released shortly after.In Batman, another group from the HDP, including deputies Saadet Becerikli and Ayşe Acer Başaran, gathered to protest the seizures of power at four municipalities in the province. Police fired tear gas and used water cannon to disperse the crowd.In addition, around 200 people also protested the moves in the Suruç district of the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa. Police dispersed the crowd gathered outside the DBP municipality building.Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Ankara also issued a statement over clashes in the southeast after the assignments, expressing its concerns.“We are concerned by reports of clashes in Turkey’s southeast following the government’s decision to remove some elected local officials from office on charges of supporting terrorism, and appoint local trustees in their place,” the embassy said.“The United States condemns terrorism and supports Turkey’s right to defend itself. As Turkish authorities investigate allegations that some local officials have participated in or provided material support to terrorist groups, we note the importance of respect for judicial due process and individual rights, including the right of peaceful political expression, as enshrined in the Turkish constitution. We hope that any appointment of trustees will be temporary and that local citizens will soon be permitted to choose new local officials in accordance with Turkish law,” it added.The government’s move to assign trustees comes two days after newly appointed Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu vowed to take control of 28 municipalities linked to terror within 15 days.“With the authorization of the KHK, the administration of 28 municipalities will no longer be in the hands of terrorists or Kandil. They will continue under the administration of people who have absorbed that flag within their hearts,” Soylu said Sept. 9, referring to the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq, where the PKK has its headquarters.The government was given authority to directly appoint trustees to municipalities in a state of emergency decree issued on Sept. 1 after the failed coup attempt of July 15.According to the decree, the appointment of trustees to municipalities would be possible if mayors, deputy mayors or members of the municipal council were suspended on terror charges.The regulation had previously been included in an omnibus bill in parliament but was later removed upon the opposition’s reaction.SAN JOSE (KCBS) — The fate of three 50-year-old movie theaters in San Jose will be reviewed Tuesday night by the city council as some city leaders argue they are buildings that don’t deserve to be spared from demolition.
With movie screens that are four to five stories tall, the three domed Century theaters in San Jose have been described as a sanctuary to the silver screen.
“When you first walk in, it’s like walking in to a Cathedral,” long-time movie buff Stan Souls told KCBS. “You can go to the church at the corner or you can to the Sistine Chapel.”
The theaters, however, haven’t necessarily elicited the same warm feelings in City Hall. Mayor Chuck Reed wrote a letter to the state Office of Historic Preservation making the case that the theaters are “obsolete” and don’t fit into the city’s Urban Village plan on Winchester Boulevard.For other ships with the same name, see USS America
USS America (LHA-6), is an amphibious assault ship of the United States Navy and the lead ship of her class. The fourth U.S. warship to be named for the United States of America, she was delivered in spring of 2014, replacing Peleliu of the Tarawa class. Her mission is to act as the flagship of an expeditionary strike group or amphibious ready group, carrying part of a Marine expeditionary unit into battle and putting them ashore with helicopters and V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, supported by F-35B Lightning II aircraft and helicopter gunships.
The ship's design is based on USS Makin Island, but to allow more room for aviation facilities she does not have a well deck, and has smaller medical spaces. With a displacement of 45,000 tons, she is as large as the aircraft carriers of many other countries' navies, and can fulfill similar missions when configured with 20 F-35B strike fighters.
Design [ edit ]
The design is based on that of USS Makin Island (LHD-8), itself an improved version of the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship. Approximately 45% of the Flight 0 design is based on Makin Island, with the well deck removed to allow more room for aircraft and aviation fuel.[15] The removal of the well deck for landing craft allows for an extended hangar deck with two significantly wider high bay areas, each fitted with an overhead crane for aircraft maintenance.
These changes were required in order to operate the F-35B and MV-22, which are considerably larger than the aircraft they replace.[16] The typical aircraft complement is expected to be 12 MV-22B transports, six STOVL F-35B attack aircraft, four CH-53K heavy transport helicopters, seven AH-1Z/UH-1Y attack helicopters and two Navy MH-60S for air-sea rescue.[14] The exact makeup of the ship's aircraft complement will vary according to the mission. America can carry 20 F-35B and 2 MH-60S[14] to serve as a small aircraft carrier as demonstrated by LHD operations in Operation Iraqi Freedom.[3]
Other enhancements include a re-configurable command and control complex, an on-board hospital, additional aviation fuel capacity (1.3 million gallons of JP-5), and numerous aviation support spaces.[1][17]
America will be modified in a similar way to the modifications made on USS Wasp to make her better able to withstand the great amounts of heat generated by the F-35B's engine exhaust when taking off or landing vertically. Intercostal structural members will be added underneath flight deck landing spots seven and nine to more closely perform timed cyclic flight operations without overstressing it. Other changes may involve re-adjusting some ship antennas to allow for a clear flight path.[18] The ship will undergo a 40-week modification period where recently installed piping, lighting, and other features will be removed to weld reinforcements underneath the flight deck; the modification period would have been greater if its construction when in the shipyard had been interrupted to perform it. Such accommodations will be included in all future America-class ships from the start.[19]
The America class has an increased aviation capacity to include an enlarged hangar deck, realignment and expansion of the aviation maintenance facilities, a significant increase in available stowage for parts and support equipment and increased aviation fuel capacity. However, the ship's design represents a major departure from past designs and has been the source of considerable controversy,[20] as it lacks the capabilities and multi-role flexibility of traditional amphibious ships, including the ability to launch landing craft and amphibious assault vehicles, such as the AAV-7.[21] Some have even argued that America represents a "dead end" as an amphibious ship.[22] In fact, the Navy is building only one other ship (Tripoli) to the LHA-6 blueprint.[23] At issue is the focus on aviation capabilities, at the expense of the "well deck", which is the defining feature of the amphibious fleet and allows Marine Corps amphibious operations. The Marine Corps Commandant and the Chief of Naval Operations have signed an official Memorandum of Agreement that restores the well deck to USS Bougainville (LHA-8) and subsequent ships, while in 2015 the Commandant of the Marine Corps launched an initiative to ensure aviation platforms do not lead to an imbalance in the MAGTF.[24]
History [ edit ]
America during exercises off California in February 2015 An AV-8B Harrier of VMA-311 launches fromduring exercises off California in February 2015
The U.S. Navy awarded Northrop Grumman Corporation's Ingalls Shipyard Division a $2.4 billion fixed-price incentive contract for the detailed design and construction of LHA-6, primarily at the company's shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi.[1] The production decision was made in January 2006[15] and construction of LHA-6 began in December 2008.[15] Navy Secretary Donald C. Winter announced in June 2008 that the ship would be named America.[25] The keel-laying ceremony was held on 17 July 2009[3] with delivery originally planned for August 2012.[15] The ship was launched on 4 June 2012,[4] and christened on 20 October.[5] She took to the sea for the first time on 5 November 2013, for five days of builder's sea trials in the Gulf of Mexico,[10] and completed acceptance sea trials in February 2014.[7]
America coming into port in San Diego, California, 15 September 2014 An aerial view of USScoming into port in San Diego, California, 15 September 2014
America departed in commission without ceremony from Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on 11 July 2014 in transit to its homeport of San Diego, California. The ship earned commission status after the crew successfully completed the light-off assessment, anti-terrorism force protection certification and crew certification.
America arrived at Rio de Janeiro on 5 August, and the local press was invited to a guided visit that happened the next day. She arrived at her home port of San Diego, California on 15 September 2014.[26] During transitions around South America, America's mission was to connect with regional allies, conducting joint exercises with Colombia, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru involving security and communications operations, as well as medical asset coordination and mission planning activities. The ship carried three SH-60 Seahawk helicopters of HSC-21 and four MV-22 Ospreys of VMX-22, which flew into countries and transported distinguished visitors to the ship. It is planned to embark the F-35B JSF for America's first operational deployment.[18]
USS America was commissioned on 11 October 2014 in San Francisco as part of the activities of San Francisco Fleet Week 2014.[27][28] The Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) Ray Mabus was the featured speaker.PanARMENIAN.Net - The General Department of Civil Aviation (GDCA) is actively negotiating with a number of air companies to have them fly from both Shirak and Zvartnots airports in Armenia, GDCA spokeswoman Satenik Hovhannisyan told PanARMENIAN.Net
"We are yet unable to disclose the names of companies we are conducting negotiations with," Hovhannisyan said.
According to her, the GDCA, the government and the airport concessionaire are equally consistent in boosting attractiveness of Shirak airport in the northern Armenian city of Gyumri.
Also, she reminded that Shirak airport cut the prices for air navigation services by 50% to attract more airlines and bolster the development of the facility.
The Department said in early December that the decision follows a number of other measures implemented as part of a development program, which seeks to promote various carriers' interest towards Shirak airport through a comprehensive discount system.
Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan has repeatedly called for attracting more air companies and budget carriers to the airports in Gyumri and Yerevan.Monorail Modeling -
Puppy Mover Monorail
Page one of two
Model and Photos courtesy of James Horecka, January 2006 (updated May 2007)
Behold, the Puppy Mover Monorail! This is certainly one of the most unique models we have ever featured, isn't it?
It all started as a joke idea from the whacky, yet creative mind of TMS member James Horecka, while enjoying lunch on a Friday afternoon. James thought it would be funny to make a PRT, or Puppy Rapid Transit vehicle, and send a picture to TMS headquarters for a laugh. Quickly the concept grew beyond a single car PRT vehicle into a monorail train full of puppies! By 3 PM that afternoon, parts were being purchased for the project.
James is one of those rare people that actually takes his inventive ideas and builds something with them. That same Friday, from 5 PM to 10 PM, James built the entire train and track.
Here we are in the beam fabrication yard. That's funny, it looks very similar to the vehicle assembly plant, doesn't it? That's Shirley helping James laminate a curved piece of track.
On Saturday the train went through an extensive painting process. As you'll see in James' own words below, on average the train has eight coats of paint!
On Sunday lettering was applied to the train and time had arrived for the photo shoot. Volunteer Parker helps place one of the trains on the beam while bellows are attached.
The photo shoot took place around noon on Sunday, a mere two days after conception! Native American Indian Dogs were put into place and voila, another famous monorail was born. This image shows minimal passengers per car, where the one at the top of this page shows crush-loading. The following is a "How To" summary courtesy of the model's creator: I threw the "Puppy Mover Monorail" together Friday and Saturday. I did it "Hollywood style" (only what would be "in camera" is finished. So the whole thing is pretty much a "prop." If you were to look at it from the back side, you'd see a few "boxes" made of scrap wood stuck atop a couple of stakes. The goal was to knock something out quick and dirty, stuff it with the last five puppies before they shipped out, and then shoot it (we started with ten puppies, now down to five, and they're gettin' bigger by the day). We have only two photos with the five puppies; the very first one was a hit. Here's a quick summary of the parts. It's basically just a few fence palings, some scrap wood and paint:
Monorail train bodies: Total of three pieces of 1x6" x 6' long redwood dog-eared fence boards.
Monorail train skirts: Two pieces total of 1x4" x 6' long cedar dog-eared fence boards. A third piece was used for the transoms.
Bellows between cars: Cardstock (same as index cards, only 8.5" x 11" sheets), folded, hit with gray primer and stuck on with masking tape.
Lettering: 1" vinyl "mailbox" letters (which I'd bought a few days before to letter my rural mailbox).
TMS Logo: JPG image printed out and stuck on with a glue stick (used with permission of TMS).
Beamway: Five pieces of redwood benderboard, left over from edging my rose garden in 1988, sprung into an arc with a nylon strap tie and then screwed together with pairs of drywall screws 4" o.c. (and a bunch o' screws near each end just in case).
Pylons: Scrap 2x2s, 4' long each, ends pointed and driven into the ground. Only two faces were painted, of course.
Miscellaneous: Scrap tin for connectors and such. Auto body filler. A couple of strips of bevel-cut mat board to trim the beamway. Various screws and such (mostly drywall screws, a few Tek screws, some pneumatic brads). The concept sketches were laid down over lunch on Friday. They were pretty darn funny, so we laughed and went with it. All the basic design, fabrication and construction of the wood train and track was done after work on Friday. All painting was done on Saturday. About eight coats average, perhaps a dozen in some places. Lots of sanding, too, of course. Most coats of paint were quick-dry sandable primers (two types). The body is a gloss white enamel (two coats). The skirting is hammered-finish galvanizing paint. The accent stripe is gloss hunter green. Masking was done with a fast-mask tool (tape/paper combo). The camera angle was decided at the very beginning, before construction. So everything that would not show on film was left raw and unfinished. In fact, the "back sides" are pretty gnarly, including some cutting errors, a few piles of sheet metal shims, tape, thumb tacks, knot holes, cracked wood, crooked screws and even bent nails! This is similar to the techniques used for stage sets and props for film. These tricks cut total fabrication time to just a matter of hours.
James Horecka, AIA
Architect April 2006 Update:
Puppy Mover Monorail grows!
Mr. Horecka has expanded the Puppy Mover Monorail to a larger five-car train. He's also added some track for the display. Here's a fresh batch of puppies onboard the new train. James tells us that it's quite an experience setting up a shot with "active" puppies!
As always, James does quality work! Note the upgraded paint job detailing. PAGE TWO: Puppy Mover Monorail Mark IV goes on the road / back to Modeling PagePay TV service providers lost 566,000 subscribers in the second quarter, a 76% increase from the 321,000 shed in the same period last year, driven by sharp declines in satellite and telco TV customers.
The losses come on the heels of a sharp drop in cable stocks over the past few days, driven by fears of increased cord-cutting and the threat of over-the-top video services. Cable stocks, mainly programmers, lost about $60 billion in market value between Aug. 5 and Aug. 6,. While those declines started to level off Aug. 7, after satellite giant DirecTV quietly released its second quarter results Friday night, those fears apparently were warranted.
“Cord cutting did indeed accelerate markedly in the second quarter, just as we were afraid it would,” MoffettNathanson principal and senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a note to clients, adding that the declines cannot be written off to mere seasonality. While pay TV almost always loses customers in the second quarter as subscribers leave school or move to summer residences, the overall loss rate is accelerating rapidly. According to Moffett, in 2014, the pay TV sector was shrinking at a rate of about 0.1% -- today, it is declining at a rate of about 0.7%.
“That may not seem like a mass exodus, but it is a big change in a short period of time,” Moffett wrote. “And the rate of decline is still accelerating.”
Net subscriber losses were up sharply at DirecTV – which completed its $48.5 billion merger with AT&T on July 24 – to 133,000 in the period, more than double analysts’ estimates and nearly four times the 34,000 loss in the same period of 2014. Coupled with Dish Network’s loss of 81,000 net subscribers in the period – and adding an estimated 70,000 additional subscribers attributed to Sling TV -- and total satellite TV subscriber declines in the period were 284,000, nearly four times the 78,000 lost in the second quarter of 2014.
Telco TV companies like Verizon and AT&T lost a collective 2,000 subscribers in the period, compared to a gain of 29,000 customers a year ago.
Cable companies actually fared better – the sector lost about 280,000 customers in the period, almost half the 534,000 shed a year ago. At about 1.9%, the rate of decline for the cable sector dipped below 2% for the first time in seven years, according to Moffett.
In his note, Moffett said the declines also come during a period of housing growth. According to U.S. Census data, 1.6 million new homes were formed on an annualized basis in 2015, more than twice the 696,000 formed in the proior year.
“Those new households are nowhere to be found in the Pay TV data,” Moffett wrote, which is understandable because those homes are being formed by millennials who are more likely to cut the cord or never have it in the first place. As a result, Moffett estimated that cord-cutters rose to 1.9 million in the second quarter (2.3 million on an annualized basis) from 611,000 in the same period last year.PHOENIX ANTIQUE ARMS Brown Bess For Sale plus other antique rifles, muskets & pistols
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not the only issue Hunter is now facing. On Friday, the state supreme court told her to file a sworn statement by Christmas stating that she has stopped practicing law and is complying with other requirements of an Oct. 21 order, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.
And a possible retrial of eight other felony charges on which the jury deadlocked in October still looms.
Sentencing Hunter on Friday in the common pleas court case, Judge Norbert Nadel heard from witness after witness who spoke highly of Hunter’s character and community service, WLWT reported earlier.
“Without the dilemma of the double whammy, that would absolutely guarantee probation,” Nadel said as he gave Hunter time, referring to the higher standard to which he said a judge should be held.
“The evidence showed that the criminal conduct of Hunter has dealt a very serious blow to public confidence in our judicial system,” Nadel said.
Hamilton was convicted of using her judicial position to obtain confidential documents eventually provided to her brother’s lawyer. They concerned an incident in which Steven Hunter, as a juvenile court employee, punched a teen inmate in the face.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Juvenile judge facing felony case goes off on special prosecutor, says she cannot get a fair trial”
Cincinnati.com: “Hunter trial spotlights racial divide”
Cincinnati.com (opinion): “Hunter got jail for not being quiet”There are no accidents in Valiant Entertainment’s Faith no. 5.
The cover features Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Our hero, Faith, is attending a Clinton rally — a plot that will yield a meeting between one of the most iconic female superheroes in recent memory and the woman who might soon become the first female president of the United States.
But the story isn’t an endorsement of Clinton. That’s no accident, either.
"I mean, I don't think most people are going to get their impression of who a candidate is from reading an eight-page or 10-page comic book story," writer Louise Simonson told me. "We simply say vote. Voting is important."
However, while Simonson sees her message as simple, the book’s reception has been controversial, with some retailers voicing concerns and planning not to display the comic when it comes out on November 2.
You can read the comic for yourself here at Vox, where Simonson, artist Pere Perez, and the team at Valiant have given us exclusive permission to publish the story in its entirety. I also got the chance to speak with Simonson about Clinton, Faith, and how she wants to thank the protesting retailers for turning her story into a collectible.
Here’s the full issue of Faith that has some retailers upset
Faith No. 5 is actually divided into three smaller stories — one that features Clinton, one that loops into Faith’s ongoing story (by series writer Jody Houser and artist Meghan Hetrick), and one that sets up a future, separate book (written by Rafer Roberts artist Colleen Doran). Simonson and artist Perez teamed up to create the story featuring Clinton, which is a 10-page vignette called "Faith in Politics":
What happens when you put Hillary Clinton on the cover of the comic book
When it comes to comic book drama and controversy, the crucial thing to remember is that no matter what comic book is drawing debate, there will always be people who haven’t read the entire finished story they’re fighting about. Sometimes the writers haven’t even finished the story.
Examples can range from brawls about Marvel giving someone other than Tony Stark the title of Iron Man to uproars over writers turning Captain America into a man who believes he is an agent of Hydra to outrage in response to a comic referencing Batgirl and the Killing Joke to boycotts of this specific issue of Faith.
There was a slight grumble and some speculation when Valiant previewed the book in August and announced Clinton’s inclusion. That early response happened during a routine round of "solicitations," a comic industry practice where publishers send brief previews of upcoming issues (and sometimes just covers) to retailers and trade publications months in advance.
But the real controversy began earlier this month, when Phil Boyle, the owner of a Floridian comic book store chain, announced on a retailer message board that he wouldn’t put out the book for display, and it inspired a conversation in which another retailer joined in and voiced his concerns. Bleeding Cool has the entire posting, but the gist is that Boyle isn’t a Clinton supporter and feels the book is an implicit Clinton endorsement:
Lastly, for the retailers out there who are opposed to Hillary, this is a forced endorsement. Clinton doesn’t pay for my shelf space and it’s not for sale for political advancement of any party. We went down that road with Obama v. Romney [during the 2012 campaign, both nominees made appearances on comic books] and the comments the two books side-by-side elicited were not what I wanted in my store. That election was about a 10th as contentious as this one. Unlike ASM [an issue of Amazing Spider-Man where Obama appears] the Black community will not pour into stores for Clinton like they did for Obama. I don’t see feminists rushing to buy these comics though there will be people wanting them. As for my stores, we will likely have people who want this book. My stores are in a 50/50 split state, which makes it more controversial. We’ll have it behind the counter for those who ask. We won’t be giving this book display space. If we sell out, I’m okay with that.
It’s unclear whether Boyle had read Simonson and Perez’s entire story at the time of his posting. And I’m personally interested to know how Boyle can tell whether someone buying this book is a feminist (is there a uniform?) or just a "regular" person.
Regardless, it’s a bold and somewhat defensive stance to take, especially for a comic that’s probably less political than comics from Marvel, DC, or Image. "Faith in Politics" feels like it goes out of the way to tone down any kind of explicit support for Clinton. But the difference is that unlike an X-Men story about civil rights, a DC story about how women’s legacies are warped by men, or an Image story about a patriarchy gone crazy, there’s no added layer of allegory in what Simonson and Perez have created.
What you see in "Faith in Politics" is what you get. And for people like Boyle, it’s difficult to look past Clinton on the cover.
What "Faith in Politics" writer Louise Simonson thinks about the controversy surrounding the issue
Simonson has a "hall of fame" career in comic books. Known as "Weezie" to her friends in the industry, Simonson co-created the iconic X-Men villain Apocalypse and co-wrote the 1986 "Mutant Massacre" crossover — an X-Men story that changed the franchise and paved the way for Marvel’s gigantic crossover events. She’s written arcs for Superman and Wonder Woman. And now she’s put her stamp on Faith.
I spoke with Simonson about her career, her politics, and how she feels about the controversy surrounding her mini story.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex Abad-Santos
I've read tons of X-Men books — some of them you’ve edited — that are much more political than what happens in this issue. Did the response surprise you?
Louise Simonson
It's the internet. Everybody jumps on everything without having a clue what's going on. But, yes, I mean — just [Clinton’s] name makes it political. It does not surprise me that people would jump to that response, but, I mean, we don't say vote for one candidate or vote for another. We simply say vote, that voting is important.
Alex Abad- Santos
Maybe you could be swaying an undecided voter — if those still exist at this point.
Louise Simonson
I hope we make undecided voters vote. I hope they vote the way I would want them to vote, but, hey, that's just me. If I were voting for the other person, I would — I'd probably want that too, but I think it's important that people actually do vote.
We tend to want to blame the government, but we're the ones who actually choose who governs us. Seriously, people, you know, you don't have the right to complain if you don't make your choice.
Alex Abad-Santos
Do you think it's natural for superheroes to be viewed as political figures?
Louise Simonson
A superhero can be one of many role models out there. I've talked to people for whom a superhero and their interaction with them is this combination of fantasy and reality — it's made a big difference in their lives. I think a superhero who's politically involved is really a good thing.
I know back in the olden days when I was writing Superman, they said I did the "liberal" Superman and there was another writer who they thought did the conservative Superman. I guess we sort of balanced each other out. [laughs]
Alex Abad-Santos
That's the power of comics, I think: being able to transcend the easy, tidy political stuff. Give the reader an option and try to open their eyes a little bit.
Louise Simonson
Any comic book or book or magazine or TV show — anything that asks a question or makes a statement that gets people thinking about how they might feel about a certain event or activity or whatever — is actually a good thing. Yeah, I mean, I'm all for it.
[When you’re writing a hero] you're treading this line between the way you perceive a character and... your own thoughts and feelings that you might lay on a character. That's been my theory. I haven't run into any problems, so there you go. I do tend to occasionally have characters have political agendas.
Alex Abad-Santos
You just talked about how you see a character and how it can help process thoughts and feelings. Could you tell me what's going through your head when you're writing Faith and what she represents to you?
Louise Simonson
More than anything, maybe she represents hope for me. I suppose also faith and maybe the basic decency of humanity. Also, diversity. I like her attitude. I like her spunk and her willingness to stand up for things she believes in — even if they're going to sometimes get her in trouble or maybe wouldn't be the most popular thing —which she pretty much does consistently.
She has her own moral compass, and she follows it. I think that's important. She's a good role model for that kind of attitude, I guess. I really like her as a character. I would like her if she was a human — a real-life human as opposed to a comic book human.
Alex Abad-Santos
I understand that. Though I tend to prefer comic book mutants over real-life humans.
Louise Simonson:
Many people do. Wouldn't you like to be one, to be a mutant with powers? Wouldn't that be great? Oh, man.
Alex Abad-Santos
I wouldn't want to be one with a bad power.
Louise Simonson
Well, a bad power would be better than no power.
I suppose, unless everything you touched exploded — you'd have a problem. I guess you could wear gloves, but then the gloves would explode, so there you go.
Alex Abad-Santos
What's kind of interesting in this is that with Faith and Hillary meeting in the comic book, you play with the idea of a Hillary endorsement. But the story doesn’t really go in that direction; instead, it reverses and ends up with Hillary endorsing Faith. What, in your mind, would Hillary endorse Faith for?
Louise Simonson
I think she would endorse Faith for all the reasons that I like Faith. She would endorse Faith because she's got gumption and she keeps trying no matter what. If she fails at something, she just gets up and tries again. She believes in doing the right thing, and then she acts on her beliefs. Honestly, she's kind.
I think all of these things probably would be things that Hillary would certainly endorse. The fact that she tries to help people. I mean, that really is what drives her more than a lot of other superheroes who have different agendas. I think Faith is actually a very positive one. Also, she's quirky. You know what? I think Hillary would like that. She's not a cookie-cutter superhero. She's different. She's very modern. I think Hillary would actually appreciate that.
Alex Abad-Santos
You’ve lived in this world where you’ve written and edited some of the biggest superhero stories ever created. You’ve gotten to spend your life creating some of the most powerful women in the universe. And now you might see the first woman president of the United States. Is that surreal?
Louise Simonson
I am looking forward very much to having a female president. I hope. Fingers crossed. That's my own personal opinion, not the opinion of the big corporate entity.
Yeah, I think it would be wonderful. I think that our country needs a more diverse approach to a lot of, again, a lot of more diverse concerns than we're seeing in the political environment right now. I think maybe the mere fact that we have a female president, which is I guess more than half the population are female, so really it's about time.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know probably, but there's kind of a feedback loop between modern culture and comic books, the modern environment. I think one feeds the other. I think that comic books reflect what's going on in the real world, and it's very much so at Valiant.
There is a feedback loop. I think it may be driving, helping, I hope, to drive the world to a more inclusive direction, or at least this country. I hope the feedback loop exists and that it's a good feedback loop. I hope we're all encouraging each other to be better.
Alex Abad-Santos
I mean, it'd be kind of terrible if it were a bad feedback loop.
Louise Simonson
Really. We don't want a supervillain being involved. We don't want him looping into the loop. That would be bad.
Alex Abad-Santos
I don't know if you've read this, but there was a retailer in Florida who said he was going to keep "Faith in Politics" behind the counter. He was going to keep the book behind the counter because it's political. How does that make you—
Louise Simonson
What?
Alex Abad-Santos
Yeah.
Louise Simonson
Oh, I think that it's just silly. I think it's also that he doesn't — he has no idea. Well, he may disagree with the politics of what he thinks the book is all about. First of all, I think it's silly, and second of all, I bet it makes more people interested. You make something forbidden and more people want it. I think we should thank him for helping us sell comic books. Just saying.
If he wants to do that, that's just fine.
Alex Abad-Santos
What would you say to people who haven't read the book yet who may be feeling like this guy?
Louise Simonson
Well, I think that maybe they should wait until it comes out and actually read it, or look at the pictures at least, before they make up their minds.
I also think that it may become very collectible and people should go out and buy three of them.
Faith No. 5 will be available online and in stores on November 2.They might make strange political bedfellows, but Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Wildrose Party Leader Brian Jean agree on one thing — Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre's opposition to the Energy East project means that greater federal support is needed for pipelines and infrastructure.
"Well, he's wrong, it's as simple as that," Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said of Coderre's rejection of the pipeline on CBC News Network's Power & Politics.
"Energy East is also about energy independence for Canada. It not only allows us to get market access, it allows us to serve Canadian customers with Canadian energy."
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi discusses the mayor of Montreal's opposition to the Energy East pipeline and Justin Trudeau's comments about'resourcefulness' 8:56
Wildrose Party Leader Brian Jean was even more blunt, telling host Rosemary Barton he wouldn't take "environmental lessons from a mayor who releases eight billion litres of raw sewage into the river right in front of his community."
On Thursday, Coderre announced Montreal's official opposition to the pipeline, stating potential environmental risks outweigh any economic benefits.
Nenshi and Jean take issue with that line of thinking.
Pipeline pushback
"If you're really worried about transporting bitumen, it's easier to control a [pipeline] spill like that than to manage a problem with oil by rail," Nenshi said.
"But he knows all of that. Clearly this is the right thing for Canada and, I've got to say Mayor Coderre, it's the right thing for Montreal."
Jean agreed, blasting Coderre's decision as "short-sighted."
"This is a province that's taken $72 billion in equalization payments over the last 10 years, a lot from Alberta and a lot from Alberta oil," he said.
TransCanada Corp.'s proposed pipeline project would carry 1.1 million barrels a day from Alberta to an export terminal in Saint John. (Canadian Press)
The City of Montreal's opposition is the latest challenge to TransCanada Corp.'s proposed pipeline project, which would carry 1.1 million barrels a day of oilsands crude through Quebec to an export terminal in Saint John.
The project would include the existing TransCanada pipeline as far east as Montreal and a new pipeline through Quebec.
'Get out of the way' of industry, Jean says
Jean and Nenshi called on the federal government to do more to support infrastructure projects in Western Canada.
You can’t dump raw sewage, accept foreign tankers, benefit from equalization and then reject our pipelines <a href="https://t.co/J94PksWtJt">https://t.co/J94PksWtJt</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ableg?src=hash">#ableg</a> —@BrianJeanWRP "The government has the ability to really invest in nation-shaping big infrastructure," Nenshi said, adding that smaller, more immediately stimulative projects are also ready to go in Calgary and cities across Canada — and that all that's needed is "a commitment for a cheque."
Jean called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP Premier Rachel Notley to "get out of the way of industry" in the province.
"I'm not blaming the NDP government or Justin Trudeau for the low price of oil. I'm blaming them for how they're reacting to it," he told Barton.
Notley supports the project, and travelled to Toronto on Friday to nail down Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne's support for the pipeline.
Trudeau's support for Energy East has not been clear. He's expressed dissatisfaction at the "torqued and flawed" environment assessment process of the previous Conservative government. But he's also said that Canada needs to get its resources to market, and Energy East is one option for doing that. During the election last fall, Trudeau said it was a question of "getting that balance right" between resource jobs and protecting the environment.
Resources vs. resourcefulness
Trudeau raised eyebrows back home this week after he made comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he wants Canadians to be known for their resourcefulness, not resources.
"It's important to remember this was for a global audience, and the talk in the hallways here at Davos is that that was a home run," Nenshi said.
"I wish he had thrown in the word 'also' or 'plus' [resources] when he was talking … but of course he's right about the resourceful piece."
Jean said Trudeau's comments "didn't make any sense whatsoever."
"This is a gentleman I've never taken seriously until he became prime minister," he said. "Canadians depend on our natural resources and the extraction of those natural resources for jobs. That's what he should be focusing on."Noah Wall has done a very weird thing. He's surreptitiously field-recorded people trying out instruments at a Guitar Center in Manhattan and made an album of it. Not remixed these unwitting collaborators into pretty, new, funky riffs—just recorded them in a borderline masochistic Hildegard Westerkamp-style soundwalk.
According to his accompanying website, the album was created by simply wandering the store in a pair of spy microphones that look like earbuds. "This place is mostly loners," Wall wrote of the experience. "Trying out a guitar or amp or whatever, they probably didn't come here to jam with others. But the din has an ensemble effect and the unintentional group is abiding some unspoken rules… On two different days, two different people on two different instruments in two different rooms play the same Jackson 5 song."
As a New York musician releasing music since at least 1999, Wall has always had a conceptual streak. Free copies of his fantastic—and more conventional—album Hèloïse were once strategically scattered around the city in an arrangement that spelled out its title (which was also his mother's name). But Live at Guitar Center is really something else.
Personally, the last time I was deep in the Guitar Center game was as a teenager, back when I was sucking at jazz band. If you've ever played an instrument, you've heard this album already, and probably, the cacophony is 90 percent painful. It's like a noise band that has never spoken to one another, attacking you in totally random fits based on the unrelated logics of strangers. But then, after you've endured thirty minutes of arbitrary noodling, some kid starts tenderly whispering Green Day's "Time of Your Life," and it's all worth it. Like, I remember when I thought I could be good, too.13 a guest Apr 23rd, 2015 663 Never a guest663Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 0.82 KB Hello. It turns out I had an extra key for Antichamber! So now I'm putting it up for grabs. Solve these riddles and add their answers (lowercase if they contain letters, no spaces) in order to bit.do/ to get a link! 1. "JUNG LBH JBHYQ FRR VA GUR NTR BS SEBFG BA WHQTZRAG QNL VGF SNE SEBZ YBFG SVAVFU LBHE QEVAX LBHER YRSG JVGU GUVF OEVAT VG HAGB NABGURE LBHER YRSG JVGU OYVFF GUVF VF NJSHYYL UNEQ FB URERF N PYHR GUR NAFJRE VF BAR JBEQ OHG NYFB GJB _ _ _ _ _ _ _" 2. "V NZ GVAL JVGU N OBQL DHVGR SEHTNY VS LBH FRNEPURQ GJB JBEQF LBH PBHYQ SVAQ ZR GUEBHTU TBBTYR GUR SVEFG JBEQ VF N ARPRFFVGL GB ZR NAQ LBH VS V YNPX VG SBE GUERR QNLF V ZHFG OVQ LBH NQVRH GUR FRPBAQ VF YVXR NA NAVZNY PBZCHGRE VG JVYY FBZRGVZRF ERDHVER FBZRGUVAT FGEBATRE GUNA FYRRC NAQ PNAG CERIRAG SVER _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _"
RAW Paste Data
Hello. It turns out I had an extra key for Antichamber! So now I'm putting it up for grabs. Solve these riddles and add their answers (lowercase if they contain letters, no spaces) in order to bit.do/ to get a link! 1. "JUNG LBH JBHYQ FRR VA GUR NTR BS SEBFG BA WHQTZRAG QNL VGF SNE SEBZ YBFG SVAVFU LBHE QEVAX LBHER YRSG JVGU GUVF OEVAT VG HAGB NABGURE LBHER YRSG JVGU OYVFF GUVF VF NJSHYYL UNEQ FB URERF N PYHR GUR NAFJRE VF BAR JBEQ OHG NYFB GJB _ _ _ _ _ _ _" 2. "V NZ GVAL JVGU N OBQL DHVGR SEHTNY VS LBH FRNEPURQ GJB JBEQF LBH PBHYQ SVAQ ZR GUEBHTU TBBTYR GUR SVEFG JBEQ VF N ARPRFFVGL GB ZR NAQ LBH VS V YNPX VG SBE GUERR QNLF V ZHFG OVQ LBH NQVRH GUR FRPBAQ VF YVXR NA NAVZNY PBZCHGRE VG JVYY FBZRGVZRF ERDHVER FBZRGUVAT FGEBATRE GUNA FYRRC NAQ PNAG CERIRAG SVER _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _"A new report by WWF reveals seven fundamental weaknesses in the regulation of Hong Kong's ivory market. This includes links to illegal activities such as the smuggling of ivory from poached elephants in Africa and the laundering illegal ivory with the city’s legal stock of ivory in Hong Kong. As a result, Hong Kong can be directly fuelling the poaching of elephants in Africa. Hence WWF is calling the government for a ban of ivory sales and processing.While Hong Kong is the city with the largest retail ivory market in the world, local ivory traders claim that the sale of these items is legal, since they are drawn from a stockpile of ivory imported more than 25 years ago – such imports were made illegal in 1990.Entitled “The Hard Truth”, the report is a detailed study of the effectiveness of the existing regulatory system, supplemented by information provided by individuals who are concerned about illegal wildlife trade. Among the evidences are the investigation and conversations with some ivory traders, who claimed to have access to at least 15 to 20 tonnes of ivory between them ( the investigation process was neither arranged by WWF nor were any members of WWF involved). This is with a significant proportion of the 111.3 tonnes of legal ivory stockpile held by all businesses in Hong Kong. Those traders pointed to a number of irregularities and systemic flaws in the Hong Kong ivory trade, which are identified in the report:Firstly, illegal ivory is accessible in Hong Kong. A recorded conversation with an ivory trader revealed that a buyer in Hong Kong can make a “purchase order” for ivory directly smuggled from Africa, thus fuelling the ongoing poaching crisis.Secondly, legal ivory is used as a front for the illegal ivory trade. Traders inform the government that they are selling very little ivory, yet Hong Kong has a visibly extensive ivory business. One ivory trader stated that “laundering” is easy, with traders using the stockpile of legal ivory as a front to sell smuggled, illegal ivory to unsuspecting buyers.In addition, the report covers five other weaknesses, including loopholes exist in the licensing system that enables it to be exploited by unscrupulous businesses, and the rampant, re-export of ivory from Hong Kong without a permit – which is illegal – with many buyers smuggling their ivory purchases out of Hong Kong.Cheryl Lo, Senior Wildlife Crime Officer of WWF-Hong Kong states, “The very real challenges in regulating ivory trafficking and trade in Hong Kong is taking its toll on elephant populations in Africa. It’s time to re-write the future of elephants by banning ivory sales and processing in Hong Kong.”Gavin Edwards, Conservation Director of WWF-Hong Kong states, “Every year, at least 30,000 elephants are killed in Africa, primarily for their tusks to satisfy the demand for ivory products in Asia. China recently committed to work towards halting ivory sales, and the US is banning most interstate commerce in African ivory. It is time for Hong Kong to step up, as part of the global effort to tackle the ongoing elephant poaching crisis in Africa.”Recent figures show that the population of African elephants has fallen from between three and five million in the early 1900s to around 470,000 today.Given that Hong Kong is one of ivory’s primary destinations for ivory and one of its major trading hubs, the city must strengthen its efforts. WWF is calling on the Hong Kong government to ban the ivory market by rapidly phasing out the sales and processing of ivory. Only with immediate and robust action we can end the illegal ivory trade in the city and help conserve threatened elephant populations.WWF calls on the public to make a pledge on our website ( wwf.org.hk/elephants/en ), starting from 8 September, to show support for ending the local ivory trade and helping create a sustainable future for the world’s precious elephants.* The report contains disturbing contentBlogs EU Parliament Rejects ACTA: Ray of Hope for TPP July 05, 2012
Yesterday, we were treated to news of a very positive development from Europe: the European Parliament voted, by a massive majority (478-39), to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
This rejection comes after more than five years of negotiations that were plagued by controversy and outcry against ACTA’s secretive process. So what should you make of this rejection and what lessons should future trade negotiators learn from the ACTA experience?
For one, it should be apparent that the negotiating process is just as important as the substance. Shutting out the public and their representatives and giving privileged access to the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries severely undermines the legitimacy of the negotiating exercise.
In a post-SOPA world, such a secretive process is particularly prone to failure because people are now paying attention when policy makers and trade negotiators attempt to trample over their rights in the name of protecting these industries.
Second, ACTA’s defeat in Europe indicates that intellectual property protection is not the center of the universe and that values such as free expression and due process cannot be sacrificed in the name of protecting intellectual property. A concern for these rights was one of the reasons Europe rejected ACTA.
ACTA negotiators paid lip service to these values and accused those who raised serious concerns about the agreement of spreading misinformation. Trade negotiators, including those negotiating the TPP, will do well if they realize that sticking their neck out for an intellectual property chapter that only protects that rights of owners, at the expense of the public interest, jeopardizes the chances of getting an agreement through.
So what happens with ACTA next? As I have explained before, in order for the agreement to come into force, six countries have to ratify it – i.e confirm their willingness to be bound by it. This is not accomplished by signature alone and requires a further affirmation, often in the form of consent of national legislatures.
As of now, ACTA does not have the required six ratifications. Even if it did, Europe’s absence from the agreement is a major setback. After all, the European countries are a vast majority of the ACTA negotiating countries (27 out of 37).
So, ACTA’s defeat in Europe, combined with the USTR’s announcement to introduce a provision on copyright limitations exceptions in the TPP is a ray of hope for the public interest community. Of course, that hope is tempered by the fact that we do not know whether these provisions will be sufficiently robust to protect the public interest. Meanwhile, the TPP will likely continue to have imbalanced provisions on breaking digital locks (DRM) and increasing enforcement that will threaten the public interest.
For a more indepth analysis of ACTA's rejection and USTR's announcement on limitations and exceptions, read my colleage, Harold Feld's blog post available here.Despite strong bipartisan votes in both the House and Senate to allow military veterans to receive medical marijuana recommendations through the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.), Congressional leadership is blocking the change from becoming law.
Last month, the House approved an amendment to let veterans get medical marijuana recommendations from V.A. doctors by a vote of 233 – 189. On the same day, the Senate passed its version of legislation to fund the V.A. through 2017, which included a medical marijuana provision that had already been attached to the bill by the body’s Appropriations Committee in a vote of 20 – 10.
After bills pass both the House and Senate, leadership appoints a conference committee made up of members from either chamber who then meet to reconcile the differences into a final package to be sent to the president for enactment.
Marijuana policy observers expected that the conference committee would include protections for veterans who need medical cannabis since the measures passed so handily through bipartisan votes in both chambers.
But the final V.A. spending package released late Wednesday night is totally silent on the issue, forcing veterans who want medical marijuana to continue to seek recommendations from doctors outside the V.A., which can be costly and time-consuming.
The news comes just one day after Congressional Republicans blocked amendments that would allow state-legal cannabis businesses to access banking services and let Washington, D.C. spend its own money to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana sales from being considered on the House floor.
The veterans medical cannabis language approved by the House and Senate differed somewhat.
The Senate bill read:
None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Veterans Affairs in this Act may be used in a manner that would— (1) interfere with the ability of a veteran to participate in a medicinal marijuana program approved by a State; (2) deny any services from the Department to a veteran who is participating in such a program; or (3) limit or interfere with the ability of a health care provider of the Department to make appropriate recommendations, fill out forms, or take steps to comply with such a program.
Whereas the House bill said:
None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to implement, administer, or enforce Veterans Health Administration directive 2011-004 (or directive of the same substance) with respect to the prohibition on “VA providers from completing forms seeking recommendations or opinions regarding a Veteran’s participation in a State marijuana program”.
But neither version made it into the conference committee’s report, which the House passed at 3:10 AM Thursday morning by a vote of 239 – 171.
The V.A. policy disallowing its doctors from recommending medical marijuana in states where it is legal actually expired on January 31 but, under the department’s procedures, the ban technically remains in effect until a new policy is enacted.
Advocates expect a new policy soon, but aren’t sure what it will say. In February 2015, a top V.A. official testified before a House committee that the department is undertaking “active discussions” about how to address the growing number of veterans who are seeking cannabis treatments.
The final V.A. bill now heads back to the Senate for an up-or-down vote and, if passed, to President Obama for his signature.
Photo Courtesy of Paket.Just as The New York Times’ scathing indictment of Amazon and its workplace culture hit the internet earlier this month—before the print edition was even in many readers’ hands—Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos sent a memo to his employees in an effort to contain the impact. Perhaps admirably, he acknowledged the controversy and encouraged his employees “to give this... article a careful read.”
But that’s where his success as a leader in a moment of organizational culture crisis ends. Bezos’ attempt at damage control fails miserably precisely because it highlights the problems that created the vicious working environment that the Times describes: limited appreciation for the people delivering the company’s success; half-hearted attempts to avoid a toxic culture rather than cultivation of a healthy one; and leadership that distances itself from its people rather than connecting and empathizing with them.
What did Bezos get wildly wrong—and what should great leaders do in moments of cultural crisis?
Say how you want your culture to be, not what you don’t want it to be
Bezos tells his employees exactly one time what he wants. “I want you to escalate to HR.” That’s it. He says nothing about wanting a culture of empathy, of hard work and self-care, of belief in colleagues and co-workers, or of success via people. He has no problem telling his readers what they can do (“You can also email me directly”; “You can work anywhere you want”). Nor does he shy away from describing others’ interpretation of his leadership intent (“[The article] claims that our intentional approach is to create a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard”). But he never counters with a vision, an explanation of how he wants the Amazon culture to be, or a description of what his leadership intent really is. Instead, Amazon’s employees are left with a vivid reminder of what the Times says is wrong, assurance that their leader has never witnessed such poor behavior at his Amazon, and no words about what his Amazon actually is—or could be.
Show empathy for your employees’ experiences
“The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day,” Bezos writes. “I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either.” I believe him. As the organization’s CEO and highest-paid employee, there are inevitably lots of experiences of working at Amazon to which Bezos is not privy. But culture is a form of compensation, and just as there is typically tremendous variation in salary across an organization, there is often similar disparity in experiences of workplace culture. Bezos might as well have said, “I don’t understand how people can suggest they don’t get paid enough here. I get paid plenty, and the people I interact with get paid plenty, too.”
Instead of conveying empathy and affirming the experiences of a wide range of Amazon employees, Bezos opts to invalidate them broadly.
The leader’s opportunity is always to support and drive employees by acknowledging, validating, and empathizing with the range of experiences within their organizational context. Indeed, organizations that are more identity-diverse (that is, those with greater variety in race, gender, sexual orientation, family structure, national origin, etc.) are typically rated by employees as being more empathetic—a clear weakness of the Amazon culture. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to convey empathy and to affirm the experiences of a wide range of Amazon employees, Bezos opts to invalidate them broadly: I don’t recognize it, so it’s not real. Even worse, he writes, “[O]ur tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero”—just as he’s in the midst of displaying a keen lack of empathy.
Share how you feel
Bezos tells his employees plenty about what he thinks, but he never once expresses |
grains could've done Wallace in.
Veterinarians use fentanyl patches all the time. Years ago, for a couple days after being neutered, my own cats wore 25 mcg patches, the lowest-dose patches made at the time. By then, I myself was a veteran user of prescribed fentanyl for severe and intractable pain from sacroiliitis. But even I worried. One of my cats, the runt of her litter, was tiny. Couldn't even as low a dose as 25 mcg be too much?
My vet told me how, in the days before fentanyl, he hated seeing animals in pain as they recovered from their injuries and surgeries. He hated seeing them cry and writhe and wave their paws around. My little runt would be fine, he said — and he was right.
Normal and necessary usage
We rarely hear about this very normal and necessary use for narcotic pain medication in our feverish talk about the "opioid crisis" and its bedfellow, the "fentanyl epidemic." We've been told that when it comes to opioids, they're not only bad: they're fatal.
Now the opioid hysteria has migrated to veterinary medicine. And indeed, because it's restricted for human use, some Halifax veterinarians report trouble getting ketamine, an anaesthetic they prefer for veterinary surgery, and say the supply is bottlenecked across the country.
Making matters worse are reports suggesting that addicts might start "veterinarian shopping" to get more narcotics for themselves, or to sell to the street. Not that there's evidence that this is happening or has happened, or ever could, but to suggest it nevertheless feeds the media narrative.
When it comes to painkillers, can we really trust anything we hear? In a long interview on Corus radio last month, Minister of Health Jane Philpott, herself a physician, failed to provide numbers to show how dangerous and fatal opioids are. She said she didn't know how we could tease apart casualty statistics to tell which applied to drug addicts and which to people in pain and using opioids under medical supervision. She agreed that chronic pain patients are routinely confused with addicts, and that the conversation over the past year has been too much about painkillers and too little about pain.
What about the medical professionals who recently crafted the 2017 Canadian Guideline for Opioids for Chronic Non-Cancer Pain, which imposes strict conditions on opioid prescribing? They must know, right? Wrong. Not a single medical practitioner who is a dedicated pain specialist voted on the guidelines. Not a single pain specialist who prescribes narcotics for pain was invited to the health minister's "opioid summit" last November, either.
Studying the benefits
Indeed, most of the opioid news we hear day after day assumes facts not in evidence. So here is some evidence:
"Medical use of opioids does not cause addiction," says Dr. Mary Lynch, a professor in the Department of Anaesthesia, Pain Management & Perioperative Medicine at Dalhousie University. Lynch has 25 years of expertise in managing pain, and cites numerous studies showing that only 0.4 to 0.9 per cent of patients continue to use an opioid a year after trauma and/or surgery.
But what about the new guideline's contention that there is little to no evidence that opioids are useful compared to alternatives? Well, a review in the Cochrane Database, which is regarded by clinicians as the leader for systematic reviews in health care, evaluated 26 studies involving nearly 5,000 chronic pain opioid patients, all of which showed the drugs' benefits. Only 0.27 per cent — a mere 13 patients — of those 5,000 got addicted.
For that cute little Shih Tzu Wallace, one thing's certain: if it was fentanyl, he's in no danger of addiction. And for you? Don't get hurt; don't age. The meds that might've saved you, well — the truth about them has gone to the dogs.
This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.Read Story: Why Hrithik is not a part of Shekhar Kapur's Paani Read Story: Why Hrithik is not a part of Shekhar Kapur's Paani
Jennifer Lawrence has not been approached for Paani. Just clearing out the rumors Shekhar Kapur (@shekharkapur) January 8, 2014
Read Story: Sushant Singh Rajput on a roll, to play lead in Shekhar Kapur's Paani Read Story: Sushant Singh Rajput on a roll, to play lead in Shekhar Kapur's Paani
There was a recent buzz doing the rounds that Hollywood actor par excellence Jennifer Lawrence has been approached to be part of Shekhar Kapur's upcoming film Paani.However, the director of the film Shekhar Kapur has slammed the rumours and made it clear via the micro-blogging site Twitter that no such development has taken place.Here is Shekhar Kapur's tweet:The project is being produced by Yashraj Films and is based on a future world where wars over water have broken out. The film's cast will have both Indian and Western actors.According to a source close to a leading tabloid, "Paani will be an expensive film. The budget would be close to Rs150 crore. To justify that kind of a money, the film will have to do good business all around the world, and not just in India. Getting someone like Jennifer will ensure the film attracts eyeballs internationally as well."In October, Kapur while in LA doing a screen test for Paani, tweeted, "Full day of auditions for Paani in LA. Range of talent in young actresses is quite amazing and even the biggest stars are not shy of auditioning."However, now with Shekhar Kapur's latest clarification, all hopes of seeing our very own Sushant Singh Rajput share screen space with the exceptionally talented Jennifer Lawrence have gone in vain.Half a century ago, MIT played a critical role in the development of the flight software for NASA’s Apollo program, which landed humans on the moon for the first time in 1969. One of the many contributors to this effort was Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist who led the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which in 1961 contracted with NASA to develop the Apollo program’s guidance system. For her work during this period, Hamilton has been credited with popularizing the concept of software engineering.
In recent years, a striking photo of Hamilton and her team’s Apollo code has made the rounds on social media and in articles detailing her key contributions to Apollo 11's success. According to Hamilton, this now-iconic image (at left, above) was taken at MIT in 1969 by a staff photographer for the Instrumentation Laboratory — later named the Draper Laboratory and today an independent organization — for use in promotion of the lab’s work on the Apollo project. The original caption, she says, reads:
“Here, Margaret is shown standing beside listings of the software developed by her and the team she was in charge of, the LM [lunar module] and CM [command module] on-board flight software team.”
Hamilton, now an independent computer scientist, described for MIT News in 2009 her contributions to the Apollo software — which last month was added in its entirety to the code-sharing site GitHub:
“From my own perspective, the software experience itself (designing it, developing it, evolving it, watching it perform and learning from it for future systems) was at least as exciting as the events surrounding the mission. … There was no second chance. We knew that. We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”
Have a creative photo of campus life you'd like to share? Submit it to Scene at MIT.For the first time ever, investment in new renewables was more than enough to cover rising global electricity demand in 2015.
That’s according to the first World Energy Investment report, published by the International Energy Agency (IEA). While fossil fuels still dominate energy supplies, the IEA says changing investment flows point towards a “reorientation of the energy system”.
Carbon Brief has seven charts showing why the IEA thinks an energy shift is underway.
Energy investment
World energy investment amounted to $1.8tn in 2015, the IEA says, equivalent to 2.4% of global GDP. Around half went towards fossil fuel extraction and distribution, mainly for oil and gas.
Renewables accounted for 17% of the total, around $300bn. The vast majority of this was in the electricity sector, where nearly 70% of investment in power stations went towards renewables.
Oil slide
Investment in energy was down 8% year-on-year in 2015 (around $150bn), largely because of falling investment in oil and gas. Soft demand and Saudi Arabia’s determination to squeeze competitors has created a prolonged period of cheap oil that has decimated incomes.
Reductions have been particularly steep in North America, the IEA says, with investment halving in the past two years. The smaller companies that dominate the US shale industry have been particularly hard-hit by the falling oil price, with scores of firms filing for bankruptcy.
Falling costs
The Saudi strategy has only been partially successful. Some two-thirds of the fall in oil and gas investment has been absorbed by cost reductions, particularly in the shale sector. Upstream oil and gas costs fell 15% in 2015, the IEA says.
These recent oil and gas cost reductions have been easily outpaced by those for new energy technologies. Costs for onshore wind are down by nearly 40% since 2008, solar by more than 80%, LEDs more than 90% and grid-scale batteries by 70%.
The IEA says renewable costs will continue to fall, while the reverse will be true for oil and gas:
“IEA medium-term analyses foresee lower costs in renewables, lighting and electricity storage and eventually modest cost increases in upstream oil and gas.”
Power shift
The large clean energy cost reductions are behind a continuing shift in the power sector, where 70% of investment in generating assets goes to renewables and fossil fuel investment is in decline.
Renewable power investment held steady at around $290bn in 2015, the IEA says, yet cost reductions mean more capacity could be bought for the money. Solar investment was lower than 2011 in dollar terms, but 60% more capacity was added.
Last year, rising renewable additions combined with weakening power demand growth in a landmark way. The IEA says:
“For the first time, investment in renewables-based capacity generates enough power to cover global electricity demand growth in 2015.”
New renewables commissioned in 2015 have the capacity to generate 350 terawatt hours (TWh), against an increase in demand of less than 250TWh. This means all other capacity brought online in 2015 was effectively surplus to requirements.
(It’s worth adding a couple of qualifiers: first, 40% of investment was to replace ageing assets; second, renewables often generate power intermittently rather than on demand).
Net of retirements, nuclear also expanded last year, adding the capacity to generate an extra 50TWh. In total, new plant added in 2015 has the capacity to generate 1,000TWh of electricity a year, more than four times the increase in demand.
Investment in electricity networks is increasing, reaching $260bn last year. This is partly down to the need to incorporate renewables. However, the IEA says around 90% is being driven by the need to expand electricity access and replace old kit.
The network investment figures includes grid-scale batteries. Spending here has risen ten-fold since 2010, the IEA says, though it still amounts to less than 1% of the network total.
Investment map
Power sector investments were disproportionately concentrated in China and other Asian countries. The split was particularly stark for new coal-fired generation, where more than 80% of investment was in Asia.
This trend is likely to continue. The IEA says around half of under-construction coal capacity is in China, which added more than 50 gigawatts (GW) of coal plant in 2015.
China stranding
The IEA, in comments that echo recent Greenpeace analysis, says that much of this surge in Chinese coal capacity is unnecessary. It says:
“China has overinvested in new fossil fuel capacity…low-carbon sources are expected to be able to cover annual demand growth…through 2020, leaving little scope for an expansion in fossil fuel generation.”
It illustrates the problem with the chart below, which shows falling demand growth being more than covered by consistent expansion of nuclear and renewables.
Fossil overinvestment in China, and elsewhere, will lead to stranded assets that become redundant before they have repaid the money spent to build them, the IEA says. It calls Chinese investments “inconsistent with market fundamentals”.
Climate inconsistent
Low-carbon sources of power are on the rise and fossil fuel’s share of the global energy mix is falling. Yet despite identifying a change in direction for energy investment, the IEA says spending on low-carbon will need to increase rapidly over the years ahead if countries of the world are to meet their agreed climate goals.
It concludes:
“Globally, energy investment is not yet consistent with the transition to a low-carbon energy system envisaged in the Paris Climate Agreement reached at the end of 2015.”Icon design is sometimes neglected when it comes to website design. The simplest method to catch the interest of your visitors is by creating a good user experience through attractive icons. An icon is a small, but critically important detail that defines the aesthetic look of the whole website design. For instance, to connect with your visitors, you can use social icons to help you with this task.
In today’s article, you will find 76 icon sets for a variety of purpose, all available for free. It’s quite a difficult task to find inspiration and fresh ideas while designing a new website, but perhaps these icon sets will be able to be a great source of ideas.
There is no room for doubt, just choose and download the icon set you like the most. This collection will spice up your design arsenal for sure.
Recommended Reading: Beautiful IOS App Icon Designs For Your Inspiration
The list of icon sets have been split up to four parts to make it easier for you:
Social Media
Vintage Social Media Stamps
Sociality
Social Icons hand drawn
Stylish Social Icon Set
Buddycons
Social Media Icon Set
36 free vintage social icons
Social Icons Pack
41 Social Media Icons
Dark Social Media Circle Icons
GoSocial
Multi-Format Social Media Glyph Set
Metro Social Media Icon Set
Free Vector Social Media Icons Set
Free Social Bundle Vector Icons
Multi-Purpose Icon Sets
Professional E-Commerce Icons Set
Academic Icon Set
Ecology Icon Set
Free Set of Photography Icons
Summer beach and seaworld set
dunk & olympic
Goodies
Free Icon Set From Ramotion
Autumn Breeze Icons
Envelope Icon Set
Free Set of Hand-Drawn Icons
Mobile Icon Set
Payment Icon Set
Trainee
Touch Gesture Icons
One Div
165 Lovely Vector Icons
Toolbar Icons
Flavour
Build Icons
Basal Icons
Freshy Icons
Aroma
Metro UI Dock Icon Set
30 Toolbar Icons
Glyph Icon Sets
Premium Pixels Icon Set
Brocolli Dry Icons
Other Icons
Retro Icon Set
Pixic Icon Set
Shopping Icons
MimiGlyphs
Pixel UI Icon Set
Handy Icons
IconSweets
gCons
Petite Icons
Mini Icons Vol. 1
Pace Icon Set
Finely Crafted Icon Set
Brankic1979 Icon Set
50 Crisp Web UI Icons
WPZOOM Developer Icon Set
Token
350 Vector Web Icons
Batch
Android Icons
Crisp Icon Set
Listicons
Minimicons 2nd Edition
200 icons from Inventicons
204 Google Plus Interface Icons
Micro Icon Set
Jigsoar Icons
modernminimal
50 Mini Icons
Glyph Icons PatriGlyphs #1
Browsercons
Silkcons: 120 Glyphs Set
126 Icon Set
40 Icon Set
Application Icon Set
Conclusion
We hope this great freebie bundle will help you to create stunning designs. If you have any questions, suggestions or just want to say “hello”, feel free to use a comment field below.
Editor’s note: This post is written by Pavlushka for Hongkiat.com. Pavlushka is the author of CrazyPixels web design blog. He writes inspirational articles about web design technologies and useful web design tutorials, about how to create amazing web design artworks.Even as Egypt braces for what’s next, the images from Tahrir are hugely inspiring. They remind us of the unending technological ingenuity of the Egyptian revolutionaries, and of the importance of self-determination: the protagonists are all Egyptian, the international forces seem largely at bay. And there seems some real hope of a thriving democracy emerging from this turbulent process. Fresh from a visit to Tahrir Square, Hani Shukrallah celebrates Egypt’s “continuing revolution” in Ahram online, and says that the apparent popular overthrow of an Islamist regime banishes the tired western paradigm of a clash of civilizations:
Egypt is making world history; in particular, world revolutionary history. Already, it is firmly up there with the two axiomatic revolutions of the modern world, the French and Russian revolutions. The popular upsurge on 30 June has been described as the biggest demonstration in the history of mankind; we would be hard pressed as well to site other examples of two major revolutionary upsurges in the space of two and a half years, overthrowing two regimes (and make no bones about it, the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt is over and done with), meanwhile putting somewhere between 30-40 percent of the nation’s adult population on the streets in a single day.
Simply, there is no historical precedent for any of this. Let alone that even in the grimmest of times during the past two and a half years, under the military/Muslim Brotherhood alliance, under the Muslim Brotherhood/Military alliance, and under the Muslim Brotherhood’s frenzied power grab, popular resistance did not cease for a single day. And it was thus that the first wave of the Egyptian revolution slipped – just like waves are known to do – into the second.
Also, for the first time in modern political history, a popular revolution is in the process of overthrowing an Islamist regime.
Thirty-four years in Pakistan, another 34 years in Iran, 24 years in Sudan, a foreign invasion to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan (and never mind for the moment the fractured and corrupt caricature that has produced), a foreign invasion actually bringing Shia Islamists to power in Iraq, which Saddam had been Islamising already via a debased marriage of degenerate Arab nationalism and Sunni Islamism. Against that backdrop, the overwhelming conviction everywhere was that once in power, Islamists were there to stay – short that is of foreign invasion.
Egyptians, however, did it, in 12 months.
All of which makes it doubly imperative for the revolutionary and democratic forces in the country to be fully aware of their place in history, and for God’s sake to not let the trees blind them to the wonderous magical forest that lies just beyond….
As predominant dogma would have it, the political, social, cultural and economic behaviour of Arabs and Muslims could only be understood by reference to Islam, wherein, supposedly, “freedom” has little or no place.
Tens of thousands of words have been written pontificating on this theme; Mr. [Samuel] Huntington created his absurd little meta-theory of “the clash of civilizations”, the very thrust of which was to presumably explain Arab/Muslim “exceptionalism”; Mr. [Francis] Fukuyama grudgingly admitted that Muslims may indeed be the globalised world’s single exception to his “end of history”, constituted by neo-liberal economic policy and oligarchic liberal democracy.
On one occasion during these fatuous decades, I had to suffer through a lecture by an intensely post modern American scholar in which he argued that Islamism in the Arab and Muslim worlds was the Muslims’ equivalent of the feminist and gay liberation movements in the West. This mind-numbingly boring drivel was thankfully delivered in English, and to an American University in Cairo (AUC) audience, who lapped it up. Had it been delivered to real, as opposed to “fashionable” Islamists, the young post-modern scholar would have been hard put to escape the lecture hall bruise free.From The Comics Journal #127 (March 1989), and conducted by Richard Samuel West.
Calvin and Hobbes is America’s hottest comic strip. After less than three years in syndication, it appears in more than 600 newspapers. The three Calvin and Hobbes collections are permanent fixtures on The New York Times best-seller list. And its creator, Bill Watterson, has already won the coveted National Cartoonist Society Cartoonist of the Year award.
So why haven’t you seen the Calvin and Hobbes characters splattered across the American landscape on burger glasses, greeting cards, and as stuffed toys? Because Watterson says “No” to licensing. In fact, Watterson probably says “No” more than Calvin’s prank-weary parents. Frankly, he’s not interested in it, and he tells us why in this interview. Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., 1958. At Chagrin Falls High School and Kenyon College in Ohio, he drew for the student newspapers and yearbooks. Upon graduation in 1980, he became the political cartoonist for The Cincinnati Post, an experience he remembers as relentlessly depressing but mercifully short. Unable to fulfill his editor’s fuzzy notion of what an editorial cartoon should be, Watterson was fired before the end of his first year. For the next five years, Watterson submitted comic strip ideas to the syndicates. Six were developed; six were rejected. United Features Syndicate was the most encouraging, and Watterson’s seventh development contract, this one with UFS, resulted in Calvin and Hobbes. Ironically, UFS declined to distribute it, saying they didn’t think it would sell. Universal Press Syndicate snatched it up and launched it on November 1985. Watterson values his privacy and only rarely gives interviews. He agreed to do this one on the grounds that the strip be the center of discussion. The interview was conducted, transcribed, and edited by Richard West, editor of the late and lamented political cartoon journal Target, and longtime friend of Watterson.
All images by and ©Bill Watterson.
RICHARD WEST: How do you explain the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes?
BILL WATTERSON: Really, I don’t understand it, since I never set out to make Calvin and Hobbes a popular strip. I just draw it for myself. I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. In a way, it’s kind of depressing.
WEST: Isn’t it ironic that in a profession that’s become so formulaic you have created the most successful comic strip of the ’80s by not trying to fulfill a formula?
WATTERSON: But in a way, I’ve ended up with the old tried and true. It’s a strip about a family — a familiar, universal setting that’s easy to identify with. I’m trying to put a unique twist on it, but it’s well-covered ground. The trend nowadays in comics seems to be to zero in on a narrow, specific audience, like divorced parents, baby boomers, and so on. I guess the idea is to attract a devoted special interest group to the comic page who will scream if the strip is ever dropped. That way, the strip stands a better chance of survival than a strip that aims wide but doesn’t hit deep. Generally, I don’t like these trend-of- the-month strips because they’re usually the product of some market analysis rather than the product of any honest artistic sensibility on the part of the cartoonist. Still, with any strip, it’s not the subject that’s important: it’s what you do with it. A family strip can be hackneyed drivel just as easily as any other kind of strip.
WEST: Sometimes Calvin acts very childlike and at other times he acts and says things that are completely impossible for a child of 6. What are your thoughts on that?
WATTERSON: The main concern for me is flexibility — what’s going to give me the most range, what voice is going to give me the most leverage. As far as making the kid into a wisecracking adult, that’s certainly been the approach of a lot of comics. The appeal of that is that, you know, the cartoonist is an adult and, presumably, he has adult comments to make. It’s not natural to speak through the mind of a child.
WEST: The whole joke rests on putting sophisticated thoughts into the mouth of a baby or child.
WATTERSON: Right. What I have enjoyed about Calvin is that I feel I’ve got the range to do what I want, that he can be childish at some points and not at others. The whole challenge really is to set up rules. You can make your cartoon world have as much sense or as little sense as you want to, and the main thing is that you’re consistent within that vision. I think the audience will go along with you. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
One of the neat things about Bloom County is that the strip has virtually no rules at all. Cutter John rides a wheelchair loaded with animals wearing fish bowls for space helmets, and that’s just the way things are. Everyone in the strip accepts it, and we readers do, too. In essence, Breathed says he’s going to draw whatever he feels like, and he’s not going to worry about a lot of clever explanations for what happens. The readers have to take it or leave it. It’s a riskier way to write, but it gives Breathed complete freedom in the world he’s set up. Other strips, equally good, have more ordered universes. I suppose mine is somewhere in between the extremes.
WEST: Do you think that because Breathed has established no rules, he limits the acceptability of his strip? Or, put another way, because Calvin and Hobbes is restricted in some ways — that you are respecting the boundaries that you have created in this fantasy world — that it’s easier for people to accept the strip, and that explains some of its popularity?
WATTERSON: That’s possible. That aspect of it doesn’t interest me much. Who reads it and who doesn’t isn’t a concern of mine.
WEST: I’m talking about acceptability. For instance, if you violated the rules of Calvin’s fantasy world, how would that diminish the strip? Why couldn’t you have less rules? Why couldn’t the strip be more like Bloom County?
WATTERSON: I think it’s the way I’m most comfortable writing. I like to work within certain confines. The aspect of the strip that I have the most fun playing with is the personalities and the characters. In other words, their interaction is what is interesting to me, not the playing with the form of the comic strip. I’ll qualify that. Visually, I like to play with the form, but, for example, Bloom County occasionally has a narrator. It’s a wonderful device, but it doesn’t really fit my needs. What I’m trying to do in Calvin and Hobbes is make it realistic enough so that I can explore the ideas that interest me without making it so realistic that it confines me.
WEST: You once said that Calvin’s imagination was greater than yours. Where do you go to find inspiration if you’re not basing it on your world?
WATTERSON: Well, for example, just a simple thing that I’ve played around with a couple of times is the issue of size. You take your size for granted. You get larger up to a point and then you stop, and then that is your size, and you relate to the world from that viewpoint. If size was a complete variable, what would the world be like? In other words, if there was not a hard and fast rule of growth, how would things change? That presents me with an awful lot of visual possibilities that I enjoy working with. And to adults who are used to thinking of the world from a certain vantage point, it sometimes seems fresh, I hope.
WEST: One of the best things about the strip is that you surprise readers with the areas of concern of the strip. Do you surprise yourself? Do you find yourself pursuing things that delight you: that you’ve stumbled upon? Is the inspiration on automatic pilot?
WATTERSON: I wish it was more than it actually is. I can’t just turn off the things that we all accept or have learned. For example, everybody works with a day-to-day assumption that gravity is going to be there from the time he gets up until he goes to bed and so on. To imagine if gravity were suddenly turned off requires an effort. My mind doesn’t just naturally go off in these odd directions all the time.
WEST: Well, in the last three years, have the fantasy sequences gotten easier? You seem to be doing less of them these days. Is there a reason?
WATTERSON: At first it was fun simply to juxtapose fantasy with reality — the simple fact that the reader could see the fantasy and then, at the end, see the flip. See it from the child’s view and then, later, see it from the adult view and realize that there’s an inconsistency there. That was originally a fun device, but the burden on the strip has been to make each switch more clever. The juxtaposition alone can get predictable if it’s just done over and over in the same way. Each time it’s got to be done with some unpredictability: some cleverness to it so that it doesn’t become moribund. So, yes, I’m doing fewer because it’s getting more and more difficult. But I still try to do the fantasies as they interest me. There’s a limitation to them. They’re fun to read and they’re certainly fun to draw, but they don’t have the emotional weight to them that an interaction between two interesting characters does. In other words, when Spiff is on Planet Zorg, it’s a visual feast. I get to draw bizarre landscapes and monsters and fool with lighting and color and so on, in the Sundays. It’s an adventure story on the simplest level. He reacts to the situation and then maybe at the end it flips into a classroom or whatever, but there’s no emotional depth. The depth of the friendship between Calvin and Hobbes interests me because of its significance. Each kind of story has its own problems in writing, but my main concern really is to keep the reader on his toes, or to keep the strip unpredictable. I try to achieve some sort of balance between the two that keeps the reader wondering what’s going to happen next and be surprised.
WEST: What do you say to the thought that Calvin and Hobbes is basically the exploration of a friendship and that all of the other comic devices you use are comic relief from that emotional center?
WATTERSON: That’s not far off, but I don’t know if I’d say the other is just a relief from that. Both interest me for different reasons. Really, what I’m trying to do is to juggle as many balls as I can at once so that I’ll have a slapstick joke one day, a fantasy another day, a friendship, a sadness. I try to explore as diverse a world as I’m capable of. This, again, gives me the flexibility to keep the writing interesting and I hope it also keeps it lively for the reader as well.
WEST: Let’s talk about Hobbes a little bit. He seems to be older and wiser than Calvin, but not much. Which of the following more accurately describes him: a pet, a brother, a friend, or the father that Calvin never had?
WATTERSON: Hobbes is really hard to define and, in a way, I’m reluctant to do it. I think there’s an aspect of this character that’s hard for me to articulate. I suppose if I had to choose from those four, the brother and the friend would be the closest. But there’s something a little peculiar about him that’s, hopefully, not readily categorized.
WEST: Well, in a way that says more about Calvin than Hobbes because Hobbes is implicitly, explicitly just a product of his imagination.
WATTERSON: But the strip doesn’t assert that. That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. Some reporter was writing a story on imaginary friends and they asked me for a comment, and I didn’t do it because I really have absolutely no knowledge about imaginary friends. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up.
WEST: Well, at the risk of getting into psychobabble, a lot of psychologists would say that children create imaginary friends to play out family dramas. So an argument can be just as much a part of an imaginary world as, you know, a sort of sentimental, gooey friendship can be.
WATTERSON: Yeah, well, I would hope that the friendship between Calvin and Hobbes is so complex that it would transcend a normal fantasy. The resolution of the question of whether Hobbes is real or not doesn’t concern me or interest me, but, hopefully, there’s some element of complexity there that will make the relationship interesting on a couple of levels.
WEST: So you’ve delineated a fine boundary that is pushed out of shape at various points and almost illogical at various points, but it has an internal consistency of sorts.
WATTERSON: Of sorts, yes.
WEST: You must find yourself in situations where you say, “No, I can’t do that,’’ and other times when you willingly violate what would seem to be a logical rule just for effect.
WATTERSON: Such as?
WEST: Well, such as when Hobbes tied Calvin up to a chair. If you accept the rest of the fantasy that you’ve created — that Hobbes is imaginary — that’s an impossibility.
WATTERSON: Yeah, and Calvin’s dad finds him tied up and the question remains, really, how did he get that way? His dad assumes that Calvin tied himself up somehow, so well that he couldn’t get out. Calvin explains that Hobbes did this to him and he tries to place the blame on Hobbes entirely, and it’s never resolved in the strip. Again I don’t think that’s just a cheap way out of the story. I like the tension that that creates, where you’ve got two versions of reality that do not mix. Something odd has happened and neither makes complete sense, so you’re left to make out of it what you want.
WEST: I guess that’s the rule of some of the best fantasies. Did Alice really go through the looking glass? Was Dorothy really in Oz? What do you choose to believe?
WATTERSON: I should also mention, just in that context, that the fantasy/reality question is a literary device, so the ultimate reality of it doesn’t really matter that much anyway. In other words, when Dorothy’s in Oz, if you want to make this obviously a dream, it becomes stupid — you confine yourself.
WEST: It has less purpose.
WATTERSON: And also less potential. There are inner workings in The Wizard of Oz that are too coherent for a dream — at least my dreams are never that coherent— and so it becomes less interesting if it is only a dream. The literary merits, the purpose of writing it that way, are better served by some ambiguity than by making everything very obvious.
WEST: You do a lot with the visuals of the strip. Do you make a conscious effort to vary the visual, as well as the storylines?
WATTERSON: I enjoy the drawing more than the writing, so I try to think of ideas that will allow me to develop the visual side of the strip as fully as possible. Some ideas don’t lend themselves to that. Even then, I try to make the drawings as interesting as I possibly can, given the very limited constraints of the format. In other words, if I’ve got essentially two characters talking in a daily, I’ll try to put them in an interesting location, have them walking through the woods. I’ll try different perspectives. If I’ve got several days’ strips that are essentially talking strips, one day I’ll eliminate all background, have it as sparse and clean as I can; the next day, try to make it a little lusher or develop the setting more. This is probably done more out of boredom than any conscious decision to do this one day and do this another day. The Sundays are the one day that I have a little more freedom with the visual aspects. The fun of a Sunday is that I have more space. Sunday strips lend themselves to longer conversations or visual things or, best of all, both: although if you have much conversation then you don’t have room for much visual. Sundays are more consciously chosen to reflect those two interests.
WEST: Isn’t there a remarkable similarity between Hobbes and Tigger?
WATTERSON: People have pointed that out. Tigger is probably more naive and energetic, but he’s an endearing character. Disney did a good job with him in animation, although the other Pooh characters suffered in the translation. The original Pooh stories are very subtle and sophisticated. They went right over my head as a kid, which is why they never were a real influence on me, but I reread them recently, and they’re hilarious. If I had understood the stories earlier, I’d have certainly swiped the idea.
WEST: Well, isn’t the point that there are similarities between characters that have appeared before in literature and you’d be the last one to say that a child with an imaginary animal friend sprang virginlike from your brain.
WATTERSON: Right. And many of the situations I deal with — monsters under the bed, these sorts of things — are well-worn themes. Hopefully, I’m doing something new with them or putting a different life into them just because it’s being filtered through my personality, but, yeah, I would never claim that nothing like this had ever been seen on the face of the earth before.
WEST: The parents are really an interesting part of the strip. In a way they’re foils, but the thing that interests me is that it’s extremely rare for them to express any love for Calvin. Is that simply because it doesn’t have |
) that it is a materially better product than local bus. Mixed-traffic streetcar systems can also have signal priority (and be class C+); the Portland Streetcar does not do this however.
A claim was made in a thread at Human Transit that for class A and B operation, rail is almost always preferable; this is a partial rebuttal to that, but the content is important enough to emphasize that it deserves a post of its own.
After the jump…
The reasons
BRT enjoys these advantages over rail:A TxDOT study has identified a possible site for a train station if high-speed rail to Houston becomes a reality. The study comes amid a warning that traffic patterns could change dramatically in the decades to come.
Engineer Sam Lott with Kimley-Horn and Associates lead a study for TxDOT that considered several possible downtown locations. The site they identified as the most appropriate for a high-speed rail stop is the block currently occupied by the Amtrak Station and the main post office.
The study was presented by consulting engineer Sam Lott.
Lott says you need a location that can also serve other modes of transportation.
“And it’s a facility that operates more like an airport terminal than a typical railroad station. That’s a facility that’s going to need substantial area and connectivity, and those are things we need to be thinking about right now.”
High-speed rail has been discussed and studied in Texas for decades. It’s far from a done deal at this point, but Lott says planners have to think ahead. He says if Houstonians don’t change the way they get around, the city could face massive all-day congestion on both its freeways and surface streets in the next 25 years.
“High-speed rail would not necessarily solve that congestion problem. It’s all the other modes that connect to the high-speed rail station that could be part of the solution.”
A private company called Texas Central Railway is proposing a high-speed line between Houston and Dallas, and will soon start evironmental studies.Here's a look inside the headline-making Huy Fong Foods Sriracha factory in Irwindale, CA. Eater recently took one of the public tours the factory now offers and had a brief chat with founder David Tran about the troubles his company has had with the city council and in court.
The tour itself covered the grounds of the company's massive Irwindale production facility, much of which was done from the comfort of a Huy Fong Foods-branded golf cart. According to the tour guide, the building is a whopping 650,000 square-feet. 40 customer-routed trucks depart from the factory each day bringing unthinkable amounts of endorphin-creating hot sauces across the country.
The tour followed the production narrative and, as explained by our guide (who was wearing a Sriracha t-shirt), it starts when chilis are picked nearby during the harvest and placed into giant hoppers outside of the building. They're washed three times, then ground, and then mixed with unspecified preservatives. They are never cooked. This "mash" is stored in blue drums until it's time to make sauce from it.
Chili grinding season begins in August, and the mash created in that four month period provides the base for all the Huy Fong sauces made year round. This mash is then sent to a second mixing room, where additional ingredients are added based on whichever sauce is being made. Huy Fong produces its own plastic bottles on site, which are silkscreened with their iconic rooster logo, filled, capped, and sealed. Packed into pallets and boxes by a "robot," the bottles must then be held for 35 days per the DOH. The tour guide said a DOH rep comes and tests samples from the batches every week.
While there was no grinding taking place at the time of Eater's tour, there were workers opening drums of chili mash. Fragrant? Yes. Irritating to the eyes, nose, or throat? Not in the slightest. There were also no perceivable odors in the office space above the factory or outside of the factory, where workers were eating lunch from a food truck on campus. (Eater asked another tour guide about whether the pepper smells ever bothered her and she said it didn't, but that "during grinding season you can smell it.")
People on the tour didn't leave empty handed. Each person was given a 9 ounce novelty bottle of Sriracha with the tag "I put Sriracha on my Sriracha" plus a handout called "The Big Lie" with quotes about how awful the odors from the factory are.
Following the tour, Eater had the chance to sit and chat with founder David Tran in a conference room on the second floor of the factory. Wearing a shirt that said "Srirachaholic," Tran told Eater that while there certainly have been plenty of politicians eager to see his factory move, he's not keen on the idea. "Why should I move?" he said. "I'm a citizen. The USA is my country. This building belongs to me."
He also told Eater that despite sending two invitations to visit the factory on a tour, the city council members have never visited. When asked why he thinks his factory has become a target for the city council he quickly answered, "Money. Nothing else."
Go, have a look around:
· All Sriracha Coverage on Eater [-E-]It's hard to argue with the sentiments behind Record Store Day, a music-lover's holiday designed to celebrate the independent brick-and-mortar shops that have managed to survive - and in some cases thrive within - the era of digital downloads. With that said, the annual event, which takes place at record stores nationwide on Saturday, April 19, has shifted some from its modest roots as major labels have continued to flood the market with "limited" releases of mediocre albums. Even worse, the few worthwhile LPs that do hit shelves tend to get snapped up quickly and sold online at criminal markups (search "record store day" on Ebay around noon Saturday and prepare to cringe).
It�s hard to argue with the sentiments behind Record Store Day, a music-lover�s holiday designed to celebrate the independent brick-and-mortar shops that have managed to survive � and in some cases thrive within � the era of digital downloads. With that said, the annual event, which takes place at record stores nationwide on Saturday, April 19, has shifted some from its modest roots as major labels have continued to flood the market with �limited� releases of mediocre albums. Even worse, the few worthwhile LPs that do hit shelves tend to get snapped up quickly and sold online at criminal markups (search �record store day� on Ebay around noon Saturday and prepare to cringe).
Here in Columbus, music fans can pick up at least one release with local ties: Columbus Blood, a compilation that gathers songs from locals like Connections, Hexers and The Girls! In addition to the vinyl LP, there will be a pair of release shows this weekend. On Friday, April 18, Righteous Buck & the Skull Scorchers, Cotton Jackson, Sick Thrills and Nom Tchotchkes take over Kobo, while Dead Girlfriends, Bridesmaid, The Girls!, Dirty Biscuits and Hexers hit Ace of Cups on Saturday, April 19.
Record Store Day photoAs we approach the five-year anniversary of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” which became a viral hit thanks to its flashy video, K-pop is in a very different place.
“A lot of K-pop fans would argue that doesn’t exactly represent the K-pop world in general, but that was a huge breakout moment in terms of the last five years,” Mr. Benjamin said about the song. “It had an effect, whether you realize it or not.” Today, we don’t have a chart-topper like Psy, but touring figures and album sales demonstrate the scene is growing internationally. Mr. Benjamin cited the success of BTS, a boy band that appeared at the Billboard Music Awards and showed up on the American album chart. “This was all based on YouTube and people talking,” he said.
But is K-pop a genre? “I really don’t think people are just fans of the music itself,” Mr. Benjamin said (he votes no).
Talking about “Despacito,” the Spanish-language song that recently topped the Billboard singles chart with an assist from Justin Bieber, Mr. Caramanica said, “I think there’s more sympatico with Korean pop music and American pop and hip-hop music, that I’m surprised that you do not see collaborations of that nature on American releases.”
What’s holding this back? Mr. Benjamin said such team-ups have been awkward so far. “There needs to be that very smart collaboration where it just is natural and it feels right. And I think it’s coming.”Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized Wednesday for a nude photo of himself posted by an anonymous Twitter account that made the rounds on social media, saying he was “sorry that I let my constituents down.”
“While separated from my second wife, prior to the divorce, I had sexual relationships with other mature adult women,” he said in a statement. “Each was consensual. Those relationships have ended. I am sorry I did not use better judgment during those days.”
Barton’s clarification that his sexual encounters were consensual and age-appropriate comes amid a wave of revelations about members of Congress in both parties sexually harassing and abusing their interns, staff members and constituents, and as a man accused of sexual misconduct and abuse toward teenage girls runs for the U.S. Senate.
It is not yet known who leaked and posted the explicit photo and screenshots of lewd messages sent by Barton, but if it was done without Barton’s consent as he claims, it could fall under Texas’ law criminalizing so-called “revenge porn.”
Yet Barton, a senior Republican in the House of Representatives who has served in Congress since 1985, confirmed to the Texas Tribune that he is considering how to move forward in the wake of the leak. A spokesperson told the paper that Barton did not plan to step down.
“I am talking to a number of people, all of whom I have faith in and am deciding how to respond, quite frankly,” Barton said.When it comes to films based on a real life person, I tend to not be that interested in them but when a master filmmaker like Martin Scorsese decided to make one, I won’t miss it for the world. As with most films based on real events, not everything you see on the screen are true but then this movie was based on a book written by a real life stockbroker Jordan Belfort, I have to believe that some if not all of the things happened on the screen were true. I mean I’ve worked at a financial institution a few years ago and heard stories of how the big wig executives partied and I can’t help but laugh when I saw this movie.
Just like some of Scorsese’s films, the main character Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) narrates the story throughout and even talked directly to the audience once in a while. It starts out with flashback of how he got started in wall street, he worked at some brokerage film in NYC, there he met his mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) who taught him the trick of the trade. After the stock market crash in 1987, Belfort loss his job but later found work at a small brokerage firm with a bunch of sales guys who have no idea how sell stocks. With his experience working at a big firm, Belfort was able to sell stocks of basically non-existent companies to bunch of regular schmucks. Later Belfort decided he wanted to start his own firm and met his future business partner Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) at a local dinner. They rented a garage to set up as an office and recruited their friends to work for them. The film basically chronicle the rise and fall of Belfort and his gang and since it’s a 3 hours long, I won’t go into any plot details for this review.
This is the fifth collaboration between DiCaprio and Scorsese and I think this one might be DiCaprio’s best performance ever. He commands the screen every time you see him and the things did in this movie, I’m not sure many actors can pull off. There’s a scene in which he was so drugged out of his mind and he had to crawl to get to his car was probably the most hilarious thing I’ve seen in a while and it’s kind of sad too because I’ve seen people behaved like that in real life. Jonah Hill was pretty good as the second lead, although there were a couple of times where I thought he really “acted” instead of playing the role, hope that made sense. Even though McConaughey only appeared in the movie for just a few minutes, he stole the scene and I kind of wish to see more of his character. Newcomer Aussie actress Margot Robbie did a decent job as Belfort’s trophy wife, I’ve never seen her in anything before this movie, but she might have a good career Hollywood since she’s also drop dead gorgeous. I also have to give a shout out to Rob Reiner who plays Belfort’s father, I haven’t seen him on the screen in a while and glad to see him working again in front of the camera.
To me though the person who truly deserves the credit is Scorsese, I don’t think this film would have worked as well as it did had other director made it. Seems to be he’s back in his old form again after some so so films the last few years. Even though I loved The Departed, I just felt it wasn’t a “Scorsese Picture” since it’s remake. Here he incorporated all of the skills that have made him famous and respected in the industry, from the fast editing to great cinematography, I have no complaint about his direction. He was able to show how despicable these people were and he pulled no punches showing us their debauchery behaviors and how they cheat their way into “success.” Some might say it’s too much but that’s the point of the movie, these greedy people will do anything to get rich and didn’t care who they hurt as long as they get what they wanted. Of course this being a Scorsese film, there has to be scene where some guy gets the crap beat out of him and don’t worry, there’s a scene in this film where some unfortunate guy got the crap kicked out of him. I was expecting to see Joe Pesci show up as a cameo and play the guy who beats up this person. I don’t mean to sound exaggerated but I think this film might be on the same level as Goodfellas or Taxi Driver. Now I do think the film could’ve use some trimming, at 3 hours it’s a bit long and I thought some scenes could’ve been shorten. But I was so involved in the story, it didn’t feel like 3 hours to me.
Of all the films I saw in 2013, this one’s probably my favorite. It’s great seeing a true Scorsese’s picture again and along with great performances, this one is highly recommended. Just a warning though, this film is for adults only, please don’t bring young kids to see it. If you get easily offended by foul language, the F-words were mentioned many times, you might want to stay away from it. Also, there were many scenes of sex acts and drug use throughout most of the film, again if you’re easily offended by these kind of scenes, you won’t enjoy the film.
I think if you’re a fan of either DiCaprio or Scorsese or both, you’ll enjoy this film. It’s a kind of tragic story of how greed can make people so evil and the last shot of the film was a proof that yes many of us will do anything to get rich and have a better life. That’s the American dream right?
4.5 out of 5 reels
What do you think of The Wolf of Wall Street and Scorsese + DiCaprio collaboration?
AdvertisementsPokemon GO is the new smartphone social experience that allows you to catch Pokemon, train them up, join a team, and help them defend different Gyms around the world. With the game being so popular upon its launch, you’ll probably find that a lot of your friends are already embarking on their own Pokemon adventure.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t offer you the ability to add your friends to some sort of friends list. Of course, there’s always the chance that this may get added in at a later date, but for now, you’ll just have to keep on waiting. It’d certainly make the whole process of trading Pokemon and battling against other trainers an easy process, anyway.
In the meantime, you can always swap tips and tricks for Pokemon GO with your friends and ask them where abouts they managed to find that elusive Growlithe in your area. We’ll keep you updated if Nintendo adds any additional social features to the game.Twitter iOS app download screen, showing a useless changelog
Changelogs
What is a changelog and why is it important?
Wikipedia defines a changelog as:
a log or record of changes made to a project, such as a website or software project, usually including such records as bug fixes, new features, etc.
While that explains the what, it does little to explain why it’s important.
Updating software is not an act that happens in isolation. It takes time and bandwidth, and there are no formal assurances that things will work the same way. That “three days later [when I] try to do something the way I’ve always done it [I won’t] be frustrated when it doesn’t work that way anymore.”
Further, a changelog is more than just a record of changes made to a project, a changelog is one of the few artifacts of the software development process that is visible to end users. It bears most of the responsibility to communicate to end users that the software is maturing by responding to changes in requirements and becoming more reliable.
This helps to explain why I was so frustrated with Twitter’s terse changelog above: it gave me no compelling reason to update my software, it gave me no argument as to why I should waste my time and data.
Changelogs for libraries
Changelogs are not only used in the application world, though. Those of us who use software libraries are familiar with relying on a changelog to suss out changes in implementations. Or as a good friend Boris put it:
X changed to Y then everything went to shit
Thoughtbot’s shoulda-matchers changelog is a great example of how wonderful a changelog can be when done correctly: it reliably points out both what has changed and why, clearly showing me the value in new versions of the software and guiding me towards using it correctly.
This kind of log works particularly well for libraries, but I do not believe it works well for applications—specifically web applications (which will be the main focus from this point forward).
Why does a web app need a different log than a library?
Libraries have a single audience: the developers who use their code. Library users have focus when looking at upgrades. They look for:
What new pieces have been added to the library’s public API that I can begin to use?
What parts of the public API have changed, requiring me to change my own software in order to upgrade?
What parts of the public API have been removed, requiring me to find an alternative to the provided features
In contrast, a web application is interacted with by many different people or personas, each of whom have very different focuses when evaluating a changelog:
Internal Developers of the application:
i.e. the people who add to and maintain your codebase. This one’s easy because internal developers can take the same view as library users, viewing the rest of the application as an available public API to use or extend. This means they care about the same trio of “what’s new, what’s changed, what’s been removed” that we’ve already explored.
End Users:
i.e. the people who use your software for its intended application. End users care about:
Infrastructure changes: improvements to speed, reliability, and scalability of existing functions
Functional changes: adding or modifying product features
Interface changes: visual redesigns, interaction changes, information re-architecture.
Operations/CloudOps: Provisioning
i.e. the people who provision the infrastructure/servers you deploy your application to. These folks care about:
Do any codebase changes require scaling up/down the number of servers needed? e.g. introducing new poor performing code
Are there new soft/hardware dependencies that need to be accomodated? e.g. a new library/gem/package, new Java/Ruby/Python/etc. version
There are many other personas not enumerated—such as Deployment, Security, Operations, Legal—each with even more disparate concerns. Because of this, I suggest redefining a changelog as
a log or record of changes made to a project, such as a website or software project, of importance to a single persona, usually including such records as bug fixes, new features, etc.
The fallout of this means creating and distributing distinct changelogs for each of the relevant stakeholders of your application. Each of these can be created independently of one another, and each one appropriately focuses on the concerns of one type of user. This prevents my most hated periodic internal debate:
Should I really write this down?
The answer is yes, you should write it down, along with all the other changes relevant to that particular stakeholder. And when you are providing your changelog publicly, such as for the Twitter app in the app store, make sure the changelog is relevant to the user who will be reading it.My body boundaries: there is no consent or consideration when it comes to young children. They need you when they need you. They need your lap and your milk and your smell and your energy, even when you have none. It’s profoundly exhausting and sometimes even feels extractive — like they have no compassion for your limits, which they don’t, and they shouldn’t (at least as infants).
But that’s a strange place to find yourself in when you’ve worked so hard to create relationships where your body’s autonomy and desire is respected. Sometimes I feel like my 20s were about learning to love and protect my body and then, in my 30s, I gave it over completely.
Mornings: I write best in the mornings, so I used to literally roll out of bed and walk straight to my desk. If my boyfriend tried to talk to me, I would give him the death stare. Don’t you know that my brain is at this very moment firing on all cylinders for a precious few moments of time before the Internet or the unpaid bills or hunger or some other less important thing sneaks into my consciousness?
You’ll be glad to know that I don’t give my babies the death stare when they wake me up at 6 a.m. Truth be told, they are as cute when they wake up as I was once inspired. Even more so. But I do miss those mornings with my fingers flying over a keyboard, my brain ever so briefly un-muddled.
Drunk dancing: I was going to write late nights, but there is actually something kind of lovely about my nights these days. I’m so worn out by the time I get the girls to bed that I positively relish that first moment when my ass hits the couch with a book in hand or a TV show in mind. Sometimes I eat a bar of chocolate. Usually my husband and I recount some ridiculous moment involving the girls and laugh together.
It only lasts an hour or so before one of us crashes, but it’s often sweet. What I do miss is dancing for hours on end in a dark bar, not thinking about the hangover the next day, not thinking at all, actually, just being in the flow state thanks to some hot, snobby DJ.
Timelessness: children impose all kinds of beautiful ritual on a life. The upside is that the existential exhaustion that accompanied my previous existence because of all those damn daily choices is gone (see Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice). The downside is that my life feels slotted into a merry-go-round of routines.
The smoothie must be put in the heart glass. The purple water bottle must go in the Wonder Woman backpack. The parking curb must be walked like a balance beam. Again and again and again… Part and parcel of not having much timeless time is that I rarely get to be lost in a book, which is one of my deepest pleasures.
Following the muse: I have a dozen notes on this phone (on which I am right this very moment drafting my column while I pump) that were supposed to be the seeds of brilliant columns or profound poems and instead they now read like stones that plunk dumbly into a lake rather than skipping. Real examples: freedom from denial, you’re wrong and I love you, pre-grief?, therapist no email.
Wandering: one of my favorite things to do is walk through a city with no agenda, watching people, getting sucked into the black hole of a great bookstore, eating something out of a truck or a diner. Infants require too much stuff and too many naps to wander. The only time I’ve been lost recently was within the confines of a bedroom pretending to be camping with unicorns (which was pretty awesome, actually).
Being fearless about dying: I used to sit on an airplane and think, if I died right now, I would be happy. I’ve had an amazing life filled with funny, brilliant, big-hearted people. I’ve been able to express who I am, be of service at some level, laugh a lot. But now that I have the girls, my entire being screams NO to death. I have to be here to make sure they eat enough protein and take a bath at least every other day and I never want to stop pulling long-legged Maya into my lap and smelling her head. Death is no longer a graceful option. I’d go kicking and screaming.
Being one person: people often evoke that saying about having kids being like having your heart walk outside of your body. It’s kind of like that for me. But it’s a different quality — more like the umbilical cord was never actually cut, spiritually speaking. If it were my heart, I think I’d actually feel less compromised. I can be reckless with my own body, my own heart, in a way that I cannot with theirs.
When they were born, it was like a dimension of the universe unfolded wherein I am not one person, but three people now. They are never outside of my mind, even if they are hiding in a corner for a moment while I give a speech or swim laps. They are permanently included in my sense of my own well being — how am I? Well, how are they? This is a deeply meaningful way to be in the world, but it’s also heavy and permanent. I never wish I were one person again. The gifts of being three are so vast. But I do miss the unbearable lightness of just being me sometimes.This week in Greater Boston, Louisa updates her calendar in Louisa Beyond Leon; Gemma takes time for a gut check in Gastromancy with Gemma; and Michael discovers a source of ancient wisdom in Thunder Over Thunder. This week in episode 7: Divinations.
Content Warnings at end of show notes.
Greater Boston is written and produced by Alexander Danner and Jeff Van Dreason with recording and technical assistance from Marc Harmon.
Please consider supporting the show through our Patreon campaign. We’ve recently revamped our Patron levels with new rewards, including a chance to receive handwritten Postcards from Dimitri.
You can also help the show by leaving us a review on iTunes or social media.
In order of appearance, this episode featured:
Alexander Danner as the narrator
Braden Lamb as Leon Stamatis
Julia Propp as Louisa Alvarez
Lydia Anderson as Gemma Linzer-Coolidge
Arun Sannutti as Tyrell Fredericks
James Oliva as Michael Tate
James Capobianco as Extinction Event Poletti
Also featuring Jeff Van Dreason as the Fortune Teller and Freshly Fulfilled in Framingham, Mike Linden as Enlightened in Worcester and Ben Flaumenhaft as Trapped in Tewksberry.
Interviews recorded with Greater Boston residents
Charlie on the MTA is performed by Emily Peterson and Dirk Tiede. “Lowell, MA” by Marck Harmon. “Red Apple Rag,” “Blackberry Rag,” and “Circus Music” by Adrienne Howard, Emily Peterson and Dirk Tiede. “On Questions of Responsibility: Act II” by Lloyd Rogers. Drum tracks by Jim Johanson. Some sound effects and music used from public domain and creative commons sources.
Episode transcripts will be posted online at GreaterBostonShow.com.
Greater Boston is written in part at The Writers’ Room of Boston, a non-profit workspace for Boston-area writers. Find out more at WritersRoomofBoston.org.
Content Notes:
Course Language
Suicidal thoughts
Alcoholism
AdvertisementsLongford 2-24 Down 3-16
Longford scored two goals in extra-time to send Down packing out of the All-Ireland SFC series and complete a humiliating season for the Mourne county.
Losing at home to a Division Three team was the latest embarrassment for Eamonn Burns' side, and an 11th defeat out of 11 inter-county matches played in 2016.
Donal O'Hare kicked 2-09 for Down but still ended up on the losing side while for Longford, who lost by eight points to Offaly in the Leinster championship, this was a big scalp to take against a side who had played in Division One in the spring.
After the sides finished level 3-12 to 0-21 after normal time, there was only one team in it in the extra 20 minutes with Longford subs Seamus Hannon and Mark Hughes scoring extra-time goals to put their side through to Monday's Round 2B draw.
Longford dominated the first half and bar a breakaway goal finished by Conor Maginn, Down were well off the pace and lucky to only trail 0-11 to 1-04 at the break with Longford hitting eight first-half wides.
Inspirational captain Mickey Quinn drove them forward and set up numerous scores with Robbie Smyth, James McGivney, Barry McKeon and Diarmuid Masterson all taking stylish points from distance.
Down led by 0-02 to 0-01 after 11 minutes but Longford scored six of the next seven points in the following 10 minutes.
Down looked short on confidence, but Maginn brought them back into it.
Kevin McKernan's long ball found Donal O'Hare, Barry O'Hagan then off-loaded to Maginn for an easy tap-in in Down's best move of the match.
The long ball and direct approach was something Down didn't exploit often enough and frequently coughed up possession too easily.
Longford capitalised on a lot of the turnovers, but poor shooting cost them a bigger interval lead.
Down came out a different team and O'Hare rattled the net 35 seconds after the restart to set the tone for a much-improved second half.
Conor Maginn pointed to draw them level before Barry McKeon nudged Longford ahead again.
But there was far greater urgency to Down's play and O'Hare slotted home his second goal after 44 minutes to put the home side in front for the first time in over half an hour.
Ryan Mallon and the on-fire O'Hare put Down three points up, but having been outplayed in the second half, Longford somehow found another gear.
Three points from play in two minutes from the inspirational Quinn, Masterson and McGivney saw them draw level, at 3-09 to 0-18 with seven minutes to go.
They made it five in a row through Brian Kavanagh and Masterson to move two ahead but Mallon and sub Sean Dornan levelled it in the 69th minute with extra-time looming.
Quinn's fourth point in the second minute of injury time put Longford in front but after Michael Brady was sent-off for a second yellow, O'Hare equalised for Down taking it to extra-time.
Longford sub Seamus Hannon bagged a goal nine minutes into extra time to help the visitors lead 1-23 to 3-16 at half-time and Hughes clinched it with an 86th minute goal.
Down: M Reid; C McGovern, G McGovern, D O'Hagan; D McKibbin, A Carr, D O'Hanlon; P Turley, K McKernan; R Mallon (0-04), M Poland (0-01), J Murphy; C Maginn (1-01), D O'Hare (2-09, 0-8 frees), B O'Hagan (0-01)
Subs: G Collins for McKibbin (43), M McKay for McKernan (53), D Turley for Murphy (55), S Dornan (0-01) for B O'Hagan (63), H Brown for McKay (BC, 79), K McKernan for Maginn (84), B McArdle for Carr (89)
Longford: P Collum; C Farrelly, B Gilleran, D Brady; D McElligot, M Quinn (0-04), D Masterson (0-03); M Brady, D Gallagher; D Reynolds (0-01), J McGivney (0-03), B McKeon (0-02); R Smyth (0-04, 0-01 free), B Kavanagh (0-06, 0-05 frees), B O'Farrell
Subs: P McGee for Gilleran (47), L Connerton for Gallagher (55), S Hannon (1-01) for McKeon (60), B Farrell for Reynolds (67), M Hughes (1-00) for J McGivney (BC, 80), R Connor for Smyth (86), D McGivney for Quinn (89)
Referee: Barry Cassidy (Derry)Could Jon Huntsman have quit the presidential race because he feared an embarrassing loss to Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert? The comedian’s Super PAC is reportedly on the air with a TV ad buy in the Charleston, South Carolina media market.
The ad charges that Romney must be a serial killer if he believes corporations are people and yet dismantled several of them anyway while CEO of private equity firm Bain Capital. John Lithgow narrates:
No word yet on the size of the buy, but the very fact of its existence is sure to further outrage voters by drawing attention to the absurdity of the campaign finance system in the post Citizens United world.
That Stephen Colbert — with his millions of devoted fans and perhaps even millions of dollars in Super PAC money — has taken this on as a pet cause could have a real affect on the debate this fall.
Huntsman, who echoed Joe Lieberman’s now laughable 2004 claim of “Joementum” made right before he finished fifth in New Hampshire and dropped out of the race, initially claimed a “ticket to ride” from a distant third-place finish of his own in the Granite State.
Perhaps it just took some time to sink in. But this brings to an end what was from the start a hopeless presidential campaign in a year where pragmatism and John McCain-style appeals to ascetic patriotism are falling on deaf ears.by | |
On Thursday this week, seven candidates hoping to replace Director-General Ahmet Üzümcü will present their candidacies to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). They have been asked by Ambassador Sheikh Mohammed Belal, the chair of the Executive Council, to focus on two pertinent questions: the priorities and future challenges of the OPCW and the management of the Secretariat itself.
These questions are similar to those answered by Mr Üzümcü in his July 2009 presentation to the Council. He discussed the challenges of industry inspections, the Chemical Weapon Convention’s relationship with the Biological Weapons Convention, as well as National Implementation. Not knowing what was around the corner, Mr Üzümcü also highlighted the need for public diplomacy—the need to raise the organisation’s profile with the media and civil society. He got unexpected help. In 2013, the OPCW received the Nobel Peace Prize “for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons.” The organisation is now in the public spotlight, and with that comes new challenges.
Notwithstanding how candidates choose to address the work of the OPCW today, they are advised to remember that directorship requires vision, resolve, and sometimes hands-on leadership. This is especially true for the OPCW, the guardian of a treaty which—in Mr Üzümcü’s own words—bridges the “space in disarmament between passion and practicality, between sentiment and action, between noble ambition and concrete achievements.” One day, the war in Syria will be over, but the organisation and its mission will remain.
Thursday’s presentations are strictly regimented; they should not exceed ten minutes (that’s around 1,400 words for the professional speaker). After that, each of the five regional groups will ask one question (not exceeding two minutes). The candidate has no more than three minutes to deliver an answer. While the schedule is not entirely set, the Council is likely to hear four presentations in the morning: Spain, Iraq, Hungary and Denmark. In the afternoon, the remaining three: Burkina Faso, South Korea and Lithuania.
So who are the candidates?
The council will first hear from Ambassador Fernando Arias Gonzalez of Spain. Mr Gonzales, a lawyer, is a relative newcomer to international security. He has served previously as the Permanent Representative of Spain to the United Nations, and is the present Permanent Representative to the OPCW.
The second presentation will be delivered by Saywan Sabir Mustafa Barzani of Iraq. At 45, he’s one of the youngest candidates. He got his law degree from the University of Orléans in 1995. He has previously served as Iraq’s Permanent Representative to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and have served on the World Food Programme’s Executive Board Bureau.
The third presentation will be delivered by someone with solid arms control credentials, Ambassador Tibor Toth of Hungary. He served as the Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) from 2005 to 2013. Before that, he did two tours as the Permanent Representative of Hungary to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, and between those postings he served as Hungary’s representative to the CTBTO. Throughout the 1990s, Mr Toth was both involved in the negotiation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, as well as chairing the effort to bring into being a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention. He is the only candidate with experience of running a relatively large intergovernmental organisation.
Ambassador Jesper Vahr of Denmark will then take the floor. He is presently serving as the ambassador to Israel, but has also represented his country to Turkey and Azerbaijan. In between posts, he’s served as the Director for Security Policy. His most |
ley in this area.
Defensive Third
Both players have needed to demonstrate the defensive element of their game this season and this is a vital area for both of them if they are to be genuine long term starters for their respective clubs. Looking at the Passing Zone graphic again we can see that, as with the other areas of the park, Cleverley makes more passes than Henderson and with a (slightly) higher completion rate.
From a defensive perspective though, the stats don’t really give us much more insight in terms of the relative strengths of the players. Cleverley’s tackle success rate season to date is 78% compared to 81% for Henderson (although Henderson has actually made fewer tackles). Minutes per tackle is also very close with Tom Cleverley making a tackle every 37 minutes of pitch time and Henderson every 41. Cleverley has dribbled past players in the defensive areas 21 times, compared to 11 for Henderson. However Henderson has made double the number of defensive interceptions (32 vs 16) for his team.
Figure 12. Possession stats.
Cleverley and Henderson rarely lose possession as shown below and they’re very good at winning the ball back for their team too. Cheik Tiote is the best at winning possession back in the Premier League averaging a possession win every 10 minutes however that is his role in the team – the enforcer that breaks up play. Tom Cleverley and Jordan Henderson have more responsibility on the pitch than Tiote. Hence their mins per possession win stats aren’t as impressive as Tiote’s but still very impressive with Jordan Henderson edging it here.
In the defensive areas, I would again rate the two players equally. They are both very disciplined and prepared to get their sleeves rolled up for the defensive cause.
Henderson Vs Cleverley: The Verdict
Like Cleverley, Henderson is an extremely dynamic footballer who provides an extra level of pace and purpose in the Liverpool midfield. He has struggled to find a home in the heart of the Liverpool midfield. Where we can argue the Cleverley brings something different to the United team Henderson has very similar players in the Liverpool squad to compete with. He is very similar in his combative approach to the game as Gerrard, without yet reaching the same levels of quality or consistency. There isn’t a player at Liverpool who we have seen yet as the ideal partner for Henderson in the middle and so we have seen him playing out of position in a number of games this season or warming the bench.
Cleverley is certainly workman-like and tenacious. But even the hardcore United supporter would struggle to support an argument for him contributing that much creatively to date, which is fine if he is paving the way for others to fulfill that role. Cleverley does though appear to be the stronger passer than Henderson, both in volume and quality. Cleverley is often the catalyst for United attacks providing an initial quick ball or burst of pace to enable an attack to be built from the middle areas of the field, but he doesn’t often provide that killer pass (as his assist stats will testify).
The key to Cleverley’s success, is the player you play with him in the centre of the park. Phil Jones looks like a real a prospect and if he develops into a holding midfield role rather than a central defender, you have to feel that Cleverley will need to add a goal-scoring element to his game if he is to become at regular in the United starting XI which Henderson seems to have added towards the end of this season.
Currently, I believe, and the stats appear to support this, there is very little difference between these two players. With Cleverley edging the passing areas and Henderson more of the creative & shooting aspects of the game. Cleverley feels to me more like a player who has found his role in the team and understands what he is able to contribute, he works extremely well with the experienced Michael Carrick and the two appear to have good understanding of how to get the best from each other, each covering well for the other as they take their turn to push on.
Henderson though is still played in a variety of positions and his position totally depends on the other players that Brendan Rodgers deploys. He certainly has quality but even with Joe Allen not in contention he hadn’t secured a regular central midfield berth with Lucas, Gerrard and now Countinho all looking impressive through those central midfield areas at Anfield, until recently. Longer term, maybe he can fill Gerrard’s boots when he eventually retires but he has some work to do if he is to be a genuine successor to the current Liverpool captain.
Overall, two very similar players in terms of age, ability and their huge potential who out-do each other in different areas. Both players wear their hearts on their sleeves and give their all for their club. Whatever your view, I hope we now all agree that there is more to this than just goals and assists.
Data and Graphics Sources: EPL Index Stats Comparison Area (Subscribe Now) and StatZone.The delayed fuse on the eurozone's debt-deflation policies has finally detonated in a second country. Portugal has joined the revolt against austerity.
The rickety scaffolding of fiscal discipline and economic surveillance imposed on southern Europe by Germany is falling apart on its most vulnerable front.
The anti-austerity revolt in Portugal is a foretaste of what may happen in a string of EMU states when the global economic expansion rolls over
Antonio Costa, Portugal's Socialist leader and son of a Goan poet, has refused to go along with further pay cuts for public workers, or to submit tamely to a Right-wing coalition under the thumb of the now-departed EU-IMF 'Troika'.
Against all assumptions, he has suspended his party's historic feud with Portugal's Communists and combined in a triple alliance with the Left Bloc. The trio have demanded the right to govern the country, and together they have an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament.
• Portugal's 'Berlin wall moment': Communists and anti-euro Leftists set for government
The verdict from the markets has been swift. "We would be very reluctant to invest in Portuguese debt," said Rabobank, describing the turn of events as a political shock.
The country's president has the constitutional power to reappoint the old guard - and may in fact do so over coming days - but this would leave the country ungovernable and would be a dangerous demarche in a young Democracy, with memories of the Salazar dictatorship still relatively fresh.
"The majority of the Portuguese people did not vote for the incumbent coalition. They want a change," said Miriam Costa from Lisbon University.
Joseph Daul, head of conservative bloc in the European Parliament, warned that Portugal now faces six months of chaos, and risks going the way of Greece.
• Indebted Portugal is still the problem child of the eurozone
Mr Costa's hard-Left allies both favour a return to the escudo. Each concluded that Greece's tortured acrobatics under Alexis Tspiras show beyond doubt that it is impossible to run a sovereign economic policy within the constraints of the single currency.
The Communist leader, Jeronimo de Sousa, has called for a "dissolution of monetary union" for the good of everybody before it does any more damage to the productive base of the European economy.
His party is demanding a 50pc write-off of Portugal's public debt and a 75pc cut in interest payments, and aims to tear up the EU's Lisbon Treaty and the Fiscal Compact. It wants to nationalize the banks, reverse the privatisation of the transport system, energy, and telephones, and take over the "commanding heights of the economy".
A durable rebalancing of the economy has not taken place... Portugal faces an acute growth challenge International Monetary Fund
Catarina Martins, the Left Bloc's chief, is more nuanced but says that if the Portuguese people have to choose between "dignity and the euro", then dignity should prevail. "Any government that refuses to obey Wolfgang Schauble must be prepared to see the European Central Bank close down its banks," she said.
She is surely right about that. The lesson of the Greek drama is that the ECB is the political enforcer of monetary union, willing to bring rebels to their knees by pulling the plug on a nation's banking system.
These two parties have for now submited to eurozone pieties, agreeing vaguely to abide by EMU fiscal rules. Such lip-service is meaningless.
The EU Fiscal Compact requires Portugal to cut its public debt from 127pc to 60pc of GDP over twenty years, under pain of sanctions, with parallel cuts in Italy, Spain, France, and Belgium that feed on each other and are likely to trap monetary union in a contractionary vortex for another generation.
For Portugal it entails a primary budget surplus on such a scale that it cannot possibly be compatible with the economic agenda of the Left.
Mr Costa's own proposals - scarcely more moderate - put him on a collision course with the European Commission. He has vowed to "turn the page on austerity", reverse Troika cuts, roll back labour reform, review the privatisation of public transport and the water works, and launch a 55-point reflation package led by spending on health care and education.
The upset in Portugal has caught Europe's elites off guard. The eurozone is enjoying a cyclical rebound of sorts, driven by the happy trifecta of cheap energy, a cheap euro, and cheap credit. The ECB's quantitative easing has flushed the system with liquidity though Europe still has one foot in deflation.
Europe's leaders thought the crisis was over and believed their own propaganda that Portugal has successfully clawed its way back to safety by adhering strictly to Troika terms. This was always wishful thinking.
William Buiter, Citigroup’s chief economist, says Portugal has many of the same economic ‘pathologies’ as Greece, with debt ratios already beyond the point of no return, and a fresh solvency crisis almost inevitable in the next downturn.
Portugal's combined public and private debt is 370pc of GDP. This is the second highest in the developed world after Japan, but Japan is an international creditor while Portugal has net external liabilities of 215pc of GDP. "A systemic solution to the problem of excessive leverage is needed," says the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF praises Portugal's “export miracle” but warns that the gains have been narrowly based. While exports have jumped from 30pc to 40pc of GDP since 2010, there have been no such advances in "domestic-value added" shipments, which are what matter for competitiveness. “A durable rebalancing of the economy has not taken place and the nontradable sector is still dominant,” it said.
“Portugal faces an acute growth challenge. Productivity growth has been declining over the past half-century. Portugal’s working-age population is projected to fall, and the country’s capital stock is contracting because of underinvestment,” it said.
It is this mix of high debt and chronically low growth that is so toxic, compounded by deflationary forces that poison with debt dynamics. The IMF says the only sure way to escape the stagnation trap within EMU constraints is a blast of radical market reform. Yet reforms have already "stalled". They now look implausible.
The anti-austerity revolt in Portugal is a foretaste of what may happen in a string of EMU states when the global economic expansion rolls over, as it may well do within a couple of years on historical patterns.
The social and political damage caused by the eurozone's self-inflicted slump from 2008-2014 is still fermenting, a combustible atmosphere if the region is soon hit by fresh downturn.
The currency bloc is in worse shape on almost every metric than it was before the Lehman crisis. Debt levels are 35 percentage points of GDP higher. EMU-wide unemployment is stuck at 11pc. The credibility of eurozone leadership is in tatters.
Powerful populist forces are waiting in the wings in Spain, Italy, and France. The events in Portugal have shown that every election in Southern Europe is a now an "event risk". Political chickens are coming home to roost, and economic time is running out.Malaysia is a country that I know well, and whose political system I have studied closely for fifteen years. It is also a country whose political liberalization I have long awaited. Malaysia has a multiparty parliamentary system of government, but the same coalition of parties has been in power for six decades, and has never lost a general election. The government retains—in a holdover from the British colonial period—the legal authority to detain people without trial if it so desires. The print and broadcast media are fairly compliant, mostly owned by the corporate allies of political elites, and rarely criticize the government.
Living in Malaysia and working on Malaysian politics has taught me something important about authoritarianism from my perspective as an American. That is, the mental image of authoritarian rule in the minds of most Americans is completely unrealistic, and dangerously so.
Even though Malaysia is a perfectly wonderful place to visit, and an emerging market economy grappling with the same “middle income trap” issues that characterize most emerging market economies, scholars of comparative politics do not consider it to be an electoral democracy. Freedom House considers Malaysia “Partly Free.” The Democracy-Dictatorship dataset codes Malaysia as a civilian dictatorship, as do Boix-Miller-Rosato. Levitsky and Way consider Malaysia to be a classic case of competitive authoritarianism. There are quite a few other countries like Malaysia: Mexico and Taiwan for most of the 20th century, Russia, Turkey, Singapore, Cameroon, Tanzania, and others.
The mental image that most American harbor of what actual authoritarianism looks like is fantastical and cartoonish. This vision of authoritarian rule has jackbooted thugs, all-powerful elites acting with impunity, poverty and desperate hardship for everyone else, strict controls on political expression and mobilization, and a dictator who spends his time ordering the murder or disappearance of his opponents using an effective and wholly compliant security apparatus. This image of authoritarianism comes from the popular media (dictators in movies are never constrained by anything but open insurrection), from American mythmaking about the Founding (and the Second World War and the Cold War), and from a kind of “imaginary othering” in which the opposite of democracy is the absence of everything that characterizes the one democracy that one knows.
Still, that fantastical image of authoritarianism is entirely misleading as a description of modern authoritarian rule and life under it. It is a description, to some approximation, of totalitarianism. Carl Friedrich is the best on totalitarianism (see PDF), and Hannah Arendt of course on its emergence (PDF). But Arendt and Friedrich were very clear that totalitarianism is exceptional as a form of politics.
The reality is that everyday life under the kinds of authoritarianism that exist today is very familiar to most Americans. You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family.* There are schools and businesses, and some people “make it” through hard work and luck. Most people worry about making sure their kids get into good schools. The military is in the barracks, and the police mostly investigate crimes and solve cases. There is political dissent, if rarely open protest, but in general people are free to complain to one another. There are even elections. This is Malaysia, and many countries like it.
Everyday life in the modern authoritarian regime is, in this sense, boring and tolerable. It is not outrageous. Most critics, even vocal ones, are not going to be murdered like Anna Politkovskaya, they are going to be frustrated. Most not-very-vocal critics will live their lives completely unmolested by the security forces. They will enjoy it when the trains run on time, blame the government when they do not, gripe at their taxes, and save for vacation. Elections, when they happen, will serve the “anesthetic function” that Philippe Schmitter attributed to elections in Portugal under Salazar in the greatly underappreciated in 1978 volume Elections without Choice.
Life under authoritarian rule in such situations looks a lot like life in a democracy. As Malaysia’s longtime Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad used to say, “if you don’t like me, defeat me in my district.”
This observation has two particular consequences. One, for asking if “the people” will tolerate authoritarian rule. The premise upon which this question is based is that authoritarianism is intolerable generally. It turns out that most people express democratic values, but living in a complicated world in which people care more about more things than just their form of government, it is easy to see that given an orderly society and a functioning economy, democratic politics may become a low priority.** The answer to the question “will ‘the people’ tolerate authoritarian rule?” is yes, absolutely.
Second, for knowing if you are living in an authoritarian regime versus a democratic one. Most Americans conceptualize a hypothetical end of American democracy in Apocalyptic terms. But actually, you usually learn that you are no longer living in a democracy not because The Government Is Taking Away Your Rights, or passing laws that you oppose, or because there is a coup or a quisling. You know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change.
It is possible to read what I’ve written here as a defense of authoritarianism, or as a dismissal of democracy. But my message is the exact opposite. The fantasy of authoritarianism distracts Americans from the mundane ways in which the mechanisms of political competition and checks and balances can erode. Democracy has not survived because the alternatives are acutely horrible, and if it ends, it will not end in a bang. It is more likely that democracy ends, with a whimper, when the case for supporting it—the case, that is, for everyday democracy—is no longer compelling.
NOTES
*The parallelism between this sentence and The Lumberjack Song are entirely inadvertent.
**It is also the case the many people find democracy rather intolerable too. By this I do not mean that people do not value democracy. Rather, I mean that in democracy, it is also the case that most of the very things that motivate people to oppose authoritarian rule—corruption, cronyism, inequality, unfairness—usually still exist.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
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Bill Clinton is upset his wife’s campaign team doesn’t follow his advice — and because he often can’t even get Hillary on the phone.
“Those snotty-nosed kids over there are blowing this thing because nobody is listening to me,” Bill told campaign chairman John Podesta, according to OrbMagazine.
The former president has not only clashed over policy with Hillary’s closest adviser, Huma Abedin, he’s also said to be furious he can’t phone his wife without going through Abedin, who carries Hillary’s cellphone and screens all her calls.
“When Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin are traveling, they always share a suite, which they lock from the inside to bar the Secret Service,” Orb reports.
“If Hillary is not in the mood to listen to her husband kvetching about problems in the campaign, she instructs Huma to tell Bill she is sleeping and cannot be disturbed. Naturally, this sends the ex-president into paroxysms of rage.”Express News Service By
Refusing to call off his day and night sit-in dharna, which entered the 15th day on Wednesday, former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa urged the government to issue an order extending the Bidai scheme to all poor brides.
Karnataka Janta Party state president Yeddyurappa said the government is trying to pressure the police to end the ongoing agitation.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had directed the city police to end the dharna, he alleged.
Yeddyurappa expressed apprehension that the police may arrest him and others any time. “If the government decides to end the agitation, which is being carried out peacefully, we will continue our stir in the jail. There is no question of withdrawing the agitation, unless the government issues the order extending the scheme to all,” he said.
Stating that the city police have issued notice saying no agitation would be allowed beyond eight days, he said: “Let the government bring a new law to this effect and take action later.
The same police has given me permission to hold the dharna till 24th of this month and all of a sudden they are changing stance.
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Give order on Bidai scheme: Yeddyurappa
Government plans to extend Bidai to all poorTwitter is a relatively new web 2.0 site that is starting to gain a lot of popularity. That means that a lot of people have heard of it but it is also quite common to run into people who haven’t heard of it.. yet. Twitter.com is this social site that encourages users to post often about what they are currently doing.
A lot of people are using it to improve their marketing reach, by being an active twitterer they gain followers who are interested in what they got going on. This means people being exposed to their updates on a regular basis. For example, if you have hundreds of followers in Twitter and you decide to post an affiliate link, that means that hundreds of people have instantly been exposed to your offer. In this article I will discuss ways to maximize Twitter for your marketing, and also a big mistake to be aware of.
In order to have a fan base per say of followers in Twitter you must be able to keep their interest in you and what you are doing now. “What are you doing?” is the whole foundation of what Twitter is about in the first place. Make sure to post daily if not several times throughout the day updates about what you are doing. The magical thing behind this is that many of your contacts will be able to feel like they know you so much better, will trust you more, and feel much more comfortable about working with you. On the other hand, when you follow others you can learn about them and their possible needs.
The big mistake to watch out for is only posting affiliate links or offers on your Twitter page. This looks like Spam and many people will see you as just abusing Twitter for your own personal gain. Think of it this way, if you would not want to invite your friends or family to keep up with you via Twitter then you are going about it all wrong. As with anything you send out or provide, ninety percent should be content and ten percent (at most) advertising. So this concept is quite simple… constantly post throughout the day what you are doing.. it is usually very simple and only takes a few seconds to post! Secondly, if you write articles or provide content online, provide a link for those in your Twitter posts. You may post many things within one day, but the last thing you post for the day is usually the most important because it will be there the longest. This means that your last post for the day should very well contain a link that you want your followers to see before your start Twittering again the next day!
Another part of Twitter is contributing. As with any social site it should be a give and take relationship. Notice that give comes first… the more you give the more people will want to work with you and the more attention you will receive. Make sure to read and follow other users in Twitter. If you read something interesting or helpful then make sure to reply and say so, or even put a link for it on your Twitter so that you are directing others to more quality content. This can also be as simple as connecting with other users, if they know you are reading their Twitter page they will be much more likely to check out what you have going on too.
To get started in Twitter you should first invite contacts who aren’t using Twitter and also find contacts who are already using Twitter so that you can start following them and also start getting people to follow you. Twitter has a nice invite and find feature that makes this incredibly easy. To grow your reach even more you can start following people who follow or are followed by the people who follow you.. or that you follow. You might need to read that sentence again.. but basically you can find other users to connect with that are already connected to other users.
Now for a big tip. If you really want to maximize the potential with Twitter, you should make sure to take advantage of any plug-ins or sites that support Twitter. Here are three, but I’m sure there will be many more in the future if not already. Squidoo allows you to input your Twitter account info into your Squidoo account and then it can automatically post updates to your Twitter account when you create or update Squidoo lenses. Facebook has an application called Twitter, it automatically updates your Facebook status when you make a Twitter post. The other tool is a free WordPress plug-in called TweetMyBlog that allows you to create a two-way connection from your blogs to Twitter. TweetMyBlog allows you to use a widget on your Wordpress blogs that will display your current Twitter feed.. that way all visitors to your blog can look at the widget and see a running feed of your latest Twitter posts. If they click on that they will be brought to your Twitter page. In addition, when you make a new post to your blog, TweetMyBlog will automatically make a post to your Twitter page with a link to your latest blog post. Imagine the extra exposure you can receive by using these tools that help people see more of what you are doing.
Lastly, have fun! Twitter is a social site… so interact and enjoy!
Author: Darren Olander
About the Author:
Darren Olander is dedicated to teaching others how to create a success online through internet network marketing strategies. He is a site owner, article writer, coach & marketing consultant enjoying the benefits of working full time from home.Around 1.5 million Zimbabweans are predicted to go hungry this year after a dramatic fall in maize production, the World Food Program (WFP) said Tuesday.
Some 16 percent of the population are expected to be 'food insecure' at the peak of the 2015-16 lean season, the period following harvest when food stocks run especially low -- a 164 pecent increase on the previous year, the WFP said.
Large quantities of maize will have to be imported because of the fall of about half in Zimbabwe's maize crop, which compares with a fall in output of 20 to 30 percent across the region, Orr said.
Zimbabwe's food output rose 82 percent in 2013/14 from the previous year, and the sharp fall this year shows how unstable agriculture is across southern Africa as a whole, the WFP said.
...Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 10:31AM
Can't Be Tamed: A Manifesto
by MOLLY LAMBERT
for Kathleen Hanna, Kim Deal, and Kim Gordon
Here are some rules about how to be a girl in a boys' club. This works for any world you're in or want to be in. Pretty much everything in the world is still a boys' club.
Befriend The Other Woman: Always. Seriously. Even if she sucks (expansion on "if she sucks" follows below). Otherwise you will be "jokingly" put into competition with her constantly, and you will be encouraged and generally provoked by some dudes to do this for their entertainment to take focus off the fact that they are in homosocial competition with each other. Befriend her and press your boobs against the glass ceiling together (copyright Kristen Schaal). She is not the enemy. She is never your enemy. The enemy is always any guys who are creating situations that limit the number of females allowed. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down.
What If She Sucks?: Well, there could be a lot of reasons for this. But if she's being a real scary bitch to you, it's probably just because she's threatened you are going to take her spot as "the girl that is cool enough to hang out with the guys." Defuse this by being really super friendly no matter what in order to demonstrate the above: you are not enemies because you have a common enemy and the enemy is exclusionism. This gets easier the more girls there are. One to one situations are especially harsh, because Black Swan. But it's not usually that hard because most girls don't suck.
What If She Actually Sucks? This does happen. It's not unfeminist to admit that some women are assholes, just don't make it your focal point or judge any other situations according to how the all time worst one went down (this is a good rule in general). Some people just actually suck. Definition of sucks: steals, lies, or otherwise tries to ruin your life in an undeniable way. Feel bad for her and then back…the fuck…away…
What If She's Cool But I Still Feel Competitive? Sometimes cool funny girls are initially cunty to other cool funny girls because they are afraid the presence of another cool funny girl will dilute or diminish their own coolness or funniness. But it won't. It just makes you both even cooler and funnier. Forgive yourself for feeling insecure and think about the way you feel around your best friend. Generally the more intimidating you initially find another person the deeper your eventual love will end up being.
Why Do Dudes Think You're In Competition With The Other Girls? Because if you're in competition with the men, you might be better than they are. And a lot of them can't handle this, and even more weirdly it's like it doesn't even really occur to them. They just automatically compare you to other girls and not other men, even though you obviously compare yourself against everybody in your field, not just the women.
Why exactly they can't handle this is something that I understand but can't really sympathize with for obvious reasons. The sinister underlying idea is that men are always going to be naturally better at everything than women. That the best man will always be better than the best woman, and that women should expect and accept this.
The truth is that most kinds of talent aren't gendered. Sometimes women will be the best at things and other times men will. The implicit fear is that women are going to take spots formerly reserved for men. THIS IS SO STUPID. The most talented people take the top spots. There are no gender quotas. Tina Fey coexists peacefully with Will Ferrell and Danny McBride. They are just all the best at their specific talent (comedy).
Ferrell isn't threatened by Fey because game recognize game. And clearly I'm really aiming for this to catch on, but it's not emasculating if you like it. And a lot of dudes like it. And a lot of other dudes secretly like it but are afraid of what their dude friends will think. Not caring about what other people think is attractive to oh, everybody.
What If I Love Being The Only Girl In The Boys Club? Megan Fox Syndrome, aka Wendy from Peter Pan. It is the delusion that you can become an official part of the boys' club if you are its strictest enforcer, its most useful prole. That if you follow the rules exactly you can become the Official Woman. If you refuse other women admission you are denying that other women are talented, which makes you just as bad as any boys' club for thinking there would only be one talented girl at a time.
You will never actually be part of the boys' club, because you are a woman. You are Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. You are not Italian, therefore you are never going to get made. And you don't want to be a part of the boys' club, because it is dedicated to preserving its own privilege at your expense. Why wouldn't you want to know and endorse the work of other women who share your interests? How insecure are you?
Drive It Like You Stole It: Be the best. That is, assuming that you are the best. Be the best you can possibly be, whatever that means to you. Absolutely do not step down in order to not threaten people. Don't apologize. If you genuinely fucked up fine, you are allowed to apologize once but then stop apologizing. Think about how much you hear women apologizing for themselves for no reason, or being self-deprecating or self-abnegating out of habit. What the fuck are you apologizing for? For being too good?
Complain And Explain: If somebody says or does something fucked up, call them out on it. Don't pretend like fucked up things never get said because you are afraid of getting exiled from the kingdom of being Angie Dickinson in the Rat Pack. It makes people uncomfortable to get called out on their bullshit, and they get weird and defensive (John Mayer), especially since they know they were bullshitting to begin with.
But it's a function of not thinking about how fucked up it feels when fucked up things get said and nobody else thinks it's fucked up, because they just don't knowwwww. They're not always trying to be assholes, they just literally sometimes do not get it. It is better to engage than to roll your eyes. Some guys will keep trolling you until the very last second. You can almost always get them to admit that they're just trying to push your buttons and don't really believe the thing they are arguing in favor of.
Guys will feel REALLY BAD when they get called out, and usually react by either getting really loud and angry and defensive, or really sad and quiet and weird. This might make you feel bad or like a bully but don't. Some conversations are uncomfortable but also necessary. They are so uncomfortable because they are so necessary. Discomfort is not death. You will be fine after, I promise. And then you will feel fucking great, because trying to protect other people from reality is for morons and chumps.
Non-normative guys who still secretly consider themselves the most macho guy in their friend group get totally freaked out when confronted by real actual bros, because it forces them to face the ultimate self-truth that they actually hate bros and they actually do respect women. They're just still embarrassed that they're indoor kids who are not good at sports, because athleticism is to men what beauty is to women.
What If I Complain And Get Laughed At And Dismissed? Well this might happen 99% of the time, because that is how men are socialized to react to being uncomfortable. The other option is that they get quiet and squirrelly and weird and constipated about talking. It sucks to have to call people out. But it is important, because that is the only way anything is ever going to change. Women have done everything in their power to conform to the existing power structures (even though those structures generally run and ruin our lives). Straight white men are the ones who have to change. They have to.
You know in Shampoo when Warren Beatty says that when he does women's hair all they ever do is complain about all the horrible bullshit men put them through? All I ever witness is straight men showing me how miserable they are with the expectations placed on them as men, how much they hate trying to live up to this impossible standard and how unhappy they still are if they manage to succeed. They have a hard time acknowledging there are other modes of being because they are fucking terrified to deviate from the known, even though the known is horrible and hurts them.
"Masculinity" is as damaging to men as "Femininity" is to women. Neither is something to aspire to. Women who understand this are called feminists. Men who understand this aren't called anything yet, but maybe they can just be called feminists too.
Lowered Expectations, The Double Edged Sword: When men demonstrate or betray surprise that you know a lot about something or have mastered a skill that they care about, it unfortunately just shows that some guys still don't expect women to care about anything. Except being pretty and shopping and having thoughts that are somehow completely unlike male thoughts in any way. They think we don't like dumb obsessive information hoarding. They think our brains are wired differently. They are wrong. Sasha Baron-Cohen's brother is wrong (man u so fucking wrong Simon).
The flip side of exceptionalism for anyone from an oppressed group is the realization that you are only considered exceptional because the system is sooooooo fuckkkkkked uppppppppp. The idea that it's fair and you just worked your way in because you're so hyper-talented is a useful seeming illusion that stops benefiting you the moment it fucks over somebody else. When men are like "wow you're so cool, you're not like most girls" it always begs the question oh my god what do you think girls are like?
Some people will never want to talk about the way things are or how and why they got that way. if you end up exiled or excluded from the boys' club for not towing the party line, start your own fucking club. I'll come! I'll bring a lovely bottle of orange soda.
Allies And Enemies Some guys will hate you for being superior to them at the thing they care most about being good at. They are Paul Kinseys. This generally looks like it sounds, and involves sputtering. Cool guys will respect you and your hustle without being personally or professionally threatened. The coolest guys (Ken Cosgroves) will be secure in themselves enough to respect you specifically because of your hustle.
Most cool girls are totally fucked up because they are used to guys telling them they are "cool" or "funny" or "smart" and they assume it's a euphemism for "not hot" because they already feel like dudes with boobs. But that's okay because a hundred percent of cool guys are fucked up too and secretly feel like girls with dicks. Straight men are sooooooooo pink inside. They just can't tell you or anyone, because they have been socialized expressly not to. But I just told you you, and now everybody knows.
The idea that men will be turned off by ambition or success is just another part of the big lie. It is meant to scare you and keep you from questioning the system. The only men who are turned off by ambition and success are men that are insecure about their own talents and success or lack thereof. You don't really want to know those guys anyway, because they suck and they will constantly attempt to undermine you, and even if you are secure enough in yourself not to care it's still really fucking annoying.
Everyone feels like the worst awkward looking junior high version of themselves at times and has conflicted feelings about whatever demographic they usually date. The best thing you can do is team up to fight all the lame assholes of both genders.
If You Are A Straight Guy Who Figured Out Girls And Gays Are The Most Fun:
- Of course you can join, but you have to shut up. I mean, you can talk, obviously. But you have to realize and recognize that traditional male privilege becomes your liability in these situations. The same thing that puts you at the top of the pecking order in most social situations (glass elevator) puts you at the bottom of this one. Get used to bottoming. Realize it can be the best. Think about how intense it is to be a woman.
- If anybody makes fun of straight dudes and the lame bonehead things they sometimes do |
after, that global warming was created by the Chinese.
Only two countries — Syria and Nicaragua — did not participate in the Paris agreement back in 2015. Trump is expected to announce his decision on the deal Thursday afternoon from the White House Rose Garden, the same place President Obama announced U.S. participation in the pact two years ago.[DISCLOSURE: As always when I write about Amazon, I'll note I worked there from 1997-2004 and that I still own some shares in the company. I still have many friends who work there, though I have no more idea what Amazon is working on now than any of you in the public.]
With every quarterly earnings call, my Twitter feed lights up with jokes about how Amazon continues to grow its revenue and make no profits and how trusting investors continue to rewards the company for it. The apotheosis of that line of thoughts is a quote from Slate's Matthew Yglesias earlier this year: "Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers."
It's a great quote, one that got so much play Amazon even featured it in its Annual Letter to Shareholders. But like much of the commentary about Amazon, it's a misreading of Amazon's business model.
Amazon is a classic fixed cost business model, it uses the internet to get maximum leverage out of its fixed assets, and once it achieves enough volume of sales, the sum total of profits from all those sales exceed its fixed cost base, and it turns a profit. It already has exceeded this hurdle in its past.
I'm fairly certain most of Amazon's retail businesses remain quite profitable. Some may not be, but they help to reinforce Amazon as the retail site of first resort. By the time I left Amazon in 2004 many of its retail businesses were already spinning off healthy profits. It is much harder to tell now from the outside because Amazon doesn't present a full P&L by business line to the outside world. You can see revenue by broad categories of the business, but most of its costs are lumped together in one giant blob on the income statement.
Very early in my career at Amazon, we could already easily model out and see when our revenue would give us enough income to exceed our fixed cost base. We could adjust when that would happen by choosing to invest more or less aggressively, but given our growth rates, it was always just felt like a matter of when, not if, we'd turn a profit. Besides, we were most obsessed with free cash flow. Most armchair analysts love to dissect gross margin and net income because those are simpler to understand and easier to compute from public financial statements, but there are many problems with just looking at gross margin that any analyst worth their paycheck should understand.
Does Amazon lose money on sales of some individual items? For sure. The first Kindle ebooks that were priced at $9.99 when Amazon had to pay more than that per copy to publisher were one example. Giant, heavy electronics items that Amazon sometimes ships for free when the shipping cost is clearly non-trivial and cost more than the usual thin margins on such goods are another.
But while such exceptions in the catalog make for great copy (it's fun to link to such items in your story and let users see the evidence firsthand, especially when the item is some strange piece of machinery that maybe a handful of people in the world would ever order), but don't be mistaken. The vast vast majority of products Amazon sells it makes a profit on. Over time, more of these products that inadvertently sell at a loss will be corrected so that no longer happens, and what remains will be products Amazon intentionally uses as loss leaders.
The platform of Amazon is profitable, too. When other people sell products on Amazon Marketplace the gross margin is huge. I sell a used book on Amazon, it takes a cut of the transaction, I am the one packing and shipping that item to the buyer. You don't have to be a financial whiz to understand the cost of that transaction to Amazon is minimal.
If Amazon has so many businesses that do make a profit, then why is it still showing quarterly losses, and why has even free cash flow decreased in recent years?
Because Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail. This is one area where the press and pundits accept Amazon's statements at face value.
Given that giant mission, Amazon has decided to continue to invest to arm itself for a much larger scale of business. If it were purely a software business, its fixed cost investments for this journey would be lower, but the amount of capital required to grow a business that has to ship millions of packages to customers all over the world quickly is something only a handful of companies in the world could even afford. Joey Chestnut doesn't just wake up one day and win the Coney Island hot dog eating contest every year, he has to spend months of training to prepare his digestive system for the feat.
Amazon has seen that lowering its shipping costs and increasing the speed of shipping items to customers is like a shot of adrenaline to customer's propensity to buy from them, and so it has doubled down on building more and more fulfillment centers around the world. When I joined Amazon it had one fulfillment center. Today it has dozens just in the US alone, and I would not be surprised if it has more than 100 fulfillment centers worldwide now.
That is a gargantuan investment, billions of dollars worth, and it takes a significant bite out of Amazon's free cash flow. Add in its investments in infrastructure to support a growing AWS client base, and Amazon has again hiked its fixed cost base to a higher plateau. But for Amazon this is nothing new, it's just the same typeface bolded.
I'm convinced Amazon could easily turn a quarterly profit now. Many times in its history, it could have been content to stop investing in new product lines, new fulfillment centers, new countries. The fixed cost base would flatten out, its sales would continue growing for some period of time and then flatten out, and it would harvest some annuity of profits. Even the first year I joined Amazon in 1997, when it was just a domestic book business, it could have been content to rest on its laurels.
But Jeff is not wired that way. There are very few people in technology and business who are what I'd call apex predators. Jeff is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I've met in my life. An apex predator doesn't wake up one day and decide it is done hunting. Right now I envision only one throttle to Jeff's ambitions and it is human mortality, but I would not be surprised if one day he announced he'd started another side project with Peter Thiel to work on a method of achieving immortality.
One popular thesis among Amazon profitability skeptics is that Amazon can't "flip a switch" and become profitable. The most common guess as to how Amazon flips the switch is that it will wait until it is the last retailer standing and then raise prices across the board, so Amazon skeptics argue against that narrative possibility.
But "flipping a switch" is the wrong analogy because Amazon's core business model does generate a profit with most every transaction at its current price level. The reason it isn't showing a profit is because it's undertaken a massive investment to support an even larger sales base. How does Amazon turn a profit? Not by flipping a switch but by waiting, once again, until its transaction volume grows and income exceeds its fixed cost base again. It can choose to reach that point faster or slower depending on how quickly it continues to grow its fixed cost base, but a simple way to accelerate that would be to stop investing in so many new fulfillment centers.
One argument against Amazon is that it is investing for a revenue volume that will never come. That's a different argument, to me, than saying its business model isn't profitable. And even on that point, you can chart its quarterly revenue for yourself and tell me if it looks like it's flattening out. Though it has not always been on an exact upward sloping curve (we can expect the curve's slope to adjust up or down as various lines of its retail business mature or accelerate depending on Amazon's market share and traction in each line), the long term arc bends up like the corner of a world-dominating smile.
Part of this problem comes from the limited visibility into the dynamics of its business finances. Why doesn't Amazon break out more detail in its financial reporting to help the external world understand all these intricacies? How many subscribers to Amazon Prime, how many Kindles have sold, what's the net income from different lines of business, how much of its asset base investment is for fulfillment centers versus technology infrastructure for AWS? Why doesn't Google break out its lines of business in more detail in its financials? Why doesn't Apple reveal more detail about exact sales of the various models of its iPads and iPhones?
Tech companies, in general, have dealt with the press, investors, and public long enough now to have decided that for the most part, disclosing less buys them the most strategic flexibility with the least amount of pain. Tech companies have an interesting ambivalence towards the public capital markets. They rebel against resource dependence theory because they don't believe their investors know how to run their businesses better than they do, but on the other hand, being public is a great boon to compensating knowledge workers who have a lot of job options.
Based on its stock price, more investors seem willing to buy Amazon's business story that they'll be able to replicate their historical playbook on a larger scale.
You could argue that a business that has to invest so much of its free cash flow to grow is inherently a profitless business model. However, Amazon has known from its very earliest days that selling commodities, the core of Amazon's business, is inherently a low margin scale business. It won't ever approach the margins of, say, Apple's hardware business.
But to me, a profitless business model is one in which it costs you $2 to make a glass of lemonade but you have to sell it for $1 a glass at your lemonade stand. But if you sell a glass of lemonade for $2 and it only costs you $1 to make it, and you decide business is so great you're going to build a lemonade stand on every street corner in the world so you can eventually afford to move humanity into outer space or buy a newspaper in your spare time, and that requires you to invest all your profits in buying up some lemon fields and timber to set up lemonade franchises on every street corner, that sounds like a many things to me, but it doesn't sound like a charitable organization.
Some people get it. When I had most of this post written, I started searching for articles analyzing Amazon's business model, and I found this fantastic post by Benedict Evans which already states much of what I've written above. He understands Amazon to be a portfolio of businesses of varied maturity. But Evans is the exception, and so you can continue to expect a torrent of jokes each time Amazon releases its earnings and shows revenue growth but a negative net income. I'd love to see more external analysis of Amazon begin to focus on trying to break down its various investments in more detail and less time spent arguing whether its basic business model is profitable. Does the world need another story marvelling at how much Jeff can invest in his business? Is it that difficult to fathom that investing to try to be the largest retailer in the history of the world takes billions of dollars in investment?
The irony of all this is that while Amazon's public financial statements make it extremely difficult to parse out its various businesses, it is extremely forthright and honest about its business plans and strategy. It's the reason Jeff continues to reprint its first ever letter to shareholders from 1997 in its annual report every year. The plan is right there before our eyes, but so many continue to refuse to take it at face value. As a reporter, it must be so boring to parrot the same thing from Jeff and his team year after year, so different narratives must be spun when the overall plan has not changed.
Take this most recent article in The Atlantic, from Derek Thompson. It's a good read, comparing Amazon to Sears, but it's also a great example of how Amazon's basic strategy is always couched the same way, with a general veneer of skepticism.
At least, that’s the vision. Defenders say Amazon is trading the present for the future, spending all its revenue on a global scatter plot of warehouses that will make the company indomitable. Eventually, the theory goes, investors expect Amazon to complete its construction project and, having swayed enough customers and destroyed enough rivals, to “flip the switch,” raising prices and profits greatly. In the meantime, they’re happy to keep buying stock, offering an unqualified thumbs-up for heavy spending.
But this theory assumes a practically infinite life span for Amazon. The modern history of retail innovation suggests that even the behemoths can be overtaken suddenly. Sears was still America’s largest retailer in 1982, but just nine years later, its annual revenues were barely half those of Walmart. “The economic countryside is littered with the carcasses of companies that thought they had a [durable] competitive advantage,” says Alex Field, an economic historian at Santa Clara University. “Just look at BlackBerry or AOL.”
Amazon is not as insulated from its rivals as some think it is. Walmart, eBay, and a bounty of upstarts are all in the race to dominate online retail. Amazon’s furious spending on new buildings and equipment isn’t an elective measure; it’s a survival plan. The truth is that the company benefits from a beautiful but delicate tautology: Amazon has won investors’ trust with a reputation for spending everybody to death, and it can spend everybody to death because it has won investors’ trust. For now.
“Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” Slate’s Matthew Yglesias joked earlier this year.
It has every element of the classic Amazon coverage story. "Flip the switch." The faceless community of Amazon's naive and trusting investors. The charitable organization quote, ™Yglesias 2013. And above all, a fairly clear and accurate statement of Amazon's actual business strategy.
What a wonderful feeling, to be able to conceal a secret in plain sight. Laid bare before its competitors, its investors, the press, is the recipe and the blueprint, in plain language. I agree with Thompson and others that it is increasingly difficult to find real business moats or competitive advantages in the modern world, what with the internet eliminating many previous physical moats of time and space. What remains, though, is a footrace of beautiful simplicity, one in which Amazon is both tortoise and hare. It is patient, it plays for the long-term like no other company, it will take failure after failure and never lose heart, and yet it will sprint when it picks up a scent. And it will take the race to an arena with the thinnest of air.
If I were an Amazon competitor, I'd actually regard Amazon's current run of quarterly losses as a terrifying signal. It means Amazon is arming itself to take the contest to higher ground. The retail game is about to become more, not less, punishing.This was was picked up by Peter Suderman of Reason, who writes:
The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005,according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for "automatic data processing services." Sonasoft's motto is "email archiving done right," and the companylists the IRS as a customer.
In 2009, Sonasoft even sent out a Tweet advertising its work for the IRS.
The exact details of the service that Sonasoft provided to the IRS aren't clear. But the company advertises its email archiving solution as "ideal for small and medium businesses, government agencies, school districts, nonprofit organizations using Microsoft’s Exchange Server." And a document posted on its website describing its services says that its system "archives all email content and so reduces the risk of non-compliance with legal, regulatory and other obligations to preserve critical business content."“I’m a single mother of two young children and am desperately in need of a place to stay. I can do $450 for rent. Please help us I can’t be homeless with my two kids.”
“We have no bad habits. Please help us.”
“In need of food fell into hard times and really need help.. anything helps we are looking for a tent and pop up tent because we are homeless and need shelter if anyone can help it would be such a blessing.”
On any given day, Craigslist serves as a misery index of people searching for an affordable rental in Hawaii.
Many of the more than 400 listings in the “housing wanted” section reflect typical efforts to find a roommate or a place to live. But many others are desperate, posted by Hawaii residents afraid of becoming another statistic in the state’s ongoing homelessness crisis.
The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Honolulu is $2,100 according to the national real estate website Apartment List. More than half of all renters in Hawaii are considered “cost-burdened,” which means they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Buying a house for many is impossible — the median price of a home reached nearly $800,000 in June.
The high cost of housing forces people to move away or crowd in with relatives. Those who choose to stay but don’t have family to live with are forced to compete in the rental market, where there is limited subsidized housing and no rent control on market housing.
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
With such a high demand and limited supply of affordable rentals, it’s no wonder that people turn to Craigslist as a last resort.
One posting described a family of seven on Maui who could only afford $2,100 per month. They couldn’t find anyplace within that range due to limits on how many people can live in a unit.
“Anyone anything. I don’t want to beg but this is where we are,” the ad said. “Weeks away from being on the streets. Please anyone. Help us out. Word of mouth. Church. Anything. Please.”
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Another family consisting of a working father and a stay-at-home mother with a toddler asked for a place that’s less than $900 per month.
“Hard working and need just a chance. As of June 1st we will be homeless. Spent over $200 on rental apps just to be denied for lack of credit. Mom is stay at home and Dad works 6 nights a week.”
Desperation is what drove Jill KenKnight to post her ad. KenKnight, age 70, has been living on Maui for 37 years. For the past three years she’s been living in a house in Kula paying $1,000 per month plus three hours of yard work. But two months ago, her landlord said that she planned to double the rent in December.
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“I didn’t even know that you can legally double rent on people,” KenKnight said. “This is how people become homeless who have worked all their lives.”
KenKnight used to manage restaurants, sell art, and even owned her own business that went under during the recent recession. She doesn’t have enough money to ever retire on Maui but still feels lucky because she’s healthy enough to work. Reached by phone this month, KenKnight was in the midst of one of three nine-hour shifts she works at a clothing and souvenir store, on top of relying on her Social Security checks.
“And all of a sudden there is no housing for people my age who are not working 40 hours per week,” she said, adding that she’ll be turning 71 next month. A divorcée, she doesn’t have family on Maui.
She’s on multiple wait lists for subsidized senior housing but was told that it could take five to six years for her name to be called.
She goes to apply for housing and sees the same 30 or 40 people who are looking for a place that’s less than $1,000 per month.
“I am totally packed up, I have no place to go, and she’s already found another tenant,” she said, referring to her landlord.
It’s not clear whether anyone is paying attention to people like KenKnight who are looking for help.
Screenshot
Service providers have for years used Craigslist to find landlords who are willing to rent rooms to people in need. But Scott Morishige, the state’s coordinator on homelessness, says that he’s never checked the “housing wanted” ads.
Nor has Anna Streegan Stone from the Salvation Army, who runs a program that provides vouchers to people who need help getting back on their feet. Stone says her organization is already overwhelmed by “a constant flow of phone calls and 211 referrals as well as just people coming in and saying, ‘We need help.’”
So far, the only call KenKnight has received in response to her ad was from a man with a Georgia area code who asked her to send him money before he gave her the keys.
Elisza Hee had better luck with her posting. The native of Hauula became homeless after not being able to keep up with her $1,700-per-month rent. For two years, she lived on and off the streets.
Screenshot
“I’m a struggling single mother living in my car and was abandoned in this situation and we really need help getting out of it,” she wrote in her Craigslist posting about a month ago. “I usually wouldn’t put my problems out there but I really have nowhere or no one to turn to.”
But Hee said she didn’t feel comfortable accepting a room from the two men who offered to take her in. The 32-year-old, who has a 4-year-old child and is pregnant with another, said she worried about her family’s safety with male strangers.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Hee says she’s in a much better place now and is living at a homeless shelter and trying to get back on her feet. She found the shelter through a Google search, not in response to her ad.
Screenshot
Hee says she’d advise other people who find themselves similarly desperate to be persistent.
“Never give up,” she said. “It was very hard trying to get from where I was to where I am now, especially being a single mom, having no help, having no family and support.”This article is about the coffee. For the streaming applet, see Cortado (software)
Cortado Type Hot Country of origin Spain Color shades of brown, white Ingredients espresso, milk
A cortado is a beverage consisting of espresso mixed with a roughly equal amount of warm milk to reduce the acidity.[1][2] The milk in a cortado is steamed, but not frothy and "texturized" as in many Italian coffee drinks.[3]
The word cortado is the past participle of the Spanish verb cortar (to cut), in the sense of "dilute", and can refer variously to either coffee or espresso drinks throughout Spain, Portugal and Cuba.
Similar drinks [ edit ]
In Spain a café solo corto or a café cortado generally both refer to single espresso shots with foam, while the term cortado is itself broadly associated with various coffee or espresso beverages having been "cut" with milk. The café solo corto may in fact be interchangeable with the Italian macchiato or similar to the French noisette.
The cortadito in Cuba specifically implies a small beverage similar to the café solo corto consisting of a standard 1oz espresso shot; however, unlike the solo corto, the Cuban cortadito is generally cut with heated sweetened condensed milk, being a more available preserved form of milk, whereas fresh milk was historically often unavailable. A cortadito is usually served in a special glass, often with a metal ring base and a metal wire handle. There are several nominal variations, including cortado condensada, café con leche condensada or bombón (espresso with condensed milk); leche y leche is a similar variation, but with both condensed milk integrated throughout and a dollop of cream resting on top. Brought to the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, Florida, by Cuban-Americans in the 1960s, the cortadito drink is now found throughout the city, and is an important part of everyday culture, particularly among Cubans. However, the cortadito is a drink distinct from Cuban-style coffee, which includes sugar in addition to milk, and has its own brewing method as espresso.
In non Spanish-speaking countries where it appears on a specialty coffee menu, however, the cortado should generally be distinguished from the Italian caffè macchiato, cappuccino, or a flat white.[3] A macchiato has only a small amount (a'mark' or spot) of milk foam added, while a cappuccino has a head from both foam and milk.[2] A flat white is generally made with a similar equivalent ratio of espresso to milk, but uses steamed and textured (e.g. microfoam) milk, resulting in a hotter and lighter drink, more closely related to a latte.[3]
A similar drink in Australia is known as a piccolo latte, or simply a piccolo.[4] This is a single ristretto shot in a macchiato glass that is filled with steamed milk in the same fashion as a cafe latte. A larger drink, popular in Portugal, is the galão, which uses 1:3 proportions but is otherwise similar to both cortados and manchados.
Other names and variations [ edit ]
In Catalan, tallat takes the role of describing being cut, with the closest word in Basque being ebaki, and pingado or garoto in Portuguese. In the United States the meaning of the name can vary by region but on the East Coast it is generally known as a cortado. In the Czech Republic, Costa Coffee sells cortado under the marketing name corto classic.[5]
Gibraltar [ edit ]
A gibraltar, served in San Francisco.
gibraltar. A diagram of coffee drinks in Silicon Valley, showing an archetypal
The name gibraltar originated in San Francisco, California, where roasters – first Blue Bottle Coffee Company, later Ritual Coffee Roasters and others – started the cortado trend by serving the drink in Libbey Glass Company glassware by the same name.[2][6]
Whereas a cortado is a broader term for many a cut beverage, a gibraltar is specifically defined in its proportions by the constraints of its cup size: a Libbey 'Gibraltar' glass contains 4.5 oz, 2 oz of which are filled by a standard double espresso shot and the remainder filled by well-integrated microfoam. It was developed as a readily available profiling beverage for immediate consumption, and is typically identifiable from cortados as having a richer, more velvety texture and a cooler, lukewarm temperature. Because of its temperature, emulsified milk integration, immediate consumption and lowered acidity, the gibraltar is especially good for profiling naturals with their hints of strawberry or blueberry.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]A Rasmussen survey published on Tuesday illustrated how the citizens remain concerned about national security: despite the squawks from the liberal media about Donald Trump’s call to pause Muslim immigration temporarily, 59 percent of likely voters think that Obama’s plan to speed the import of sketchy Syrians is unwise.
One of the poll’s questions focused on that issue, asking “The Obama administration reportedly wants to speed the screening process for Syrian refugees to come to the United States. The goal is to bring 10,000 of those refugees here by the end of the year. Do you favor or oppose allowing 10,000 Syrians to come to America?”
Unsurprisingly, less examination of Middle Eastern Muslims did not make them more appealing to American citizens.
Most Still Oppose Syrian Refugees, Cite National Security Risk, Rasmussen Reports, May 10, 2016 The Obama administration reportedly is speeding the vetting process for Syrian refugees so 10,000 can come to the United States this year, but most voters still don’t welcome those newcomers and fear they are a threat to the country. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Likely U.S. Voters oppose allowing 10,000 Syrians to come to America by the end of the year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 31% favor letting those refugees come here. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.
What’s extra alarming is after long promising that the normal screening process of Syrian refugees takes around two years of careful examination, the Obama administration announced it would slash the process to three months, even though FBI Director Comey admitted last October in a House hearing that the government cannot adequately check Syrians for jihad affiliation.
In a November poll, Rasmussen found that 60 percent of voters don’t want Syrian refugees dumped in their state.In 1999, kids were so crazy about Pokemon cards that some of their parents sued the game’s creators for creating an illegal lottery. In 2011, more kids wanted an iPad for Christmas than anything else. Today, the two concepts are joining forces.
Nukotoys is a hybrid gaming company that makes physical trading cards to power its virtual iPad games. On Tuesday, it is launching its first game cards in Apple stores, Walmart, Target and other major retailers.
Not only does Nukotoy’s game concept combine two products with proven appeal to children, but it solves a marketing problem that has long plagued virtual game developers: Even if you make a great game, how does it get noticed in the app store?
When the game has physical cards, Nukotoys is guessing, they will be noticed in a department store checkout lines, while parents shop for devices at the Apple store, and on the school bus.
Trading cards also take in-app purchases offline. While the iPad components of Nukotoys games are free and can be played with a handful of included characters, the games are pretty lame until kids start buying additional cards either within the game or offline. Three cards cost $1.99. Seven cards cost $3.99.
In Animal Planet Wildlands, a game built for kids ages 3 to 7, children collect animal cards that they can tap into the game. They navigate through a world based on Animal Planet to access different races, quests and puzzle games. Monsterology, based on the popular “ology” books series, is a “technical turn-based strategy game” wherein users tap in different mythological creatures to battle. Like Pokemon, some characters are more likely to win battles than others, which incentivizes additional card purchases.
Beyond driving sales, giving trading card characters a virtual place to interact has potential to add a new element to the game type. “When I tap the card on Wednesday it can do something different than on Friday,” Raderman tells Fast Company. “every time I use it, it can be a surprise.”Since 2006, enough drywall has entered the U.S. from China to build some 60,000 homes. Now, fears about what's seeping out of that material are beginning to stack up.
In the spring of 2006, the cargo ship Great Immensity headed toward Florida's west coast. Its destination? The Port of Tampa.
In its hold? More than 16 million pounds of Chinese drywall manufactured by Knauf Tianjin -- enough to potentially make more than 1,700 homes.
The Great Immensity's shipment was one of hundreds that have arrived on American shores since January 2006, a Herald-Tribune analysis of shipping data shows.
All told, at least 550 million pounds of Chinese drywall have come into the United States since 2006. With that quantity, some experts say, you could construct 60,000 average-size homes.
Builders who used the material, like Miami-based Lennar Corp., acknowledge that the gases being emitted from some of the Chinese drywall are the cause of the corrosion eating away at the guts of homes. The gases have blackened metal components such as coils and wiring. Homeowners have reported televisions, computers and other electronics failing, and even silver jewelry turning black.
But Lennar, other builders and at least one of the manufacturers point to scientific tests they commissioned showing that the amount of sulfur compounds being emitted is below the amount that federal guidelines say could endanger human health.
"What we aimed to do is figure out whether the air inside those homes was a health concern, and we found there was none," said Robert P. DeMott, managing principal of Environ International Corp., which conducted the investigation for Lennar.
Residents, some with small children and some who have moved from their homes, remain unconvinced. Many have told the Herald-Tribune of similar health problems, including chronic respiratory ailments, sinus and eye pain, headaches and nosebleeds. In many of those cases, the symptoms diminished when residents moved out.
Dan Tibbetts, one of 23 affected homeowners on Montauk Point Crossing in Manatee County's Heritage Harbour neighborhood, said he has no doubt that he, his wife and even his dog got sick because of the material. Since moving out in December, their health has begun to improve.
"It's still lingering a little bit with my sinuses, but overall we're doing much better now; the dog is getting back to normal, too," Tibbetts said Friday.
To date, Florida health officials have logged more than 50 complaints. Lennar has confirmed 80 of its homes in Sarasota, Manatee, Lee and Collier counties have the Chinese product and another 40 may have it. Two more homes have been identified in Miami-Dade. Taylor Morrison Homes also used Chinese drywall in the Greenbrook neighborhood of Lakewood Ranch and in Crystal Lakes in Palmetto.
List could grow
Given how much of the material came to the U.S. at the tail end of the housing boom, the list could lengthen.
The Herald-Tribune's analysis was done using a shipping database obtained from the Port Import Export Reporting Service, or PIERS, the primary source of U.S. waterborne import-export trade data. The company maintains individual records taken directly from ships' manifests.
The analysis covered shipments entering the country beginning in January 2006. More Chinese drywall is also believed to have been imported during 2004 and 2005, but full records for those years have not yet been obtained.
The shipments were unloaded at more than two dozen ports throughout the United States -- seven in Florida -- and carried cargo exported by more than 100 companies.
Nearly 60 percent of the drywall -- also known as wallboard, gypsum board or plasterboard -- came in through Florida ports. Miami was the largest, with more than 100 million pounds of Chinese drywall unloaded, followed by Port Everglades with at least 80 million pounds and Tampa with at least 50 million.
Other destinations included Port Manatee in northern Manatee County, Pensacola, Port Canaveral and Jacksonville.
While Florida has so far been the primary focus of public officials and builders, the shipping records show more than a dozen other states got the Chinese product, from New York to Texas to California.
The Herald-Tribune found at least 60 million pounds of Chinese drywall came into New Orleans in 2006 and another 27 million into Pascagoula, Miss., two areas with post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding. To date, no reports of Chinese drywall from the area have been received by state or federal health authorities.
Most of the New Orleans shipments were from Chinese subsidiaries of the German-based company Knauf, which has been identified as one of the problematic producers.
Knauf Tianjin
Knauf's operation in Tianjin, Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin Ltd., has been of particular concern. The company's drywall has been found to be defective throughout Southwest Florida.
It was sued last week in a class-action complaint filed in Sarasota County circuit court.
Knauf Tianjin officials have acknowledged they received complaints from builders and contractors about the smell of their product in 2006, and that a 2008 investigation showed copper corrosion was potentially connected to sulfur gases coming from the material. But like Lennar, the company claims the sulfur compounds are not hazardous to humans.
From January to September 2006, five separate ships unloaded 52 million pounds of Chinese-made Knauf drywall in New Orleans, three-quarters from Knauf Tianjin. Shipments to Florida also were extensive, both directly and through exporter Rothchilt International. At least 37 million pounds of Knauf drywall was shipped directly from three sites in China to Florida through Tampa and Port Canaveral.
Knauf Tianjin sent an additional amount -- which company officials would only describe as "most" of its drywall -- into Miami through Rothchilt.
The first Knauf shipment into Florida -- 11 million pounds -- arrived at Port Canaveral in March 2006 aboard the "Afra" from a Knauf subsidiary in Guangdong, China.
Knauf Tianjin maintains that each of the Knauf subsidiaries in China is a separate operation and should not be thought of as part of the same company.
"They are separate corporations that operate separate facilities in completely different locations in China," said Melisa Chantres, a spokeswoman for Knauf Tianjin.
But shipping records show what appears to be coordination between Knauf's Chinese subsidiaries: sharing the same vessel to transport their product to the U.S. In April 2006, the "Yong An Cheng" took three shipments from Knauf's Wuhu, China, operation and a fourth from Guangdong to the U.S. All were imported by USG Corp., one of the largest manufacturers of domestic drywall in the U.S. market.
Sorting good from bad
Another Chinese drywall manufacturer that is known to be causing problems for homeowners in Florida is Taian Taishan Plasterboard, based in Taian, China.
In 2007, after the boom was over and most Chinese drywall manufacturers stopped shipping to the U.S., records show Taishan continued sending sizable quantities, primarily to New York and Port Everglades. In summer 2007, three shipments entered Port Everglades, totaling 3 million pounds.
Taishan's largest market overall, and by far its most active, was New York. From 2006 to 2007, ships bearing Taishan drywall docked at least two dozen times at ports there, unloading more than 4.5 million pounds of the material.
Experts caution that not all Chinese manufacturers produced defective materials.
"Just because it says 'China' does not mean it's definitely bad," said Michael Foreman, head of Sarasota construction consulting firm Foreman & Associates, which is investigating the issue. "It's like anything else, there are bad manufacturers we've identified and many more to come. But there are also good manufacturers of board that just happen to be in China. Sorting the good from the bad is what we're all trying to do right now."
Part of the challenge is that some Chinese drywall found in affected homes has been "generic," or not marked properly with its manufacturer, making tracing its origins difficult.
At Port Manatee, Capt. Rasmus Okland said he thinks he knows where there is some good Chinese board: in his company's warehouse. And it is for sale.
|
An array of names for the fields to be requested. $username_field : The name of the username field. $password_field : The name of the password field. $id_field : The name of the id field. $username_value : The value of the username field. $password_value : The value of the password field. $service_name : The name of the service. $cookie_name : The name of the cookie used to store the authorization token. returns an associative array
: Provides authorized access to the system for a user, based on the provided credentials, using a query to the database. If the authorization is successful, a unique JSON Web Token is generated and stored in a cookie. generate_jwt_cookie($username_value, $id_value, $service_name, $cookie_name) : Generates a unique JSON Web Token from the values provided. $username_value : The user's unique username. $id_value : The user's unique id. $service_name : The name of the service. $cookie_name : The name of the cookie used to store the authorization token. returns void
: Generates a unique JSON Web Token from the values provided. regenerate_jwt_cookie($service_name, $cookie_name) : Regenerates a unique JSON Web Token from the values provided. Will return a message if no existing cookie is found. $service_name : The name of the service. $cookie_name : The name of the cookie used to store the authorization token. returns an associative array
: Regenerates a unique JSON Web Token from the values provided. Will return a message if no existing cookie is found. check_jwt_cookie($service_name, $cookie_name) : Checks the validity of a unique JSON Web Token. $service_name : The name of the service. $cookie_name : The name of the cookie used to store the authorization token. returns true if the cookie is found and the JWT is valid, false otherwise
: Checks the validity of a unique JSON Web Token. get_jwt_data($cookie_name) : Gets the data stored in a unique JSON Web Token. $cookie_name : The name of the cookie used to store the authorization token. returns an associative array
: Gets the data stored in a unique JSON Web Token.
rest-api
Contains multiple methods, implementing generic CRUD methods for a RESTful API. For security reasons, certain methods are not implemented, but rather return an associative array with an error code and a message.
createResourceRoot() : Creates a new collection, using a query to the database. returns an associative array with an error message
: Creates a new collection, using a query to the database. createResourceElement($table, $input_fields, $input_types, $input_values) : Creates a new entry in a collection, using a query to the database. $table : The database table to query. $input_fields : An array of names for the fields to be filled. $input_types : A string that contains one or more characters which specify the types for the corresponding fields. $input_values : An array of values for the fields to be filled. returns the id of the newly-created collection member
: Creates a new entry in a collection, using a query to the database. readResourceRoot($table, $fields) : Lists the members of a collection, using a query to the database. $table : The database table to query. $fields : The table's fields to be retrieved. returns a collection of elements
: Lists the members of a collection, using a query to the database. readResourceElement($table, $fields, $element_key, $key_value) : Retrieves a specific member of a collection, using a query to the database. $table : The database table to query. $fields : The table's fields to be retrieved. $element_key : The table's field that will be used for the specific resource's indentification. $key_value : The value to be used for the specific resource's identification. returns a list of members or false
: Retrieves a specific member of a collection, using a query to the database. updateResourceRoot() : Updates a resource collection, using a query to the database. returns an associative array with an error message
: Updates a resource collection, using a query to the database. updateResourceElement($table, $input_fields, $input_types, $input_values, $element_key, $key_value) : Updates a specific member of a collection, using a query to the database. $table : The database table to query. $input_fields : An array of names for the fields to be updated. $input_types : A string that contains one or more characters which specify the types for the corresponding fields. $input_values : An array of values for the fields to be updated. $element_key : The table's field that will be used for the specific resource's indentification. $key_value : The value to be used for the specific resource's identification. returns the number of affected rows
: Updates a specific member of a collection, using a query to the database. deleteResourceRoot() : Deletes a resource collection, using a query to the database. returns an associative array with an error message
: Deletes a resource collection, using a query to the database. deleteResourceElement($table, $element_key, $key_value) : Deletes a specific member of a collection, using a query to the database. $table : The database table to query. $element_key : The table's field that will be used for the specific resource's indentification. $key_value : The value to be used for the specific resource's identification. returns the number of affected rows
: Deletes a specific member of a collection, using a query to the database.
How to use
The provided helpers are supposed to be used in a CI_Controller, but you can use them any way you like. The sample provided (controllers/Api.php) is a pretty good starting point for a RESTful API implementation:
All helpers are loaded in the __construct() method of the Api class. Certain variables are also instantiated to be used for the API's requests.
method of the class. Certain variables are also instantiated to be used for the API's requests. The index() method is an empty method returning an error message, when no resource is specified in the request in the form of a URI.
method is an empty method returning an error message, when no resource is specified in the request in the form of a URI. The users($param) method maps the different API methods to HTTP methods (CREATE = POST, READ = GET, UPDATE = PUT, DELETE = DELETE) and uses the various helpers and class variables to provide a sample RESTful API implementation.
method maps the different API methods to HTTP methods (CREATE = POST, READ = GET, UPDATE = PUT, DELETE = DELETE) and uses the various helpers and class variables to provide a sample RESTful API implementation. The login($param) method allows for the authorization of a user (needed to update or delete a resource matched to his/her username).
To query the API, you should use something like example.com/index.php/api/resource_name (or example.com/api/resource_name, if you are using the.htaccess file provided, configured to your environment), replacing resource_name with your resource's name (e.g. users ). Bear in mind that certain requests will return errors due to implementation specifics. All responses are encoded as JSON for easier use with frontend frameworks.
License
The project is licensed under the MIT license.The KeyBiner is a more refined version of a time tested tool many have used to carry their essentials every day. The biggest change was the addition of a unique key retention system, that allows you to keep your keys neatly organized and quiet. We have also added several tools to aid you in your daily chores. The KeyBiner has no sharp edges to cut you or damage your clothing.
Please share this project with your friends, on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter with the hashtag #KeyBiner
Bottle Opener
Copper KeyBiner Poppin Bottles
1/8"- 3/16" - 1/4" - 5/16" - 3/8" 10mm Wrenches
Screw Bit Driver
Flat Blade Screw Driver/Prybar/File
Screws and hardware will be provided so you can custom fit the key retention to hold as many keys as you need (Up to 14 keys depending on shape, size and orientation)
3/8" Screws fit 1-6 keys
1/2" Screws fit 1-10 Keys
3/4" Screws fit 1-14 Keys
Ti KeyBiner
USB Thumb Drive Option:
Add a 32GB slimline Thumb Drive to your KeyBiner
Ti KeyBiner with 32Gb Thumb Drive
STRETCH GOALS:
UNLOCKED!!! - Once this goal has been met all backers will get their choice of Stainless, Blackened, or Brass Hardware with their KeyBiner an no extra charge!
Hardware Options (Stainless, Blackened, or Brass)
UNLOCKED!!!!! - Once this goal has been met all backers will receive a complimentary aircraft grade steel wire key loop for their KeyBiner. Great for attaching key fobs and other essential gear
Blue Annodized Ti KeyBiner with Aircraft Cable Key Ring
UNLOCKED - Once this goal has been met I will offer some different finishes for backers choosing to get a Copper or Titanium KeyBiner
Ti and Copper Finish Options
UNLOCKED - Once this goal has been met KeyBiner backers that opted for an Al model will have a choice of 3 colors of annodizing. I am open to suggestions but I think Black, Red, and Orange would be great choices. I will leave it up to the comments section as to what colors you want to see most!!
UNLOCKED - Once this goal has been met KeyBiner Backers (with pledge over $24) get a FREE Aluminum KeyBiner (silver) with their order
Aluminum KeyBiner with Brass Hardware
Featured websites
Big shoutout to my friend Brad at Tactical Keychains for helping me get this project off the ground. Check out his projects here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/tactical/created"A Street Cat Named Bob" redirects here. For the film adaptation of the book, see A Street Cat Named Bob (film)
James Bowen (born 15 March 1979)[1] is an English author and busker[2] based in London. His memoirs A Street Cat Named Bob, The World According to Bob and A Gift from Bob, written with author Garry Jenkins, were international best-sellers. A movie based on the first two books was released in 2016. Bowen now dedicates his time to helping numerous charities that involve homelessness, literacy, and animal welfare.[3]
Early life [ edit ]
Bowen was born in Surrey in March 1979. Following his parents’ divorce, he moved to Australia with his mother. Because they moved frequently, Bowen was often bullied at school. He later dropped out of education in his second year of high school, becoming a self-confessed "tearaway kid"; he was later diagnosed with ADHD, schizophrenia and manic depression.
In 1997, he returned to the United Kingdom to live with his half-sister and her husband. Tensions arose and the arrangement did not last. In time, he began sleeping on the streets. For the next few years, Bowen either slept in the streets or stayed in shelters. He began using heroin to escape from the realities of homelessness.
Meeting Bob [ edit ]
In spring 2007, Bowen was enrolled on a methadone programme, busking in Covent Garden, and living in a supported housing programme in Tottenham, London. One evening he returned home to find a ginger cat in the hallway of his building. Assuming it belonged to another resident, he simply returned to his flat. When the cat was still there the following day, and the day after that, Bowen became concerned and discovered the cat was wearing no collar or ID tag, and had an infected wound on his leg. Bowen checked with other residents to see if the stray belonged to any of them, and when none of them claimed ownership of the animal Bowen decided to help the cat himself.
According to the account in A Street Cat Named Bob, Bowen took the cat to the nearby RSPCA clinic, which provided antibiotics to treat the infected wound. To make sure the cat received the full two-week course of medication, Bowen took him in for a time, while he continued to look for the stray’s owner. When he couldn’t find any information, he released the cat back on to the street, hoping he’d find his own way home. Instead, he began to follow Bowen around, even following him onto the bus when he left to go busking. Concerned that the cat had nowhere else to go, Bowen took him in permanently, naming him Bob after the character Killer BOB from the television drama Twin Peaks.[4]
Since Bob constantly followed James when he was going to work, he got him a harness for safety and allowed him to come along to his regular spots in Covent Garden and Piccadilly, travelling in the window seat of the number 73 bus. The public reaction was positive and the pair became popular, their visibility increasing still further when Bowen began selling The Big Issue. The public began uploading videos of Bowen and Bob to YouTube, and tourists would visit Covent Garden to see them. During this time, Bowen decided to conclude his methadone treatment. He credits this development to Bob, saying "I believe it came down to this little man. He came and asked me for help, and he needed me more than I needed to abuse my own body. He is what I wake up for every day now... he’s definitely given me the right direction to live my life."[5]
Books [ edit ]
A number of books have been published about Bowen and Bob.
A Street Cat Named Bob [ edit ]
In time, Bowen and Bob’s public appearances attracted the attention of the Islington Tribune, which first published his story in September 2010.[6] This was read by Mary Pachnos, the literary agent responsible for the UK rights to John Grogan's Marley and Me, who introduced Bowen to the writer Garry Jenkins. The pair produced an outline for a book which Pachnos used to secure a book deal with the publishers Hodder & Stoughton. Since its publication the book has sold over 1 million copies in the UK alone,[7] has been translated into 30 languages, and spent over 76 weeks at the top of The Sunday Times' bestseller list in both its hardback and paperback editions.[8] A Street Cat Named Bob: And How He Saved My Life was published in the US on 30 July 2013, and entered The New York Times' best-seller list at No 7.[9] A movie of the same name was released in late 2016, starring Luke Treadaway as Bowen, and with several cats, including the real Bob, playing the part of the pet.
The World According to Bob [ edit ]
The World According to Bob continues the story of Bowen and Bob's lives on the street, including the period leading up to their meeting with his agent Mary Pachnos. It was released on 4 July 2013 and was also a number one book on The Sunday Times' bestseller list.
Bob: No Ordinary Cat [ edit ]
Bob: No Ordinary Cat is a version of the book A Street Cat Named Bob re-written specifically for children. It was released on Valentine's Day 2013.
Where In The World Is Bob? [ edit ]
Where in The World Is Bob? is a picture book in which readers have to spot Bob, James and assorted other items in scenes around the world. It mirrors Bob's travels in a blog, Around the World In 80 Bobs, where fans of the book take photographs of the famous cat at various locations around the world.[10] It was published in October 2013.
My Name Is Bob [ edit ]
My Name is Bob is a picture book for young children, written by Bowen with Garry Jenkins and illustrated by Gerald Kelley, published by Random House in the UK in April 2014. It imagines Bob's life prior to him meeting Bowen.
For the Love of Bob [ edit ]
For the Love of Bob is a children's version of The World According to Bob and the sequel to Bob: No Ordinary Cat. It was released on 3 July 2014.
A Gift from Bob [ edit ]
"A Gift from Bob" is a short story about Bowen and Bob's final Christmas on the streets together. According to publishers Hodder & Stoughton, the book reveals "how Bob helped James through one of his toughest times - providing strength, friendship and inspiration but also teaching him important lessons about the true meaning of Christmas along the way." It was published on 9 October 2014, and reached No. 8 on the Sunday Times' best-seller list.
Bob to the Rescue [ edit ]
Bob to the Rescue is a second children's picture book, written again with Garry Jenkins and illustrated by Gerald Kelley. It was published by Random House in September 2014.
The Little Book of Bob [ edit ]
The Little Book of Bob: Life Lessons from a Street-Wise Cat collects together pieces of wisdom Bowen has accumulated during his years sharing his life with his'streetwise' cat. It was published by Hodder & Stoughton on 1 November 2018.
Film adaptation [ edit ]
A film was optioned by London-based Shooting Script Films, and its producer Adam Rolston, in March 2014.[7] In August 2015, Variety announced that Luke Treadaway was to star in the film, and that Roger Spottiswoode was to direct, with shooting in London to begin in October.[11] During production, it was revealed that Bob played himself in the vast majority of the film's scenes.[12] The film was released in the UK in November 2016.[13]
Awards [ edit ]
A Street Cat Named Bob was nominated for the UK's National Book Awards in the Popular Non-Fiction category in November, 2012.[14] In March 2014, A Street Cat Named Bob was listed at No. 7 on a list of the most inspiring teenage books as part of a poll for World Book Day.[15]Entertainers with dwarfism and other growth disorders were among Dr. Rimoin’s patients in Los Angeles. One regular at the clinic was the actor Billy Barty, who founded Little People of America, an organization for people with dwarfism and other conditions causing short stature. Those conditions often cause nerve, bone and vascular problems that need regular medical care.
Another of Dr. Rimoin’s patients, Rocky Dennis, inspired the movie “Mask,” about a young man whose face and skull are severely deformed and enlarged by a bone disorder, craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, also called lionitis. A doctor character in the movie was partly based on Dr. Rimoin.
Dr. Rimoin became a student of genetics not long after James D. Watson and Francis Crick deduced the structure of DNA, an exciting time when the field was poised to begin making discoveries that could greatly help patients. In the 1960s, Dr. Rimoin was among the first to suggest that diabetes was not one disease but one with different forms, probably caused by multiple genes. Though initially scorned by experts, the idea was later proved correct. Recognition of differences in diabetes led to the development of different treatments for the two major types of the disease.
Dr. Rimoin’s studies also pinpointed genetic defects that caused particular skeletal or growth disorders — revealing, for instance, that pygmies are short not because they lack growth hormone but because they carry an inherited trait that makes them biochemically resistant to the hormone’s effects.
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In 1970 he co-founded an international registry of cases to help identify and diagnose inherited skeletal disorders and to find their genetic underpinnings. In the first year, information was collected on 50 cases; now, with 19,000 cases, the registry is the world’s largest for skeletal disorders.
Dr. Rimoin cherished an honorary lifetime membership in Little People of America. In an interview for an oral history project on genetics, he said the group’s gesture was important to him because he knew he had offended some of its members by helping to set up a program at Cedars-Sinai offering limb-lengthening surgery to people with dwarfism, a grueling process that involves breaking bones.
“I know that in developing the limb-lengthening program, I angered many of them who are opposed to invading their society and trying to sort of eliminate it in many ways,” Dr. Rimoin said in the interview, “but I stuck to my guns and felt that if somebody wanted it, they should have availability of it.”
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In the 1970s, Dr. Rimoin and Dr. Kaback developed the first large-scale screening program for Tay-Sachs disease, a fatal genetic disorder most likely to be carried by Ashkenazi Jews.
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Dr. Kaback had developed a system for testing large numbers of people, but he said Dr. Rimoin had the drive and knowledge to take the test public and reach those who might benefit: nearly a million Jews in the Los Angeles area. Since then, testing has virtually eliminated the disease in the United States.
To make sure that practitioners who treated genetic disorders were qualified to do so, Dr. Rimoin led a team of experts in developing certification tests and got medical genetics recognized as a full medical specialty in the 1990s.
David Lawrence Rimoin was born on Nov. 9, 1936, in Montreal. In 1961 he earned his medical degree from McGill University, where he was such a star student that he was personally invited to study further at Johns Hopkins University by Dr. Victor McKusick, who is regarded as the father of medical genetics. Dr. Rimoin earned a Ph.D. in human genetics at Hopkins in 1967.
He later worked at Washington University in St. Louis and Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center before joining Cedars-Sinai in 1986. He was co-author of a classic textbook in medical genetics, first published in 1983 and now in its sixth edition.
At his death, Dr. Rimoin was working with Dr. Kaback on providing genetic testing for four inherited disorders most likely to occur in Persian Jews, including one that involves an unusual sensitivity to anesthesia.
Dr. Rimoin, who lived in Beverly Hills, Calif., is survived by his wife, Ann; two daughters, Annie Rimoin and Lauren Rimoin; a son, Michael; and two sisters, Shirley Entis and Mona Deutsch.2012 Life Expectancy, US Second to Last By Mark Wachtler March 26, 2012. Seattle. (ONN) The Annual Review of Public Health was released and this year’s results show the United States lagging behind every industrialized nation on Earth except Qatar. It’s ironic that during a week where the US finds itself debating President Obama’s universal healthcare in the highest court in the land, the country that spends more on healthcare than any other nation finds itself with the shortest life expectancy of any other nation, again except Qatar. 2012 Life Expectancy by nation. Data and image courtesy of AnnualReviews.org.
In a detailed review by Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington and published in the nonprofit science journal Annual Reviews, the study’s results paint a bleak picture for Americans. Poor diets and unhealthy lifestyles are the main cause of health problems in the US. Typically compared to other nations, American society has suffered from factors like widespread drug abuse, legal firearms, violence and a lack of universal healthcare. But recent years have shown that the more money Americans spend on care, the worse their standing gets. Now, the US spends as much as double some of its counterparts.
Some critics point to the lack of adequate care among typical US citizens. They argue that the richest and most powerful Americans truly do have the best healthcare in the world and their numbers show it. In just two examples pulled from current headlines, former Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed he did in fact receive a heart transplant, even though he’s well over the age of a normal American to be eligible for one. When R&B singer Beyonce gave birth in New York earlier this year, it’s widely reported she and her husband Jay-Z spent $1.3 million on the delivery. That covered not just pampering and luxury for mom and dad, but enough healthcare to handle any surprises.
While Beyonce and Dick Cheney are examples of the healthcare afforded to the privileged and elite of American society, the other 99 percent tends to find their situation more reflected by the February article, ‘A Lonely Voice Lost in America’s Missing Safety Net’. In the article, Joe Chicagoan he’s called, relays his tragic experience simply trying to gain access to a doctor in Chicago. From standing outside overnight in line at the only free clinic, to waiting three days in the emergency room waiting room, to being prescribed a pill that his Medicaid won’t pay for – Joe’s experience is not unique.
Without access to legitimate healthcare, the majority of Americans will continue to find their life expectancy falling embarrassingly short compared to the rest of the industrialized world. As released today and to be published in next month’s Annual Review of Public Health, here is the list of the top 35 nations as ranked by 2012 life expectancy.
2012 Life Expectancy
Japan – 83 years
Switzerland – 82
Australia – 81
Italy – 81
Iceland – 81
Israel – 81
France – 81
Sweden – 81
Spain – 81
Singapore – 81
Norway – 81
Canada – 81
Andorra – 80
Austria – 80
Netherlands – 80
New Zealand – 80
Korea – 80
Ireland – 80
Germany – 80
United Kingdom – 80
Belgium – 79
Finland – 79
Luxembourg – 79
Greece – 79
Liechtenstein – 79
Malta – 79
Cyprus – 79
Portugal – 79
Slovenia – 79
Costa Rica – 79
Cuba – 79
Chile – 79
Denmark – 78
United States – 78
Qatar – 78
As readers can see, the US ranks 34 out of 35 industrialized nations in life expectancy. Americans trail their long-time rival Cuba, where living conditions are often portrayed as less than healthy. And the US even finishes 28 places behind war-torn Israel. But why?
According to the report, the reasons are “complex and multifaceted” as to why life expectancy in the US is so low. The study suggests, “Medical care is the most often-stated factor believed to affect health.” The authors warn however that, “The terms ‘health’ and ‘health care’ are often used synonymously in the United States with terms such as ‘health services’.” They go on to explain, “Such language does a disservice to the cause of producing health.”
Critics of those who blame healthcare and unhealthy lifestyles suggest that the data shows the US isn’t as different from other nations as implied. The American Enterprise Institute points out that life expectancy in the US levels out with the other nations if certain types of deaths are removed from the numbers. They site examples such as, “homicides, motor vehicle crashes, suicides, falls, etc.” Apparently, the United States has a disproportionately high number of all those types of death.
The report also provides an examination of the amount of money Americans spend on healthcare each year. The total estimated for 2009, the first year available, is $2.5 trillion. That’s 18 percent of the nation’s entire Gross Domestic Product and much more than any other country in the world. By comparison, other nations much higher on the life expectancy list spend only 12 percent of their GDP on healthcare, some even lower.
As the report warns however, much of that money is being spent on the wealthiest handful of Americans, throwing off the average numbers. In fact, the report specifically explains that the wealth gap in the US is one of the main contributing factors to the nation’s suffering health and life expectancy. The report states, “Income and economic inequality are important factors in a wide range of social and health outcomes. One meta-analysis suggests that one-third of all deaths in the United States can be linked to inequality.”
SUBSCRIBEDuration is strongly affected by dose, tolerance, and individual reaction. Those who use cannabis regularly experience a shorter duration than those who do not. Note that most cannabis users smoke multiple times in a single session and this extends the duration.For oral consumption, duration is complicated by stomach contents and delivery mechanism. Taking THC-capsules on an empty stomach lasts much shorter than eating THC-containing cookies or food, which take hours to fully digest.There has been some research into the pharmacokinetics of THC (how it moves through and is processed by the body). See Grotenhermen's research, which showed that the peak THC concentration after smoking was between 15-30 minutes and sloped down for 1-2 hours. He also showed that oral consumption caused the THC levels to peak between 2 and 4 hours and last for 4 to 8 hours.
The primary effects sought by those using cannabis recreationally are euphoria, relaxation, and changes in perception. Effects vary depending on dosage, with effects at low doses including a sense of well-being, mild enhancement of senses (smell, taste, hearing), subtle changes in thought and expression, talkativeness, giggling, increased appreciation of music, increased appetite, and mild closed-eye visuals. At higher doses, sense of time is altered, attention span and memory are frequently affected, and thought processes and mental perception may be significantly altered.
One of the most common comments about cannabis is that it enhances the appreciation of sensory experiences without substantially changing the perceptual experience. Many people attribute their love of music, appreciation for new forms of music, and ability to play instruments to the use of cannabis.
At overly high doses, the effects are often likened to other psychedelics and panic and dysphoria (bad mood) are more common. High doses, especially when taken orally, can sometimes result in difficult experiences and trips to the emergency room in response to racing heart, extreme confusion, short-term memory loss, and panic. After high-dose experiences, especially among those who are not regular users, after effects can last 1-2 days.
Paradoxically, although cannabis is normally considered a relaxant / depressant, its effects are stimulating in a substantial portion of those who use it. While some people use it to help them sleep, others cannot sleep for 3-6 hours after their last smoke.HOUSTON - A hilariously detailed grocery list has one H-E-B exec wondering: "What aisle are the 'hoochies' on?'"
Scott McClelland, the grocery giant's president of Houston food and drug division stores, tweeted a photo of a grocery list he found while at H-E-B.
The grocery list reads seemingly normal -- organic baby carrots, bananas, pickles -- until you get to the bottom of the list where, in all red, the list states "Do NOT look at the hoochies!!!"
WARNING: The list contains explicit language which may not be suitable for some audiences.
A grocery list I found at one of our @HEB stores. Read to the bottom! What aisle are "hoochies" on? @jimmyfallon pic.twitter.com/Zd9b7vPVJT — Scott McClelland (@HEBScott) August 11, 2017
Over 20 people responded to McClelland's tweet offering suggestions as to where one might find the hoochies. Others laughed at other more personal parts of the list.
Near the liquor aisle Scott. Duh — Atom Smasher (@atomsmashershow) August 12, 2017
Haha!! Don't forgot the yogurt to help them poop! — M. Dominguez (@melidmgz) August 11, 2017
little yogurts to help him what??? lol (third to last item on the list) — Kena Moore (@KenaMoore) August 11, 2017
So, what aisle ARE the hoochies on, San Antonio?
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Copyright 2017 by KSAT - All rights reserved.The Phoenix Suns NBA basketball team has announced that they will be installing 1,125 solar panels on their parking garage to help power their arena. The clean energy project will cost about $1.5 million and will reportedly not increase ticket prices for fans. The 194 kilowatt solar power system will provide an equivalent amount of energy to what would be used in about 26 home games per season. The system should be operational next year.
The Suns created a “green committee” last year to help brainstorm and create solutions that would make the basketball team and its facilities more environmentally-friendly. The idea for solar panels apparently came about thanks to the suggestion of star point guard Steve Nash. He is installing solar panels at his personal home and urged the team and franchise to do likewise.
The effort is also part of a larger initiative by the city of Phoenix. The city’s mayor was quoted as saying: “Our goal for Phoenix is to become the first sustainable city of the 21st Century. With this project, we have taken another step toward a sustainable Downtown, powered by renewable energy sources.” The Sun’s solar power system alone will eliminate close to 440,000 pounds of CO2 per year.
While not the first major sports team to use alternative energy, the Suns are still among the few early adopters. As more and more sports franchises follow the lead and begin seeking ways to be more environmentally-friendly, it makes sense that fans will catch on with their personal actions. If anything, it provides an informal education opportunity for large groups of people to see and learn about alternative energy.
Here’s a brief listing of some of the other major sports teams you can support who have also undertaken alternative energy projects and initiatives to decrease their operating costs and negative effects on the environment:
Baseball: the San Francisco Giants, Boston Red Sox, and Colorado Rockies have all installed solar panels.
Basketball: the Los Angeles Lakers also have plans to install solar panels.
Read More About Sports and the Environment on the Green Options Network:
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons licenseby
The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum. Bank strategists learned not to risk submitting their plans to democratic vote after Icelanders twice refused in 2010-11 to approve their government’s capitulation to pay Britain and the Netherlands for losses run up by badly regulated Icelandic banks operating abroad. Lacking such a referendum, mass demonstrations were the only way for Greek voters to register their opposition to the €50 billion in privatization sell-offs demanded by the European Central Bank (ECB) in autumn 2011.
The problem is that Greece lacks the ready money to redeem its debts and pay the interest charges. The ECB is demanding that it sell off public assets – land, water and sewer systems, ports and other assets in the public domain, and also cut back pensions and other payments to its population. The bottom 99% understandably are angry to be informed that the wealthiest layer of the population is largely responsible for the budget shortfall by stashing away a reported €45 billion of funds stashed away in Swiss banks alone. The idea of normal wage-earners being obliged to forfeit their pensions to pay for tax evaders – and for the general un-taxing of wealth since the regime of the colonels – makes most people understandably angry. For the ECB, EU and IMF “troika” to say that whatever the wealthy take, steal or evade paying must be made up by the population at large is not a politically neutral position. It comes down hard on the side of wealth that has been unfairly taken.
A democratic tax policy would reinstate progressive taxation on income and property, and would enforce its collection – with penalties for evasion. Ever since the 19th century, democratic reformers have sought to free economies from waste, corruption and “unearned income.” But the ECB troika is imposing a regressive tax – one that can be imposed only by turning government policy-making over to a set of unelected technocrats.
To call the administrators of so anti-democratic a policy “technocrats” seems to be a cynical scientific-sounding euphemism for financial lobbyists or bureaucrats deemed suitably tunnel-visioned to act as useful idiots on behalf of their sponsors. Their ideology is the same austerity philosophy that the IMF imposed on Third World debtors from the 1960s through the 1980s. Claiming to stabilize the balance of payments while introducing free markets, these officials sold off export sectors and basic infrastructure to creditor-nation buyers. The effect was to drive austerity-ridden economies even deeper into debt – to foreign bankers and their own domestic oligarchies.
This is the treadmill on which Eurozone social democracies are now being placed. Under the political umbrella of financial emergency, wages and living standards are to be scaled back and political power shifted from elected government to technocrats governing on behalf of large banks and financial institutions. Public-sector labor is to be privatized – and de-unionized, while Social Security, pension plans and health insurance are scaled back.
This is the basic playbook that corporate raiders follow when they empty out corporate pension plans to pay their financial backers in leveraged buyouts. It also is how the former Soviet Union’s economy was privatized after 1991, transferring public assets into the hands of kleptocrats, who worked with Western investment bankers to make the Russian and other stock exchanges the darlings of the global financial markets. Property taxes were scaled back while flat taxes were imposed on wages (a cumulative 59 percent in Latvia). Industry was dismantled as land and mineral rights were transferred to foreigners, economies driven into debt and skilled and unskilled labor alike was obliged to emigrate to find work.
Pretending to be committed to price stability and free markets, bankers inflated a real estate bubble on credit. Rental income was capitalized into bank loans and paid out as interest. This was enormously profitable for bankers, but |
Larsen says, “are fan-producer relationships where there’s an actual action on the part of the producer that changes the outcome—as opposed to a nice relationship that’s collegial and everyone enjoys talking and chatting, but it’s not going to turn into action on the producer’s part.” The latter is still what the BBC and Moffat have with Sherlock.
Of course, the tangible effect of fandom is hardly restricted to Doyles and Dickenses past. In 1968, fans organized a grassroots letter-writing campaign that saved Star Trek from obscurity; much more recently, Jericho fans ran a hilarious peanut campaign to keep their beloved show on the air in 2007. Still, Larsen and Zubernis say it’s important to understand the circumstances under which fans ever see their influence playing out in the life of their show.
“The letter-writing campaign and the peanut campaign and those things were [instances in which] fans and the creative people were on the same side, the people who created the show, write the show, joining the fans against the powers that be,” says Zubernis. “That’s a different kind of influence than trying to tell the creative team which direction to go.”
Larsen agrees. “There’s a danger of overestimating the impact fans have on creators,” she says. “If you’re a writer, you’re not going to cede authority to a fan.”
Business Never Personal
The conversations Zubernis and Larsen have been having with the press, with showrunners, and with fans themselves are coming, they say, at a time when giving fans what they want—or at least creating a relationship in which producers give fans what they think they want—has become a massive, incredibly lucrative business.
“It’s profitable for [the producers], which is why things like Comic-Con have gotten out of hand,” says Larsen. “It’s become this big selling festival of consumerism: ‘Come buy our products, we’ll give you sneak peeks, things to take home with you.’ It’s not because they’re so into the fans. They’re into the fans’ buying power.”
Nevertheless, it’s becoming harder to fake it; Larsen and Zubernis say producers need to start treading more lightly when it comes to superficial titillation, because fans are quick to smell a rat. “That kind of affectionate, ‘nod-nod, wink-wink’ fan service that shows started to do a while ago has been done for so long that it causes a rift sometimes between fans and producers,” says Zubernis. “People now are like, ‘You know, if you’re gonna tease us, where’s the follow-through? Why wouldn’t you follow through? Is this [gay joke] homophobia, is this [joke about female characters] misogyny?’ People are starting to question that a little more.”
As friendly as that fan-creator relationship may seem, it’s actually a delicate thing. And in the end, Zubernis and Larsen say, it’s mostly artifice. “[The relationship] seems a lot more reciprocal and closer than it is, which is an artifact of the way social media, especially Twitter, makes fans feel,” says Zubernis. “I always stay on Twitter when a Supernatural episode is airing, and the actors and the writers and directors are usually on [Twitter], and I see what it does to fans when somebody answers their tweet. There’s a need, I think, to feel like, ‘They’re listening to me; I’m important.’ That’s a normal psychological response, but it’s not actually true; it’s wishful thinking. It’s a constructed intimacy that’s not really intimate at all.”
And there have been few better examples of that than the unfortunate fan-fiction incident in London: At the end of the day, fandoms are still often joke fodder. “I think it was a really good indication of where the power still lies,” says Larsen. “If anyone is going to get hurt in the fan-producer relationship, it’s going to be the fan.”Interview With thatgamecompany
In an exclusive interview, PlayStation LifeStyle goes one-on-one with thatgamecompany’s John Edwards, lead programmer for the hit titles Flower and flOw.
PSLS: The release of Flower brought a wave of fresh air into the PSN store. It was praised by critics and fans alike; for its simplicity and beauty. But fans still want more, so, is there any new content being planned for Flower?
John: Flower was designed to be a complete experience that you play through in one sitting. Still, we’ve gotten plenty of emails and posts on our forums from people with good ideas about how to expand it. Right now, we haven’t made any plans either way.
PSLS: What do you think is the reason people tried and fell in love this very unique game?
John: If Flower really clicked with anyone, maybe that’s because it isn’t quite as unique as it might at first seem. I think the work we do at thatgamecompany is very much a natural extensions of traditional games. Every single member of the team was a hardcore gamer at some point in their lives, and most of us still play tons of mainstream games. We certainly all appreciate what’s great about Uncharted or MGS4, but it’s getting harder to find the time to master the complicated controls or grind through the 20 hours of gameplay, or even pull together the motivation to save yet another world that seems to have less and less to do with our own.
We’ve grown up, but so has the entire NES generation. So we made Flower for ourselves, and all the other people like us, who appreciate the kind of immersion and kinesthetic connection that only games can deliver, but also value intuitive controls, manageable play time, and themes that are relevant to their lives.
PSLS: While Flower may seem like a very simplistic game, I am sure the technical side of the game is very complex. Was Flower a hard game to develop for, with all the free-moving, individual blades of grass and flower petals?
John: There were many aspects of the Flower development that gave us trouble, but technology was not one of them. With our first PSN game flOw, on the other hand, technology was a complete disaster. FlOw was the first console game any of us had worked on from start to finish, and we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. I often wonder if Sony had realized the full depths of our incompetence whether they would have even hired us in the first place.They did, though, and we bumbled our way through somehow. The 90 hour weeks probably had something to do with it. We emerged as war veterans from a fox hole, changed men, and we vowed never to do that again.
On Flower, we took a very methodical approach to both technology and production. Inspired by a Media Molecule talk at the 2007 Game Developer’s Conference, we dove into the scariest parts of the technology head first. The SPUs, for instance, which had been a constant source of despair on flOw, we started using from day one on Flower. We even developed a way to reload SPU code while the game was running, making it much faster to iterate on than code for the main processor. The result was that for many systems, people preferred writing directly for the SPUs, since they had become the most convenient processors for which to program.
By attacking the hard problems early and planning ahead, we were able to maintain a “zero-crunch” production, meaning we never once had to work longer than 40 hours a week, if we didn’t want to. In fact, the closer we got to shipping, the less extra time people put in at the office, to the point where the last 3 months were very strict 40 hour weeks, as a way of compensating for all the other pressures of shipping a game.
PSLS: Flower is a very emotional game, has some incredible music, and has a brilliant use of the SIXAXIS feature, did all of this come from the concept or did it grow while developing it? Did Flower stay close to the original concept?
John: At the very first meeting about the game our Creative Director Jenova Chen typed the word “flower” into Flickr, pulling up hundreds of amazing images. There were delicate, serene closeups and visceral, majestic wide shots. Pictures of flowers are evocative of a very specific feeling, and we decided then and there to focus on recreating that feeling with Flower.
While we established the high level target from day one, getting there was a very organic process. At different points in its design Flower involved golfing, spell casting and collecting glowing orbs we called “Loves.” The story centered around a socially inept photographer and a teenage rapper before settling into its current subdued form. We spent almost the entire first year of development just finding that flower feeling, to the point where Sony, and most of our team for that matter, were worried that there wouldn’t be any time left over to make an actual game. And, in fact, it was only about 6 months from shipping that we really had all the concepts nailed down and were able to enter full production.
Looking back, it seems strange that it took us so long, not only because Flower is such a simple game, but also because we’d come up with about 95% of the ideas that constitute Flower within the first three months. The problem was never lack of ideas, but the opposite. We always had too many, some of them good in their own right, but Flower was so much about conjuring a specific feeling clearly and intensely that we couldn’t just throw any old features together, no matter how good they were individually. All the features, from the sound, to music, to graphics, to gameplay had to harmonize.
So Flower was a combination of very firm high concept and an adventure game-like process of combining everything with everything until we found the set of features that worked together.This study provides an early evaluation of the assistance programmes implemented by the Troika in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The study assesses the economic impact of the programmes and the consequences of their particular institutional set-up.
Read update ‘The Troika and financial assistance in the euro area: successes and failures’ (coming 19/02)
Three years ago, in May 2010, Greece became the first euro-area country to receive financial assistance from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for implementing an economic programme designed by the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Within a year, Ireland and Portugal went down the same path.
This study provides an early evaluation of these assistance programmes implemented by the Troika in these three countries. The study assesses the economic impact of the programmes and the consequences of their particular institutional set-up.The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, did not pass up such a gift from the president. She wrote on Twitter that Trumpcare, as she called it, was “not only ‘mean,’ but a moral monstrosity.”
“The Senate bill is just as cruel,” she added, although no bill text has been released.
Republican senators were already planning to make their bill more generous, at least relative to the House bill, known as the American Health Care Act. At the Capitol, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said Republicans were hard at work on their legislation, although he did not divulge any specifics about it.
“Our goal here is to move forward quickly,” he said. “The status quo is unsustainable.”
The Congressional Budget Office found that the bill passed by the House would leave 14 million more people uninsured next year than under the Affordable Care Act, and 23 million more in 2026. It also said that the House bill would cut more than $800 billion from projected federal spending on Medicaid over the next 10 years and that less healthy people could face “extremely high premiums,” as would some older Americans.
For example, the budget office said, for a typical 64-year-old with an annual income of $26,500, the net premium in 2026 — after tax credits — would average about $16,000 a year under the House bill, compared with $1,700 under the Affordable Care Act.
Doctors and hospitals opposed the House bill, as did groups like the American Cancer Society and AARP. Senate Republicans immediately dismissed the House overhaul and pledged to write their own replacement for the health law.
Senate Republicans have been working for weeks on proposals that they say could soften the effects of the House bill by providing more financial assistance to low-income people and older Americans to help them pay for insurance.
But some Republican senators are eager to keep a provision of the House bill that would let states opt out of a federal requirement for insurers to provide certain minimum health benefits.
In such states, the budget office said, “out-of-pocket spending on maternity care and mental health and substance abuse services could increase by thousands of dollars” for some consumers.Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network joins with the Palestinian people and the international movement for justice in Palestine in condemning in the strongest terms U.S. President Donald Trump’s colonial declaration of “recognition” of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on Wednesday, 6 December. See the list below of global actions for Jerusalem, Palestine:
This attempt to legitimize colonization, apartheid, occupation and land theft will do nothing to erase the Arab identity and Palestinian character of Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine. It only undermines the utterly false nature of any so-called “peace process” under U.S. auspices and the reality of U.S. imperialism as the primary partner of the Israeli occupation state and Zionist racism and an extreme threat to the Palestinian people and all forces of justice in the world.
It must be noted that this is an extension of the same U.S. policy that imprisons and deports Palestinians for supporting their people, that has attempted to impose the Oslo process on Palestine, that provides $3 billion dollars in killer military aid to the Israeli occupation army each year. Furthermore, this policy has enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support, with Democrats and Republicans lining up to attack the Palestinian people and strip them of their rights.
It also comes as thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites are imprisoned and countless more face stripping of their residency, home demolitions, land confiscation, settler violence and a project of ethnic cleansing that has gone on for 70 years.
This declaration coming as it does on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour declaration, as Trump repeatedly invoked the word “promise” in his speech, seeks to renew the spirit of Balfour through another imperialist colonizer promising land that is not his to give. The Palestinian people are making it clear on the streets of Palestine that Jerusalem will always be the capital of the Palestinian people, and neither Trump nor all of the might of U.S. imperialism and the Zionist movement will change that reality.
From Haifa, to Yafa, to Jerusalem, to Gaza, to Ramallah, Palestine and its people will never be defeated, colonialism and land theft will not be legitimized through imperial declarations, and millions of Palestinian refugees will return to their liberated homeland.
We urge all supporters of Palestine to join the rallies around the world to support Palestinian resistance to Trump’s declaration.
We will add additional events to the list below as we become aware of them! Please email us at samidoun@samidoun.net or message us on Facebook to let us know about your protests to stand with Jerusalem and with Palestine!
UPCOMING ACTIONS:
New York City
Friday, 22 December
Emergency Rally to #FreeAhedTamimi and End Child Detention
4:30 pm
Union Square North (17th St., across from Barnes & Noble)
New York City
Facebook: https://www. facebook.com/events/ 499878070395125
Montreal, Quebec
Saturday, 23 December
Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
1:00 pm
Guy-Concordia Station
Montreal
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/142391279753899/
London, UK
Saturday, 23 December
Victory to the Intifada – Free Ahed Tamimi
1:00 pm
Marks and Spencer
458 Oxford St, London
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1782307218447476/
Saturday, 23 December
Free Ahed, Nariman and Nour Tamimi
2:00 pm
Trafalgar Square
London
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/135683673777625/
Manchester, UK
Saturday, 23 December
Protest to Free Ahed Tamimi and all Palestinian Prisoners
12:00 pm
Piccadilly Gardens
Manchester
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ events/202387466986443/
Berlin, Germany
Saturday, 23 December
Hands off Jerusalem! Hands off Palestine!
3:00 pm
Karl-Liebknecht-Str/Spandau St
Berlin
Koblenz, Germany
Saturday, 23 December
Rally for Jerusalem, No to Trump
2:00 pm
Herz-Jesu-Kirche
Lohrrondell 1a
46068 Koblenz
More info; http://palaestina-solidaritaet.de/2017/12/16/koblenz-sa-23-12-kundgebung-gegen-trumps-jerusalem-entscheidung/
Hamburg, Germany
Saturday, 23 December
Rally for Jerusalem, Capital of Palestine
1:00 pm
Hauptbahnhof/Glockengiesserwall
20095 Hamburg
More info: http://palaestina-solidaritaet.de/2017/12/22/hamburg-sa-23-12-kundgebung-fuer-jerusalem/
Malmo, Sweden
Wednesday, 20 December
Jerusalem, Capital of Palestine
4:30 pm
Triangel Torg
Malmo
Kalmar, Sweden
Saturday, 23 December
Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
1:00 pm
Stortorget 23
Kalmar
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/147463205956227/
Cologne, Germany
Wednesday, 20 December
Rally for Jerusalem
5:00 pm
Cologne Hauptbahnhof
Cologne, Germany
Brussels, Belgium
Friday, 22 December
Jerusalem, Capital of Palestine
5:00 PM
US Embassy in Brussels
Boulevard du Regent 27
Brussels
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/382625825517808/
Malaga, Spain
Wednesday, 20 December
Rally for Jerusalem
7:00 pm
Placa de la Merced
Malaga
Rivas, Spain
Friday, 22 December
Rivas with the Palestinian people
10:15 am
Salon de Plenos (C/ Grupo Escolar, 2)
Rivas
Athens, Greece
Friday, 22 December
Protest at the Zionist Embassy
6:00 pm
Israeli Embassy
Marathonodromon 1 P Psychiko
Athens
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/158007124967459/
Milan, Italy
Saturday, 23 December
Jerusalem, Eternal Capital of Palestine
3:00 pm
March departs from Piazza Oberdan
Milan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2007990569471199/
PREVIOUS ACTIONS:
New York City:
Wednesday, 6 December
Rally: New York Stands with Jerusalem
5:45 pm
Hunter College Hall
68th St and Lexington Ave
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1392460360863427/
Friday, 8 December
New York Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine!
4:30 pm
Times Square
42nd St and 7th Avenue
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/130658067614282/
Monday, 11 December
Defend al-Quds! Free Ahmad Sa’adat and Khalida Jarrar! Stop HP!
5:00 pm
Union Square – Best Buy
52 E. 14th St, NYC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1696870457010107/
Monday, 18 December
Protest to free Abdul-Khalik Burnat and #StopHP
5:00 pm
Best Buy Union Square
52 E 14th St, NYC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/133823153961352/
Dearborn, MI
Tuesday, 19 December
Standing up for Jerusalem
5:30 pm
Ford Community and Performing Arts Center
15801 Michigan Ave, Dearborn
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/138575746856149/
Chicago, IL:
Thursday, 7 December
Emergency Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine!
4:30 pm
Kluczynski Federal Building
230 S. Dearborn St., Chicago
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/364421994006609/
Fort Lauderdale, FL:
Friday, 8 December
Rally; Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine!
5:00 pm
Broward County Courthouse
201 SE 6th St, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/304951356667214/
Tampa, FL:
Friday, 8 December
Rally: Hands off Jerusalem!
6:00 pm
Corner of Fowler Ave and 56th St, Tampa
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2017627081855810/
Jacksonville, FL
Friday, 8 December
Jerusalem is Palestinian! Hands off al-Quds!
5:30 pm
300 N. Hogan St
Jacksonville
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/899879560189158
Orlando, FL
Friday, 8 December
Protest: Hands off Jerusalem!
4:30 pm
Lake Eola Park
Orlando
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1857845674545873/
Sarasota, FL
Sunday, 10 December
Jerusalem is Palestine! No US Embassy Move!
1:00 pm
Five Points Park
1 Central Ave, Sarasota
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/307092906444030/
Ann Arbor, MI
Monday, 11 December
Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
6:00 pm
Michigan Union
530 South State St, Ann Arbor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/150801775686748/
Ft. Myers, FL
Thursday, 14 December
Hands off Jerusalem
11:00 am
1st and Monroe, Ft. Myers
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/165844607482731/
Cleveland, OH
Friday, 8 December
Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine!
5:00 pm
Public Square, Cleveland
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1603893759671535/
Columbus, OH
Friday, 8 December
Call to Action: Rally Against US Embassy Relocation to Jerusalem
4:30 pm
Ohio Statehouse
1 Capitol Square, Columbus
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1379780698816136/
Toledo, OH
Sunday, 10 December
Hands off Jerusalem!
12:00 pm
Corner of Secor and Central, Toledo
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/134187743929658/
Los Angeles, CA
Sunday, 10 December
Jerusalem is Palestine! No US Embassy Move
1:00 pm
Wilshire Federal Building
11000 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/594258424246788/
San Francisco, CA
Saturday, 9 December
All Out for Palestine: Hands off Jerusalem!
12:00 pm
Civic Center/UN Plaza
San Francisco, CA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1556659997759149/
Fresno, CA
Friday, 8 December
Protest for Jerusalem
5:00 pm
Corner of Shaw and Blackstone, Fresno
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1015469261926177/
Anaheim, CA
Friday, 8 December
All out for Jerusalem!
2:30 pm
611 S Brookhurst St, Anaheim
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1694636593913797/
Sacramento, CA
Saturday, 9 December
Rally and protest for Palestine
4:00 pm
20th and J Street, Sacramento
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/550487815298790/
San Diego, CA
Saturday, 9 December
Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
1:00 pm
Balboa Park
San Diego
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/131668337511657/
Boston, MA
Wednesday, 6 December
Jews Say No To Trump Embassy in Jerusalem
6:00 pm
AIPAC
70 Franklin Street, Boston
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/378087899308104/
Washington, DC
Wednesday, 6 December
Rally to Tell Trump: Jerusalem is Not the Capital of Israel!
4:00 pm
The White House
Washington, DC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/164573460955871/
Friday, 8 December
Hands off Jerusalem Protest
12 pm
The White House
Washington, DC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/965358533619520/
Philadelphia, PA
Friday, 8 December
Protest Trump’s Reassignment of Jerusalem
4:00 pm
1401 JFK Boulevard, Philadelphia
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/959709627530281/
Pittsburgh, PA
Saturday, 9 December
Emergency Palestine Rally
1:00 pm
Schenley Plaza
4100 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/152287848830276/
Albuquerque, NM
Friday, 8 December
Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine!
3:00 pm
400 Gold Ave SW, Albuquerque
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/167281704017786/
Gallup, NM
Saturday, 9 December
Stand with Palestine! Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine!
12:00 pm
SE Corner of Maloney and Hwy 491
Gallup
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/531413267239283/
Kansas City, MO
Friday, 8 December
Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine!
2:30 pm
Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd, Kansas City
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/168030557134043/
Detroit, MI
Friday, 8 December
Emergency Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
5:00 pm
Hart Plaza
Detroit, MI
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1483447341732510/
East Lansing, MI
Friday, 8 December
Emergency Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
5:00 pm
E Grand River Ave
East Lansing, MI
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/174939163091562/
Albany, NY:
Saturday, 9 December
Day of Rage: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
1:00 pm
Townsend Park, Albany
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/157838194972669/
Portland, OR
Friday, 8 December
Tell Trump NO- Jerusalem is Not the Capital of Israel
5:00 pm
Federal Building, SW 3rd and Madison
Portland
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2186675861560433/
Tempe, AZ
Friday, 8 December
Stand in Solidarity with Jerusalem – Stand Against Trump
6:00 pm
Mill Avenue and University Drive, Tempe
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/124218361696385/
Salt Lake City, UT
Saturday, 9 December
Protest Trump’s Jerusalem Announcement
2:00 pm
Wallace Bennett Federal Building
125 South State Street, Salt Lake City
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/549889052036922/
Atlanta, GA
Saturday, 9 December
Stop Trump, Protect Jerusalem, Support Peace
12:00 pm
Location TBA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1488503127929972/
Austin, TX
Friday, 8 December
Emergency Action: Hands off Jerusalem
3:00 pm
UT Tower
Austin
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1953208881597313/
Dallas, TX
Saturday, 9 December
Rally for Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine
3:00 pm
Dealey Plaza, Dallas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/548022182203536/
Houston, TX
Saturday, 9 December
Emergency Rally: Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
2:00 pm
2521 Post Oak Blvd, Houston
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2004761833096682/
Omaha, Nebraska
Friday, 8 December
Emergency Rally: Hands off Jerusalem
4:00 pm
72nd and Dodge, Omaha
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/409809806105020/
Greensboro, NC:
Saturday, 9 December
1:15 pm
Corner of Gate City Boulevard and Holden Road
In front of the Wells Fargo
St. Paul, MN
Friday, 8 December
No to Trump’s Plan to move US Embassy to Jerusalem!
4:30 pm
Summit and Snelling, St. Paul
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2070178673201952/
Nashville, TN
Saturday, 9 December
Emergency Stand Up for Palestine Protest
3:00 pm
Centennial Park
Nashville
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1675250135870940/
Seattle, WA
Friday, 8 December
Al-Quds is the Capital of Palestine
5:00 pm
Westlake Park
Seattle
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/305485543297018/
Boston, MA
Sunday, 17 December
Hands off Jerusalem
11:00 am
Copley Plaza, Boston
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/175069679752942/
Dallas, TX
Saturday, 16 December
Rally for Jerusalem, Capital of Palestine
2:00 pm
Tarrant County Courthouse
100 W Weatherford, Fort Worth
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1371082546354514/
New Orleans, LA
Friday, 15 December
Palestinian day of rage: Justice for Jerusalem
6:30 pm
Corner of Canal and Decatur
New Orleans
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/731670023688907/
Washington, DC
Saturday, 16 December
Jerusalem, the Eternal Capital of Palestine
12:00 pm
Lafayette Park – White House
Washington, DC
More information: https://www.facebook.com/events/2019416711679245/
Seattle, WA
Saturday, 16 December
Hands off Jerusalem!
12:30 pm
401 Pine Street
Seattle
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/133366937343168/
Atlanta, GA
Saturday, 16 December
Stop Trump, Protect Jerusalem
12:00 pm
Centennial Olympic Park Dr NW and Marietta St NW
Atlanta
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1488503127929972/
Anaheim, CA
Saturday, 16 December
Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
12:00 pm
611 S Brookhurst St, Anaheim
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/781290588721732/
Oklahoma City, OK
Saturday, 16 December
Jerusalem is Forever the Capital of Palestine
11:00 am
Oklahoma City Capital Building South Place
Oklahoma City
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2004072133201922/
Minneapolis, MN
Monday, 18 December
Hands off Jerusalem
5:00 pm
300 South Fourth Street
202 US Courthouse, Minneapolis
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/875422242618724/
Indianapolis, IN
Sunday, 10 December
Emergency Rally for Palestine
4:00 pm
Soldiers and Sailors Monument
Indianapolis
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/176712262920605/
Dublin, Ireland:
Friday, 8 December
Hands off Jerusalem! Emergency Lunchtime Protest at US Embassy
1 pm
US Embassy
Dublin, Ireland
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/522915784755200/
Derry, Ireland;
Thursday, 7 December
Hands off Jerusalem Rally
7:00 pm
Guildhall Square, Derry
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1978229262465379/
Belfast, Ireland
Friday, 8 December
Tell Trump Jerusalem is Not the Capital of Israel
6:00 pm
US Embassy
Danesfort 223 Stranmillis Road, Belfast
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/152658182127689/
Limerick, Ireland
Saturday, 9 December
Hands off Jerusalem!
2:00 pm
Thomas Street
Limerick
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/313235175845579/
Edinburgh, Scotland (national demo)
Saturday, 9 December
Protest for Jerusalem!
12:00 pm
Princess Street in front of Waverly Station
March to US Consulate
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2004467089838401/
Glasgow, Scotland
Saturday, 9 December
Hands off Jerusalem – Not Trump’s to Give Away
12:30 pm
Buchanan Street Steps
Glasgow
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/188002085111924/
London, UK:
Friday, 8 December
London Protest – Hands off Jerusalem!
5:30 pm
US Embassy
Grosvenor Square, London
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/170537040356273/
Sunday, 10 December
Do NOT Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, Trump!
1:00 pm
US Embassy London
24 Grosvenor Square, London
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/151751605458340/
London, UK
Friday, 15 December
March for Jerusalem
5:30 pm
Embassy of Saudi Arabia, 30 Charles St
March to US Embassy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/128503511265322/
Manchester, UK
Saturday, 16 December
No to Trump’s Jerusalem Plan! Protest on PFLP Anniversary
12:00 pm
Piccadilly Gardens
Manchester
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/370327460076955/
Middlesbrough, UK
Saturday, 16 December
Hands off Jerusalem
2:00 pm
Debenhams The Corner
1 Newport Road, Cleveland, Middlesbrough
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1630846753620721/
Manchester, UK:
Friday, 8 December
Protest: Jerusalem’s Not Trump’s To Give Away
5:30 pm
Whitworth Hall, Manchester
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/173708333367924/
Saturday, 16 December
No to Trump’s Jerusalem Plan! Protest on PFLP Anniversary
12:00 pm
Piccadilly Gardens
Manchester
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/370327460076955/
Coventry, UK
Monday, 11 December
Hands off Jerusalem!
6:00 pm
Lady Godiva
26 Broadgate, Coventry
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/675217489340578/
Bristol, UK
Friday, 8 December
Bristol says Hands off Jerusalem!
5:00 pm
The Centre (by the fountains), Bristol
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/135659940548935/
Nottingham UK
Friday, 8 December
Emergency Protest – Hands off Jerusalem!
5:30 pm
Nottingham Speakers Corner
Nottingham, UK
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1505996489499037/
Sheffield, UK
Saturday, 9 December
Protest Trump Jerusalem Decision
12:00 pm
Sheffield City Hall
Barkers Pool, Sheffield
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1397114987056439/
Birmingham, UK
Saturday, 9 December
Protest: Al-Quds is Palestine!
2:00 pm
Marks and Spencer
42 High Street, Birmingham
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1943494829238119/
Halifax, UK
Friday, 8 December
Hands off Jerusalem!
5:00 pm
Outside old central library on Northgate
Halifax
More info: https://www.facebook.com/HalifaxFriendsOfPalestine/
Cardiff, UK
Friday, 8 December
Hands off Jerusalem!
5:30 pm
Nye Bevan Statue
Cardiff
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1526738384060970/
Cambridge, UK
Saturday, 9 December
Hands off Jerusalem!
11:30 am
Market Square
Cambridge
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1669247079763303/
Montreal, Quebec:
Friday, 8 December
Montreal Rally: Hands off Jerusalem!
1:00 pm
US Consulate General Montreal
1155 rue St-Alexandre, Montreal
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1968933419989588/
Sunday, 10 December
Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine
1:00 pm
Guy-Concordia Station
Montreal
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1995490697389410/
Montreal, Quebec
Saturday, 16 December
Rally for Jerusalem
1:00 pm
Guy-Concordia Station
Montreal
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/350942038649497/
Sunday, 17 December
Demonstration: Al-Quds, Capital of Palestine
1:00 pm
Guy-Concordia Station
Montreal, QC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1058965274244303/
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Sunday, 17 December
Rally for Palestine
1:00 pm
Waterloo Town Square, Waterloo
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/204189443459774/
Chatham, ON, Canada
Saturday, 16 December
Hands off Jerusalem
11:00 am
Chatham City Hall
315 King St W, Chatham
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/133743627319324/
Halifax, Canada
Saturday, 16 December
Hands off Jerusalem
11:00 am
Victoria Park, Halifax
next to Public Garden
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2059454020748249/
Hagen, Germany
Saturday, 16 December
Jerusalem is Palestinian
12:30 pm
Berlinerplatz
(Hauptbahnhof)
Hagen, Germany
Uppsala, Sweden
Saturday, 16 December
Jerusalem: Capital of Palestine
3:00 pm
Slottsbacken
Uppsala
|
area of Wynwood, because active local transmission of Zika has been confirmed," CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said in a media briefing held Friday.
A broader travel advisory for pregnant women could threaten tourism and heighten fears for pregnant women living in the Miami area.
The Zika virus is typically transmitted via mosquitoes and can cause a transient illness. It is most dangerous to pregnant women, due to the virus' link to microcephaly, a devastating birth defect where babies are born with smaller than normal heads and underdeveloped brains.
Officials continue to struggle with controlling mosquitos in the Wynwood area of Miami, Frieden said.
"Although the state of Florida, with CDC's assistance, has mounted and continues to mount an aggressive response, the mosquitos are persistent and we won't know for at least another couple of weeks if these aggressive control measures have worked," Frieden said Friday.
Outside the Wynwood and Miami Beach areas, Florida health officials have investigated at least four other independent instances of mosquito-borne Zika transmission in Miami-Dade County, Frieden said.
"These are individual instances, and do not represent spread throughout the area," Frieden said.
Occasional individual cases of local transmission cropped up during earlier chikungunya and dengue outbreaks in Florida, but in most instances these did not amount to a new outbreak, Frieden explained.
"For every nine or so one-off cases, where there was a single case of transmission that was locally mosquito-borne, there was one cluster," he said. "The vast majority of local transmissions hit a dead end after one or two people in one household. That's what we would anticipate seeing here."
In other recent Zika news, experts have wondered if the virus might sometimes be transmitted through blood transfusions, and a cluster of infections in Brazil seems to support that notion.
Reporting Aug. 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors believe that a blood donor passed along the typically mosquito-borne virus in late January to two hospitalized patients who needed transfusions.
"These data show evidence for Zika virus transmission by means of [blood] platelet transfusion," reported a team led by Dr. Iara Motta, of the Jose Alencar Gomes da Silva National Cancer Institute in Rio de Janeiro, and Bryan Spencer of the American Red Cross in Dedham, Mass.
Health officials in the United States have already been preparing for the possibility of Zika transmission via blood transfusion. In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an experimental test to check blood donations for the Zika virus.
The FDA also recommends that anyone who has traveled recently to an area where the Zika virus is active refrain from donating blood.
Elsewhere, Texas health officials on Monday reported what appears to be the first case of Zika infection traveling across state lines. A resident of that state who visited Miami recently has tested positive for the virus, state health officials said in a statement.
Things are much worse in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, where federal health officials have declared a public health emergency because Zika is spreading so rapidly among residents there. The number of Zika cases there now total 10,690, with 1,035 of those being pregnant women.
And on Thursday, Puerto Rican health officials reported that 30 people have been diagnosed with a rare paralyzing condition that can be caused by Zika infection.
The CDC's Frieden said Thursday he expects even more cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome in Puerto Rico because the Zika virus is infecting so much of the population there.
"We think there will be as many as 200 additional cases [of Guillain-Barre], given the overall number of infections there," Frieden told NBC News.
Health experts do stress that the vast majority of the more than 2,260 Zika infections so far reported in the continental United States have been linked to travel abroad -- to countries with Zika outbreaks in Latin America or the Caribbean.
Most of the thousands of Zika infections recorded globally have so far occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean. Brazil, especially, has reported the vast majority of cases of Zika-linked microcephaly.
U.S. officials said they don't expect to see a Zika epidemic in the United States similar to those in Latin America. The reason: better insect control as well as window screens and air conditioning that should help curtail any outbreaks.
In addition to mosquitoes, the Zika virus can be transmitted through sex. These infections in the United States are thought to have occurred because the patients' partners had traveled to countries where Zika is circulating, the CDC said.
The CDC advises pregnant women not to travel to an area where active Zika transmission is ongoing, and to use insect repellent and wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts if they are in those areas. Partners of pregnant women are advised to use a condom to guard against sexual transmission during pregnancy.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more information on mosquito-borne diseases.
This Q & A will tell you what you need to know about Zika.
To see the CDC list of sites where Zika virus is active and may pose a threat to pregnant women, click here.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Det Insp Kevin Hyland: "It's clear that there was a degree of freedom"
Detectives investigating the case of three women allegedly held as slaves for 30 years in south London have uncovered a "complicated and disturbing picture of emotional control".
The women, aged 69, 57 and 30, were rescued in Lambeth last month.
Commander Steve Rodhouse told a press briefing that the three women told police they had been beaten.
It has also emerged the couple suspected of keeping them as slaves were arrested in the 1970s.
Police would not reveal the reason why the married couple were arrested. The man is aged 73 while the woman is 63 years old.
'Invisible handcuffs'
News of the women's plight did not emerge until Thursday, when police revealed the women, a 69-year-old Malaysian, a 57-year-old Irish national and a 30-year-old Briton, had managed to leave a house in Lambeth on 25 October.
They are not believed to be victims of trafficking.
Mr Rodhouse described the three women as having been restrained by "invisible handcuffs" and confirmed they have made a clear allegation of slavery against the two suspects, who have also been arrested on suspicion of immigration offences.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Aneeta Prem, Freedom Charity: "We've ensured they're in a place of safety"
He said: "It is not as brutally obvious as women being physically restrained inside an address and not allowed to leave.
'Brainwashing'
"What we have uncovered so far is a complicated and disturbing picture of emotional control over many years, brainwashing would be the most simplest term, yet that belittles the years of emotional abuse these victims have had to endure.
"We are unpicking a story that spans at least 30 years of these women's lives, and all of this requires police activity to turn that into evidence."
He added the women had given a "disturbing picture" of their experience, although the household may have appeared as a "normal family" to others.
It is also being investigated as to whether the women had previous contact with public services.
The case has been described as "unique" by the force and its entire 37-person specialist team is working on it.
House search
Mr Rodhouse said one of the reasons the police had not revealed more information about the couple's arrest in the 1970s was because it must "take great care not to provide information that could lead to the identification of the subjects".
He said the two suspects had been bailed as the investigation would be a long one and could take up to many months, but said they had not returned to the Lambeth property.
The house has been subjected to a 12-hour search, with 55 bags of about 2,500 exhibits seized.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Home Office minister James Brokenshire: "I want to see slavery consigned to history books"
The rescue was staged after the 57-year-old woman secretly gained access to a phone and contacted Freedom Charity.
She first called on 18 October and there followed a number of conversations over a week, before the women left the property when the occupants of the house were not around.
They were met by police and representatives of the charity and moved to a safe location.
It is not yet known if the women are related but police believe the 30-year-old has spent her whole life in captivity. Officers are trying to establish whether she was born in the property.
Leader of Lambeth Council Lib Peck said people were "horrified and shocked".
Dame Tessa Jowell, MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, said: "It is shocking, and for one of the women this is a life foregone until she's in her early adulthood.
Bizarre behaviour
"It happened in my constituency and I think that until we begin to have more information from the community, it will be very hard to draw a precise conclusion as to how bizarre the behaviour of this household was.
"Once we've got those established as facts then we can draw conclusions about why this was allowed to happen, how it happened, did these people slip through the net, were there moments when the bizarre and brutal nature of this household could have been revealed?
"I think we have to accept that we have to be patient."
The Ministry of Justice said the women would be provided with secure accommodation for the first 45 days following their release.
The Salvation Army would be involved in helping the women with the next stages of their recovery period and re-integration into society.
Jakki Moxham, chief executive, of Housing for Women, a charity which works with victims of domestic slavery and trafficking, said the "horrific" case showed "slavery is not confined to the history books".
"Women who have been victims of slavery and trafficking are in an extremely vulnerable position but fail to get long term support and safe and secure accommodation after the government 45-day recovery period.
"We urge the government to address this lack of support in the Modern Day Slavery Bill so these women can try to rebuild their lives."
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson said: "If it's as bad as it would appear to be, it's deplorable that something like this can happen in the 21st Century let alone in London, the greatest city on earth."Garath McCleary has four goals in the last four games for Reading
Reading secured a fifth successive Championship win as they beat Bristol City at the Madejski Stadium.
Two goals in six minutes put the Royals in control, with Garath McCleary and Roy Beerens the men on target.
McCleary saw his penalty saved after Hordur Magnusson fouled Dominic Samuel, but hooked in the rebound, and Beerens volleyed home Chris Gunter's cross.
Bristol City had a number of chances at the other end, but Gary O'Neil's late strike was only a consolation.
Having begun the game four points behind second-placed Brighton, Reading remain in third place despite the victory.
And there was cause for concern for manager Jaap Stam as the Robins carved out several decent openings in response to his side's double breakthrough.
Bobby Reid, in particular, had a number of chances, one in particular from close range which Ali Al-Habsi somehow clawed away, and was later denied by a superb block from Royals centre-back Paul McShane.
O'Neil finally found a way past the keeper with a well-directed right-foot effort from the edge of the box - the first goal conceded by Reading in the Championship for 447 minutes - but the home side hung on for the three points.
Jaap Stam's Reading have caught the eye this season with their passing game
Reading manager Jaap Stam (on style comparisons with Barcelona and Manchester City): "I think we're a long way from there. We need to be realistic. We're not trying to copy a certain team, we've got our own style of play and that's what we're trying to do.
"I'm not going to sit in front of the television looking at their patterns of Barcelona and Manchester City.
"But we're trying to play and we've done it loads of times. But if people are talking about us like that, that's a good thing.
"The guys are getting appreciated for what they're doing on the pitch. Maybe people can say as well that Barcelona and Man City are trying to play like Reading."
Bristol City boss Lee Johnson: "The penalty was a decision by somebody who's probably not played football an awful lot before.
"The striker's legs get tangled up as he tried to cut across the defender. He fell over, but there were no complaints. Then penalty.
"It seemed that it was the assistant who gave it. Our fans were right in front of the incident and knew exactly what happened.
"It was decent game, it was like two good boxers going for each other. Had the game finished four-all, you'd have probably been right that that was a fair result."Police across Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area are expressing frustration after a Victoria Day long weekend that saw a high number of impaired driving charges laid against motorists on the province's roads and highways.
"You have to understand, one is too many," Ontario Provincial Police Const. Graham Williamson told CBC News when asked about the number of impaired drivers on Ontario roads.
Police will have the final tally later this week, but by Monday afternoon the OPP said they had laid 160 impaired-driving charges.
In addition, provincial police said they had pulled 25 cars off the road for stunt-driving and laid another 16 dangerous driving charges.
"Unfortunately there is room for an upward movement in that number," Williamson said.
That's borne out by the overall numbers in York Region, where regional police say they've already laid nearly 700 impaired driving charges less than halfway through 2016.
Ontario Provincial Police had a busy long weekend on the roads, laying numerous impaired-driving, dangerous-driving and stunt-driving charges. (Mark Blinch/Reuters)
In 2015, York regional police police laid 1,200 impaired driving charges in total.
"It is probably 30-35 per cent of our work on a daily basis." York Deputy Inspector Gary Miner said.
Miner says his force has been cracking down, laying 10 charges since Friday, and that doesn't include those drivers who blow in the warning range.
"What's it going to take to get the message...? We have those nasty, nasty reminders of people getting killed and people are not getting it," Miner told CBC News.
In Toronto, police have been charging more drivers with driving under the influence of drugs, according to Constable Craig Brister.
"Last year [at this time] we had 10. This year as of May 1st we're up to 25. That's a 150 per cent increase," Brister said.Here’s a license for a library you probably use right now. Notice the clause I circled in an alarmist shade of red:
If you saw this license flagged in a Nexus RHC report it might make you stop, chuckle a bit. “Right, don’t be Evil clause. Ok, whatever.” But, remember, you are a developer, not a lawyer.
A lawyer sees that clause and they have to take it very seriously. You see, lawyers usually don’t have a sense of humor when it comes to the law, and they can’t ignore something in a license. A license is just that, a legal document, everything in it must be taken at face value.
Assuming you take the law seriously, there are two things about this license:
Compliance is impossible. A distinction between Good and Evil is barely possible within strictly defined cultural contexts, but coming up with a universal definition of Good and Evil is impossible within the confines of international law. You could try, but you would need to employ the services of a committee including philosophers and scholars familiar with the descriptive meta-ethics who could render opinions on the software that incorporates this library. You have some specialists on meta-ethics on staff, right?
This isn’t even Open Source. The Open Source Initiative has a criteria for open source licenses here: http://opensource.org/docs/osd – The Open Source Definition. Clause #6 is “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor” – The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. Forget the definition of Evil, you can’t restrict fields of endeavor.
So if this license isn’t an open source license, what is it? That’s a good question. Is it unenforceable? Does the clause invalidate the standard MIT license it is contained in? I can’t answer these questions for you, I’m not a lawyer. I’d only trust a lawyer familiar with your approach to software development and your distribution footprint to render an opinion.
But, the most important thing I take away from this license is that this additional clause adds an unnecessary complication… one that many people don’t even know is lurking in their dependency tree. If it were just a stock MIT license, you wouldn’t have to pay a legal professional to take time to evaluate it, it would show up in Sonatype Insight as a standard license, but at least Insight and the Nexus Repository Health Check would alert you to the presence of this obscure obligation.
What license is this? JSON.org has this clause embedded in a standard MIT license: http://www.json.org/license.html Do you use JSON in your systems today? Have fun explaining the “Don’t be Evil” clause to your in-house counsel.An improvised explosive device packed with projectiles was set off at a St. Petersburg supermarket late Wednesday, injuring 13 people. The suspect was reportedly caught on security camera footage as he left a backpack that detonated later at the coat check.
President Vladimir Putin has instructed security forces to kill all terrorists who threaten the lives of security officers after calling Wednesday's explosion in St. Petersburg a "terrorist attack."
"You know that a terrorist act was committed in St. Petersburg yesterday," Putin said Thursday at a ceremony awarding hundreds of Russian troops who served in Syria.
The Russian head of state said he instructed the FSB chief to act “decisively” against returning terrorist fighters who threaten the lives of security officials.
"Don't take any prisoners, liquidate the bandits on the spot," Putin told the 600 servicemen and women who gathered at the Kremlin.
Earlier this month, security forces arrested seven suspected members of an Islamic State (IS) sleeper cell in St. Petersburg who were reportedly preparing a suicide bombing at the city’s Kazansky Cathedral. IS is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.
Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov clarified the president's statements to journalists later on Thursday.
"The phrase was in reference to those who harbor plans to commit terrorist acts in our country," he was cited as saying by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.Chris Christie responds to Occupy Wall Street protester
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Tuesday said he would stand by his vow to veto legislation that would allow same sex couples to marry.
On Monday, the New Jersey Senate passed the bill by a 24 to 16 vote.
“Yesterday was a good bunch of theater, but that’s all it was,” Christie said at a press conference. “It was theater.”
Christie has pledged to veto the bill. Instead, he has called for the New Jersey legislature to draft a constitutional amendment and put the issue to a statewide vote.
But Democrats have said it is wrong to put a civil right issue on the ballot and vowed to pass the bill despite the governor’s veto threat.
“If they pass it on Thursday and send it to my desk, believe me I will take very swift action on the bill and then we can move on to the things the people of New Jersey say are most important to them, which is creating jobs, lowering taxes and continuing the New Jersey comeback and not the last month that we spent, which really is an act of theater on their part because they know it’s not going to happen,” Christie said.
Overriding the governor’s veto would require two-thirds majority vote in both the Assembly and the Senate.
Watch video, clipped by Think Progress, below:Edson Luís de Lima Souto ( Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈɛdʒsõ luˈiʒ dʒi ˈlimɐ sowtu]; February 24, 1950 – March 28, 1968) was a Brazilian teenage student killed by the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro after a confrontation in the restaurant Calabouço ( IPA: [ˌkalɐˈbowsu]), in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Edson was one of the first students to be killed by the Brazilian military government, and the aftermath of his death marked the beginning of a turbulent year for the regime, which ended with the enactment of AI-5, a decree restricting most of the basic human rights guarantees.
Biography [ edit ]
Born into an impoverished family of Belém, Pará, Edson Luís began his studies at the Augusto Meira State School in his hometown. He later moved to Rio de Janeiro in order to study at the Instituto Cooperativo de Ensino (English: Cooperative Education Institute), a high school facility where the Calabouço restaurant for low-income students operated.
Death [ edit ]
On March 28, 1968, students in Rio de Janeiro organized a surprise march to protest against the high prices of meals in the Calabouço Restaurant, that began in the late afternoon on that same day.
Around 6:00 pm, the Military Police arrived at the location and dispersed the protesters who were in front of the building. Some students took refuge inside the restaurant and responded to police violence with sticks and stones. This caused the police to step back, and the street was left deserted. When the officers returned, shots were fired from the building of the Brazilian Legion of Assistance, which caused panic among the students, who fled the location.
The police believed that the students were planning to attack the nearby United States Embassy and eventually broke into the restaurant. During the raid, the commander of the Military Police troops, Aloísio Raposo, shot and killed Edson Luís with a point-blank shot into his chest. Another student, Benedito Frazão Dutra, was injured and later died in the hospital.
Aftermath [ edit ]
Fearing that the police would hide Edson Luís' body, students did not allow him to be taken to the Forensic Institute; instead, they carried him to the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro, where a funeral service was held. An autopsy was performed there by doctors Nilo Ramos de Assis and Ivan Nogueira Bastos, under pressure from Military Police officers and agents of DOPS, the military regime's political police.
Between the funeral and the seventh-day mass held in the Candelária Church on April 2, several demonstrations were organized across the country to protest against Edson Luís' death. In São Paulo, around 4,000 students staged a protest at the University of São Paulo Medical School. Demonstrations also were held in the August XI Academic Center of the São Francisco Law School, in the Polytechnic School of USP, and in the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.
Rio de Janeiro stopped on the day of Edson Luís' burial. To express their protest, movie theaters in Cinelândia announced the screening of three films: The Night of the Generals, Point Blank, and Coração de Luto (Heart of Grief). In hundreds of movie posters phrases such as "Does bullets kill hunger?", "Old people in power, young people in coffin", and "They killed a student... what if it was your son?" were written.
Mass rally in honor of Lima Souto. A protestor shows the student's bloodstained shirt he wore when shot.
Edson Luís was buried to the sound of the "Brazilian National Anthem", sung by the crowd present at the cemetery.[1]
The mass [ edit ]
On the morning of April 4, a Roman Catholic mass was held at the Candelária Church to honor the memory of Edson Luís. After the mass, people leaving the church were attacked by the cavalry of the Military Police. Dozens of people were injured.
Another mass was to be held on the same day, but the military dictatorship vetoed the religious event. The vicar-general of Rio de Janeiro, D. Castro Pinto, however, insisted on performing it. Around 600 people attended the mass. Fearing a massacre, the priests ordered people not to leave the church. On the outside, there were three ranks of soldiers on horseback with sabers, behind them were the Marine Corps and several of the DOPS agents.
In an unprecedented act of courage, the churchmen took hands, forming a human barrier between the police and those who attended the mass. They escorted the churchgoers safely up to Rio Branco Street. However, the police waited until the clergymen left to start beating several people.[1]
Tribute [ edit ]
On March 28, 2008, to honor the 40 years since Edson Luís' death, a statue of him was inaugurated at the Ana Amélia Square (between Churchill Avenue and Santa Luzia Street), in Rio de Janeiro.
See also [ edit ]CLOSE Detroit Mayor Dave Bing says there is "going to be a lot of pain" for people following a judge's ruling that the city is eligible to fix its finances in bankruptcy court. (Dec. 3) AP
Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection July 18.
The city of Detroit from midtown. (Photo: Carlos Osorio, AP) Story Highlights Pension reductions could be part of mix
City could sell assets, including Detroit Institute of Arts property
Judge would like to see a draft plan by the end of the year
DETROIT — The city of Detroit officially became the largest municipality in U.S. history Tuesday to enter Chapter 9 bankruptcy after a judge declared it met the specific legal criteria required to receive protection from its creditors.
The landmark ruling ends more than four months of uncertainty over the fate of the case and sets the stage for a fierce clash over how to slash an estimated $18 billion in debt and long-term liabilities that have hampered Detroit from attacking pervasive blight and violent crime.
STORY: Judge OKs pension cuts
STORY: How Detroit went broke
"It is indeed a momentous day," U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes said at the end of a 90-minute summary of his ruling. "We have here a judicial finding that this once-proud city cannot pay its debts. At the same time, it has an opportunity for a fresh start. I hope that everybody associated with the city will recognize that opportunity."
In a surprise decision Tuesday morning, Rhodes also said he will allow pension cuts in Detroit's bankruptcy. He emphasized that he won't necessarily agree to pension cuts in the city's final reorganization plan unless the entire plan is fair and equitable.
"Resolving this issue now will likely expedite the resolution of this bankruptcy case," he said.
Rhodes' verbal ruling, which precedes a 140-page written opinion to be issued Wednesday, gave Detroit the green light to enter Chapter 9 bankruptcy.
"The court finds that Detroit was and is insolvent," he said. "The court finds that the city was generally not paying its debts as they became due."
Rhodes said bankruptcy was a "foregone conclusion for a very long time. Cities often wait longer to file for bankruptcy than they should have, and the city of Detroit was no exception."
Rhodes said he will not issue a stay on the bankruptcy, meaning the case will proceed.
“The court finds that Detroit was and is insolvent. The court finds that the city was generally not paying its debts as they became due.” Judge Steven Rhodes, U.S. Bankruptcy Court
Even though Michigan Council 25 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees already has filed an appeal — and more will come in days ahead — the bankruptcy code provides for Chapter 9 to continue while appeals are pending that challenge, said Clark Hill lawyer Robert Gordon, who represents the city's pension funds and will be filing an appeal.
John Pottow, a University of Michigan bankruptcy law professor, said Rhodes clearly was urging the city to reach a consensual resolution with its creditors.
"Bottom line: He's pushing negotiation," Pottow said in e-mail.
Rhodes scolded the city for rushing through negotiations with creditors before its filing, noting they only had 30 days to offer a counter. Saying that amount of time is "simply far too short," Rhodes ruled the city did not satisfy good faith requirements to try to negotiate with creditors outside of bankruptcy court.
Lawyers for unions and retirees who fought to persuade the judge to reject Detroit's eligibility for bankruptcy found a silver lining in Rhodes' criticism of the city's negotiation efforts.
"The city has to step up now and negotiate more reasonable and more fairly," said Lynn Brimer, a lawyer for the Detroit Retired Police Members Association.
Despite criticism of Detroit's negotiations, Rhodes said negotiating in good faith was impractical for the city because its financial crisis was growing worse, and creditors filed several lawsuits that could have derailed a bankruptcy filing.
An estimated 1 in 3 Detroiters lives in poverty, making the city the poorest large city in America. (Photo: Spencer Platt, Getty Images)
The city now will proceed with its plan to introduce a proposal to restructure its debt and reshape government operations.
Rhodes asked lawyers for Jones Day, the law firm that represents the city in bankruptcy court, if a first draft of the so-called "plan of adjustment" could be filed by the end of the year. Lawyer David Heiman responded, "We're not quite certain," adding it would be far in advance of the judge's March deadline.
Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr said his team plans to submit the plan of adjustment "in the coming weeks," file a disclosure statement early next year and work to exit Chapter 9 protection by the end of September.
"Time is of the essence, and we will continue to move forward as quickly and efficiently as possible," Orr said in a statement. "We hope all parties will work together to help us develop a realistic restructuring plan that improves the financial condition of Detroit and the lives of its 700,000 citizens."
The plan is expected to include controversial cuts to unsecured creditors and asset sales, including a potential spinoff of the water and sewer department and the possible sale of Detroit Institute of Arts property.
Rhodes said one-time infusions of cash will not provide for a sustainable financial future, but he did not rule out the possibility of approving asset sales.
In a press conference after the ruling, Orr message's to pensioners was this: "We're trying to be very thoughtful, measured and humane," but cuts are necessary.
“You can treat creditors differently.” Lawyer Sharon Levine, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
Gordon, the lead lawyer for the city's two pension funds, said he believes the judge cares about residents and the plight of pensioners.
"I hope it plays out when a plan is proposed," he said of expected pension cuts. While the judge cautioned the city he would scrutinize proposed cuts in the restoration plan, Gordon did not interpret it as a warning to the city to protect the money.
Other lawyers representing retirees expressed disappointment that individuals were being lumped with bondholders and financial institutions.
Major creditors objecting to the bankruptcy included AFSCME; the United Auto Workers; Detroit's two pension funds; the city's public safety unions, retiree associations and a committee created to officially represent retirees during the bankruptcy.
AFSCME lawyer Sharon Levine said bankruptcy is a powerful and flexible tool.
"You can treat creditors differently," she said.
The ruling comes after an exhaustive nine-day bankruptcy eligibility trial that concluded Nov. 8. During that trial, Rhodes gave unions and retiree groups an opportunity make their argument that the city's bankruptcy case should be rejected.
Detroit city workers and supporters protest outside the federal courthouse in Detroit while awaiting the Dec. 3, 2013, bankruptcy decision. (Photo: Carlos Osorio, AP)
Unions and retirees argued that Orr conducted no substantive negotiations with creditors and argued the city fell short of its duty to conduct "good faith" negotiations before filing for bankruptcy. No financial creditors objected to the filing.
By July 18, the day Detroit filed for bankruptcy, the city was being bombarded by lawsuits, facing dwindling cash flow and failing to deliver vital services — adding credence to Jones Day bankruptcy lawyer Bruce Bennett's argument that reaching a deal with more than 100,000 creditors would have taken too long.
"It was clear to Judge Rhodes that negotiations were not going to go anywhere," Laura Beth Bartell, a Wayne State University law professor, said in a recent interview.
Rhodes ruled the city is legally insolvent and obtained the necessary legal authorization from Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to enter Chapter 9.
Brimer, who represents Detroit's retired police officers, said the fight isn't over.
"Perhaps it's fair to say the fight has just begun," she said.
Mayor Dave Bing sounded an optimistic note after the ruling, saying it will be beneficial in the long run.
"There's going to be a lot of pain for a lot of different people," he said. "But in the long run, the future will be bright."
Contributing: Joe Guillen, Detroit Free Press
4 main rulings on eligibility
Here's how U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes ruled Tuesday on each criteria of the eligibility question as required under Chapter 9 of U.S. bankruptcy code.
Criteria Ruling Did the city obtain the state's approval to file for bankruptcy? Rhodes ruled that Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder legally gave the city the OK to file for bankruptcy in July. Is the city insolvent? "The court finds that the city was generally not paying its debts as they became due.... The court finds that the city of Detroit was and is insolvent." Did the city negotiate in good faith? Allowing only a month to negotiate was not enough, Rhodes said. "This calendar was very tight and did not request counter proposals," he said. "The creditors cannot be faulted for failing to offer counter proposals when they did not have enough information to evaluate the city's initial vague proposal." He ruled that the city did not negotiate in good faith but filed the petition for bankruptcy in good faith. Was it impractical to negotiate in good faith? Rhodes found that negotiating in good faith was impractical. And "accordingly, the court finds that pre-filing negotiations were impracticable."
Live coverage from the federal courthouse in Detroit
See the details as they happened in this Twitter blog by Free Press reporters Nathan Bomey and Brent Snavely.
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1bcKJC9All this variety makes the consistent success of fecal transplants even more impressive. But how do they work?
The bacteria in stool seem to be particularly important. Dr. Sahil Khanna of the Mayo Clinic and his colleagues isolated the spores of about 50 different species of bacteria found in stool samples donated by healthy people. They put the spores in pills, which they gave to 30 patients with C. difficile infections. As they reported in the July 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 29 of the patients recovered.
Stool bacteria seem to help patients in a few different ways. “We understand, sort of, how they work,” said Dr. Vincent B. Young, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Michigan Medical School.
In a healthy gut, different species struggle with their rivals for territory. “They have to compete for space, because it’s a nice place to be,” said Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota.
The bacteria from a donor’s healthy gut may be superior at competing for space. They may also be able to gobble up nutrients that competing invaders like C. difficile need to survive.
Writing last month in the journal Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Dr. Khoruts and Michael Sadowsky, a University of Minnesota microbiologist, also described another way in which transplanted bacteria may fight C. difficile: chemistry.
Our livers produce compounds called bile acids that help break down fat in the food we eat. Many species of bacteria in a healthy gut feed on bile acids, casting off byproducts that, Dr. Khoruts said, appear to slow the growth of C. difficile.“If I surrender to you [Blackbeard], then i could never call myself a man again. I won’t submit. I won’t live with regrets, no matter what. You got that, stupid?”
– Portgas D. Ace, One Piece (Ep. 325)
The Toonami Trending Rundown for December 5-6, 2015. A good night for social media buzz, all things considered, as Toonami, #Intruder2 and every show has managed to trend during their respective East Coast airings. No character or in-show content trends to report this week, however.
Huge news for Toonami for those that haven’t heard. On Wednesday, it was announced that a new season of Samurai Jack is currently in production with Genndy Tartakovsky back as Producer. Not much details have been revealed at the moment other than it will be premiering on Toonami sometime next year.
Tune in next week as Michiko and Hatchin showcases it’s series finale, while One Piece begins the Lovely Land arc, among other great moments. Until next week, have a Happy Hanukkah, congratulations to the Portland Timbers on winning the MLS Cup, and stay gold.
[divider]
Legend: The shows listed are ordered based on their appearance on the schedule. Show trends are listed in bold. The number next to the listed trend represents the highest it trended on the list (not counting the promoted trend), judging only by the images placed in the rundown. For the Twitter tweet counts, the listed number of tweets are also sorely based on the highest number shown based on the images on the rundown.
United States Trends:
Toonami/#Toonami [#6]
#Intruder2 [#3]
#DBZKai [#8]
#AkameGaKill [#6]
#Parasyte [#8]
#MichikoAndHatchin [#6]
#Shippuden [#8]
#OnePiece [#5]
#KillLaKill [#5]
Tweet Counts:
#Intruder2 [1,047 tweets]
#DBZKai [1,343 tweets]
#AkameGaKill [3,268 tweets]
#MichikoAndHatchin [1,610 tweets]
#OnePiece [5,573 tweets]
Notes and Other Statistics:
Special thanks to @JMB_70056 and others I forgot to mention for spotting some of the trends on this |
is more rewarding and more interesting to watch. But for that to happen, we NEED Overlord upgrade for all Overlords at Lair, just like the old times. Maybe decrease the cost and research time on it, as it has to be used in conjunction with Overlord Speed.
This way, you will give players a good, skill-oriented way of playing.
Another thing is, there has to be a unit that can be dropped and not only kill workers, but also deny mining. Once a Widow Mine is dropped, it will deny mining for as long as there is no detection. And it costs 75/25. Oracle will lay waste as long as there is not enough anti-air. Those are just some of the examples.
In case of the baneling, it cannot deny mining. It is a suicide unit.
The only other unit that can be used as a harass is the Lurker, but they are coming into play way too late.
The all-in nature of Zerg should be addressed. Zerg all-ins are too easy to perform, and inflate player ranks, which is the reason why there are is such a low representation of Zerg players in lower leagues, but over representation in the medium leagues (Gold, Platinum, Diamond).
In my next point, I would like to talk about the Lurker.
The Lurker:
Lurker is a strange beast. Strong in ZvP, strong in ZvZ if it ever goes past bane wars, but not so good in ZvT.
So far, we haven't had many pro games including the Lurker. There is a reason for it – it comes out too late to be usable. Lurkers are great for the game – they provide a zone control options for Zerg, which increases strategical choice available to players. It gives us some other way of playing the race, instead of macro and a-move or cheap all-ins. The Lurker is good, so said the lord.
But Lurker as of current state is not without flaws from balance prespective.
First of all, it takes to long to tech, and it is easy to deny it. What is the minimum time investment to get Lurkers?
- 18 Lurker morph time.
- 86 Lurker Den morph time.
- 29 Hydralisk Den build time.
- 57 Lair morph time.
= a whooping 190 seconds to get Lurker out, or 3 minutes and 10 seconds.
Do not forget, a Lurker Den can be sniped by a single Dropship, denying you further production of Lurkers for another 133 seconds, or 2 minutes 13 seconds. This is game ending, if you rely on them.
How to fix it? Make Lurker Den not a morph, but an upgrade. Same cost, but once researched, all Hydralisk Dens build afterwards are Lurker Dens by defaut.
Problem 1 solved.
Now, decrease Lurker Den research time from 86 to 46. In BW, if you wanted to go Lurkers, you build Hydralisk Den once Lair was morphing. You could get Lurker research finished in 75 seconds after Lair. Lowering it to 46 will allow us to get Lurkers in similar timing.
Lurker contains were interesting. It kept you on the edge of the seat, not knowing if Protoss will be able to break out and kill the Zerg before he takes advantage and expands everywhere.
We want them back.
Now, lets get back to the Lurker itself. It is too strong in ZvP once its out, but doesn't perform great in ZvT.
The reason why it is OP in ZvP is because of its ridiculous range of 9. 9 Range doesn't do much for ZvT, as Marines and Marauders get inside firing range in a second anyway. However, Stalkers, slow moving Zealots and Immortals just don't have this amazing mobility. They take extra shots before they are able to deal any damage to the Lurker. Lurkers 200 Hp doesn't help, as Stalkers and Zealots do not have the DPS to take Lurkers out quickly. In case of Bio, the opposite is true, as Lurkers die quickly to Marauders and even Marines, and besides, Medivac can always lift up and drop the forces where there are no Lurkers, completely bypassing them.
At the same time, Lurkers are terrible in base defense because of their supply cost. Leaving 1 Lurker to defend is not enough, as Medivac can easily outheal any damage it is doing. You need at least 2 to defend a base against Terran drop. That's 6 supply.
To sum it up, the issues are:
weak defense because of high supply cost.
too strong in ZvP because of its range and high HP.
inability to counter Bio.
There are simple ways of fixing it. Let me present you with an actual Lurker, that Zerg players asked for since WoL:
- 140 HP down from 200.
- 20% movement speed increase.
- 7 range down from 9.
- 2 supply cost down from 3.
- 28(+3) damage up from 20(+2) + 10(+1) vs armored.
Hp and range reduction helps making ZvP fair.
Movement speed increase makes it better at engaging the enemy, leading to more action, which is always a good thing.
Supply cost reduction makes it better at defending.
28 damage instead of 20+10 armored helps it against Bio (Marines die in 2 shots instead of 3, which is a big deal), has a minimum impact on ZvP (Zealots are shred to pieces anyway as they need to get into melee range, only Adepts are slightly affected, both going down in 6 shots instead of 8), and a minimum impact of ZvZ (Lings and Banelings still die in 2 shots, only Hydralisks die in 3 instead of 4.
This version of Lurker, including changes to Lurker Den, would even suit your flawed agenda (sarcasm) of...
Worker harassment, micro:
When trying out this change, we determined that reducing the workers needed per base isn’t good for the game because many of the coolest moments in StarCraft II come from worker harassment. With fewer workers, it was just too easy to rebuild after taking economic damage, making these moments less meaningful.
I agree with you. And I bet most of the community will agree with me. Worker harassment is in fact cool. The premise is sound, but again, the execution is poor.
This is what I consider a cool worker harassment/harassment in general:
This is what I don't:
I also tried to find some cool Mutalisk harassment moment on Youtube. Couldn't find any.
You know what the difference is between those two comparisons?
One requires not only to macro behind it, but also to micro you harass units.
Give an average player those Vultures and he will lose them to Zerglings.
Give him a Reaver, and he won't be able to kill more then one Tank.
Give him Mutalisks, and he won't kill more then 10 SCVs or Marines without losing them all.
Not to mention macro behind it.
Give me the Oracle and I will do the exact same thing as in the video.
Give me those Hellbats and I will micro the Dropship as in the video.
I most likely won't be able to macro behind it like the players shown. But the micro part required to perform those worker kills is on a 10-12 year old Silver or even Bronze level.
Micro is not adding another ability to the unit and making players press the button every 5-10 seconds to micro. Micro is an constant action of unit movement, mouse clicking, precision, and timing. It is giving us a unit that performs its basic role with minimal effort (so not like current Disruptor), but can do amazing things in good hands.
Giving Mutalisks fast regeneration is not micro.
Giving Medivacs a boost ability is not micro.
Giving us units that kills entire mineral line with no control in 5 seconds, is again, not micro.
There are things about the game engine that prevent this kind of micro, like moving shot. It should be in the game since day 1. Since the beta of WoL.
The one we got is clunky and has a low skill ceiling. It is also less exciting to the viewers.
You had 5 years to get this shit together, + however long have SC2 been in development. You failed hard to recreate the micro potential of units in the successor to the game which started it all.
There is more fun in controlling the unit to the best of your ability, and not in mindlessly activating a spell like Guardian Shield or Immortal's Barrier of old.
Recently, a couple of Korean pro's retired. Guess which game are they streaming or talking about, and having more fun with? Hint: It's not SC2. I agree with you. And I bet most of the community will agree with me. Worker harassment is in fact cool. The premise is sound, but again, the execution is poor.This is what I consider a cool worker harassment/harassment in general:This is what I don't:I also tried to find some cool Mutalisk harassment moment on Youtube. Couldn't find any.You know what the difference is between those two comparisons?One requires not only to macro behind it, but also to micro you harass units.Give an average player those Vultures and he will lose them to Zerglings.Give him a Reaver, and he won't be able to kill more then one Tank.Give him Mutalisks, and he won't kill more then 10 SCVs or Marines without losing them all.Not to mention macro behind it.Give me the Oracle and I will do the exact same thing as in the video.Give me those Hellbats and I will micro the Dropship as in the video.I most likely won't be able to macro behind it like the players shown. But the micro part required to perform those worker kills is on a 10-12 year old Silver or even Bronze level.Micro is not adding another ability to the unit and making players press the button every 5-10 seconds to micro. Micro is an constant action of unit movement, mouse clicking, precision, and timing. It is giving us a unit that performs its basic role with minimal effort (so not like current Disruptor), but can do amazing things in good hands.Giving Mutalisks fast regeneration is not micro.Giving Medivacs a boost ability is not micro.Giving us units that kills entire mineral line with no control in 5 seconds, is again, not micro.There are things about the game engine that prevent this kind of micro, like moving shot. It should be in the game since day 1. Since the beta of WoL.The one we got is clunky and has a low skill ceiling. It is also less exciting to the viewers.You had 5 years to get this shit together, + however long have SC2 been in development. You failed hard to recreate the micro potential of units in the successor to the game which started it all.There is more fun in controlling the unit to the best of your ability, and not in mindlessly activating a spell like Guardian Shield or Immortal's Barrier of old.Recently, a couple of Korean pro's retired. Guess which game are they streaming or talking about, and having more fun with? Hint: It's not SC2.
The battle of Korhal – air domination:
Note that this is written from Zerg point of view. While keeping this in mind, don't disregard whatever I'm saying just because of it.
Liberator is a strange beast just like the Lurker. It is a 150/150 3 supply unit, that can be reactored (why on earth, is anyone's guess). It kills all air play in the mid game. It can harass in the early game. It is great for defending and sieging in the late game.
Is Liberator imbalanced then?
Yes and no.
It is just fine with the current Parasitic Bomb. But without it, there is no way for Zerg to contest the air.
Vikings counter Corruptors. Even Liberators in large numbers (8+) counter great numbers of Corruptors. Even if they didn't, Zerg would still be left with a flying supply, incapable of fighting the ground army, after the air battle is finished. Marines/Thors can also help Liberators in fight. And after the dust settles, Liberator can still attack ground.
You may say “don't Terran get there!”. This can be turned around to “don't let Zerg get to 8 armor Ultralisks or Vipers”.
This is a stupid counter argument, so lets stop using it. It's childlish.
Liberator nullifies Mutalisks completely. They counter them so hard it's not even funny. Corruptors are not that good either for their job, as they are slower, unable to prevent drop play, and overcommitting to it leaves you weak on the ground.
Phoenix openings in ZvP are also problematic. If Zerg doesn't choose to all-in with Ravagers, or Nydus, and decides to go for macro play, Phoenixes coupled with Pylon Overcharge can keep the Zerg unable to attack at all.
Queens and Hydralisks are easy pickings. 2 Spores will not save drones from dying to 6-8 Phoenixes killing 5-10 drones in one go.
Zerg has to commit a large amount of larva to build Spore Crawlers around his base, falling behind in economy. Anti-air is non-viable.
- Queens don't have enough dps.
- Spores don't have enough dps.
- Hydralisks can be countered by Phoenixes.
- Mutalisks are countered by Phoenixes.
- Corruptors are too slow to catch up and protect your bases.
What I propose, is a solution to those problems. Hear me out.
Nerf Parasitic Bomb as I said earlier. Make it non-stacking, or unable to finish off the units, or both. You can even increase the damage of the spell, as it will all be balanced around slower damage output, giving you much more time to micro and split your units.
Then, either increase Corruptor speed either to 5, or match it with Liberator's speed.
Or, increase it's armor by 1, to the total of 3, making them take 33% less damage from Phoenixes, and 20% less from Liberators.
Maybe even +1 armor, and +0.5 speed increase.
If not, give us Scourges back. There is an easy way of making them not a-move, but skill based unit – make their damage to be applied over period of 0.5 second (damage over time), allowing overkill to occur.
Creep dynamic:
There is this misconception, that creep spreading and creep clearing contributes to more action. It does in a way, but Terran scanning and killing one or two Creep Tumors can be called action no more then watching paint dry.
Creep prevents other races from engaging on it, therefore either you wait for detection, or wait till your force is big enough that extra speed of the Zerg units is no longer relevant.
Zerg on the other hand will hold back and wait for the enemy to get on the Creep to rip more benefits.
This waiting in both cases holds back the action instead of promoting it.
Creep being spread is already beneficial, as it provides vision and allow you to build structures on it.
What I believe would be a better solution, is to remove all speed bonuses for units on creep, apart from Queen and Crawlers. Instead, in case of the slowest/most affected units, just give them back some of the speed in their speed upgrades, or add to the base speed. Some examples I have in mind:
- Hydralisk: 3.15 off creep (+0.75 upgrade), 4.75 on creep. Changed to 3.3 off creep (+0.825 upgrade), 3.5 and 4.325 on creep (creep provides only +0.2 speed increase with and without upgrade).
- Zergling: 4.13 (+2.45 with upgrade) off creep and 5.37 (+3.18 with upgrade) on creep becomes 4.7 (+2.82 with upgrade) off creep and +0.2 on creep.
Is it too much balancing? I agree it is too late for that. But not if you thought about it and had this kind of mechanic since WoL beta.
Baneling/Marine and soft/hard counters:
Banelings suck from design perspective. But they are also amazing from design perspective, as it is a hard-counter to a unit that is its own hard-counter. This will be split into two sections. One about the baneling as a design, and second purerly from a counter system standpoint.
Problem with the Baneling is not that they are as good as you are. When it comes to higher levels of play, Banelings feel underpowered. However, in lower leagues they obliterate the Bio composition.
They are to easy to play effectively, but hard to play against if you lack the skill.
You, as a T, look away for a second, and your army is gone to an a-move.
They also have a low skill ceiling.
You, as a T, look and you have a moment of perfect micro and kill Zergs army with Banelings doing minimum damage – no amount of micro on the Zerg part is going to change anything.
With Banelings, it is just a numbers game – if there is enough banelings, they will kill all Marines even with great splits, and there is nothing a Terran player can do. If there isn't enough, they will die before reaching Bio ball and there is nothing that Zerg player can do to increase damage.
You either have enough of them, or not. No amount of fancy micro will make your banelings better past the ceirtain threshold.
Also, the design is just bad in itself. Lets say you move out as T and there is a ling bane ball. You attack, micro, kill all lings, kill all banelings because you micro'ed well and there wasn't many of them. Now there are no more banelings for you to worry. However, if you take bad engagement, you will kill all lings, but banelings will kill your army because of their numbers. But you know what? You don't have to worry about the banelings no more – they're all dead as well.
The only way for Zerg to win an army battle is to sacrifice an army, and then rebuild it – isn't that stupid, that Zerg are forced to use banelings because of the lack of alternatives? That even if Zerg has better macro, he has no units to attack with after a battle?
From this point of view, BW Lurker is far superior. You a-move like a dork and sacrifice you Marines to banelings – there are no more banelings for you to worry about.
You a-move like a dork and sacrifice your Marines to Lurkers – Lurkers are still there waiting for you.
My intent with this is not to highlight any kind of imbalance – but a design.
Now then, let's move on to the counter system.
- What is the counter to Marines? Banelings.
- What is the counter to Banelings? More Marines.
It seems stupid at first. But lets examine this closer – on the highest level of play, where both players are closely matched in both micro and macro, Baneling vs Marine is one of the best and easiest to understand example of micro in SC2.
Both units hard counter each other. And because of it, their interaction boils down to micro alone (although most of it depends on Terran micro).
Other hard counters in game are not as interesting – you really can't micro Zerglings well against Hellbats, for example. Fancy micro won't change the outcome, because Zerglings don't counter Hellbats.
Roaches with no control will die to Hellbats. However, with control they counter Hellbats hard. This is a soft-counter interaction, which is great to watch as it showcases micro of both parties.
Another example, from different game – Mutalisk and Scourge. Scourges hard counter Mutalisks, but Mutalisks with control hard counter Scourge. And guess what – again, it is interesting to watch.
And another one from BW: Hydralisk and High Templar. High Templar can decimate 12 Hydralisks with a single storm. But Hydralisks can pick off a High Templar from the Protoss ball. It creates interesting interaction.
It's not about hard-counter beating its hard-counter, it can be a soft-counter beating its soft-counter.
But those counter interactions are way more interesting, then one dimensional units of SC2. Most of the time, it is a hard-counter vs no counter.
Pheonix vs Mutalisk.
Roach vs Hellion
Adept vs Marine
Liberator vs Mutalisk
Void Ray vs Corruptor
Viper vs Liberator/Void Ray/Mutalisk/etc.
Immortal vs Tank
Marauder vs Stalker
Marauder vs Zealot
Maurader vs armored Adept
Oops, sorry, I went too far. But you get what I'm saying. There is not enough of interactions where both units counter each other, and it all boils down to who has got better control.
Instead, there is always one unit that counters the other one.
Fixing some spellcasters:
Ravens, Infestors – those are the units that have been nerfed into oblivion, and I haven't seen people using them.
Raven? I haven't seen one, not even for detection.
Infestors? Rarerly, but not much.
Here are some examples of fixing the Infestor:
- Fungal Growth no longer immobilizes units – instead, it slows down their movement by 50%.
- Fungal Growth no longer does damage over time – instead, it slows down rate of fire of enemy units by 20% (non-stackable ofc) or nullifies any attack speed upgrades.
- Fungal Growth duration increased from 3 seconds to 10.
- Fungal Growth projectile is 200% faster.
- Neural Parasite range down from 9 to 8. Can be casted while burrowed.
- Infested Terran off creep speed increased by 50%.
Now the explanation. The reason why FG is broken is purerly because of the immobilization effect. You nerfed it by making it a relatively slow moving projectile. However, this creates an situation that is bad fro the design perspective: you need a large amount of Infestors or energy to guarantee accurate hits with the ability. Casters should be strong in low numbers, not require high numbers to function.
High Templar in BW was scary. Now it is merely a shadow of former self. You can see now how Protoss has to rely on gimmicks and all-ins to win, as Gateway units are not strong enough on their own.
You done the same thing with Infestor – instead of tackling the issue, you masked it.
Making it more reliable by faster projectile and increasing duration means you need lower amounts of Infestors to be effective, and it prevents mass Infestor tactics because of lack of stacking. At the same time, slow instead of immobilization gives opposing player an ability to micro at all.
Change to Neural Parasite makes it actually usable (this is not necessary, but I think it could be good for the game). Since Collosus or Thor cannot be controlled, it is only fair to give the ability some use. Imagine parasiting Observers and other units in ZvP to wear down Protoss army, without actual engagement. Harassing the Deathball, available for the first time in LotV.
Infested Terrans speed increase is only a small buff to otherwise a bad unit.
More detailed and in-depth explanation is in my previous thread, along with a poll for everyone to see. Link in the Introduction section.
Yes, we want Fungal to work just like Ensnare from BW, or at least making FG slow, instead of immobilize.
Raven:
It has been nerfed too severely.
- First of all, the Seeker Missile should not be cancelled if the unit leaves the range – this one, simple change will make Ravens actually contribute to something.
- Another thing is, Raven is a very fragile unit for its cost. Increasing it's speed by 20% and giving it extra 30-40 Hp would do wonders.
- Seeker Missile should also cost less. Reduction from 125 to 100 would be a good start.
Go on Blizzard. Fix those two casters. It is simple. Introduction: + Show Spoiler + Parasitic Bomb: + Show Spoiler + 8 Armor Ultralisk and forcing Terran to move on from Bio: + Show Spoiler + Disruptor, PvP and PvX: + Show Spoiler + Battle Cruiser: + Show Spoiler + Carrier: + Show Spoiler + Adept and TvP: + Show Spoiler + The Thor and misunderstanding of what the Mech is: + Show Spoiler + High Templar, Gateway based PvX: + Show Spoiler + Getting rid of the band-aid of Pylon Overcharge + Show Spoiler + Harass for all? Nope, you must all-in: + Show Spoiler + The Lurker: + Show Spoiler + Worker harassment, micro: + Show Spoiler + The battle of Korhal – air domination: + Show Spoiler + Creep dynamic: + Show Spoiler + Baneling/Marine and soft/hard counters: + Show Spoiler + Fixing some spellcasters: + Show Spoiler +Today I learned a valuable lesson about art. I'm not sure what it was.Lookit all the pretty colors.To be a little more specific about the reason for this piece, it was primarily born out of my continuing slow march towards realism. The focus in this case was on color of illumination. The most notable sources (ignoring direct sunlight) are the greenish light from the grass and the bluish white from the sky, though there are subtler ones, like the green and indigo from Celestia's hair affecting her face and neck. This is all stuff that I know and have known happens for a long time, but haven't really made a real effort to apply to a scene. I think for that purpose, this came out well.I'm not sure what I think of the composition of the piece as a whole though. In my quest for increasing contrast I've started using quite a lot of darkness in recent pieces, and this may be a swing too far in the other direction, with barely any really dark values. It was partly inspired by seeing the crazily saturated but still eerily accurate color palettesuses in his works. I don't think I quite hit the mark, but like I said in the original, very short description, I do think I learned some things. I also had quite a bit of trouble with Celestia's face, oddly enough. You'd think I'd have it down by now, having drawn so much of it, but I originally sketched a much more vertical angle, in a way that I've since determined was probably quite wrong, and ended up redoing most of the face several times, and as a result I can't really tell if it's right anymore.Overall, I like a lot of what got put down here, but I think much of it may still be too subtle, and also lacks the dynamism and motion that I've been pushing, though it does lend this piece a more serene feel.You don’t want to spend $100 more to pay upfront for the latest iPhone models? Fine, we wont sell you the iPhone. How about them apples?
That’s essentially the stance Best Buy has taken in the wake of consumer backlash from news that the company was charging consumers more to buy the phone upfront instead of through an installment plan. Bloomberg first reported earlier today that the company has decided to only sell the iPhone X and iPhone 8 with installment plans.
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When Best Buy began offering pre-order of the iPhone X last week, it was asking $100 more for customers who didn’t want installment debt. The Apple store allowed customers to buy the phone upfront without paying the extra $100. The iPhone X with 64GB on the Apple store or through the Best Buy installment plan cost $999. However, to buy that same phone upfront at Best Buy, it cost $1,099. For the iPhone X 265 GB, the price difference was $1,149 and $1,249.
Best Buy has also been selling the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 plus for $100 more than its normal retail price, for those who paid for it all at once.
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The day the iPhone X was made available for pre-order, a Best Buy spokesperson explained the company charged more for upfront pricing because “Flexibility has a cost.”
“Sometimes customers aren’t able to purchase phones at other locations because their desired plan or carrier makes them ineligible,” the spokesperson told Gizmodo. “That’s not the case at Best Buy, as our prices reflect the fact that no matter their desired plan or carrier, or whether a customer is on a business or personal plan, they are able to get a phone the way they want at Best Buy.”
That explanation for the pricing wasn’t enough to keep customers from complaining, and now Best Buy has decided to only sell the phone to customers who will pay for the device with a monthly installment plan.
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Best Buy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its decision to no longer provide upfront sales of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, but a spokesperson told Bloomberg: “Although there was clearly demand for the un-activated iPhone X, selling it that way cost more money, causing some confusion with our customers and noise in the media... That’s why we decided a few days ago to only sell the phone the traditional way, through installment billing plans.”
That is a slightly more frank explanation of the pricing difference: Best Buy gets paid by carriers when the company sells phones that are set up through those carriers. If customers buy the phones upfront without a carrier attached, then Best Buy misses out on that money from the carriers.
[Bloomberg]Image copyright PA Image caption Dot Scot Registry said the new.scot addresses could be available in the summer
An internet domain for Scotland could be available in time for this year's Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
Not-for-profit company Dot Scot Registry (DSR) has announced that it has agreed terms with international regulators to operate a new.scot domain.
The domain had not been expected to be available until early 2015.
The news means.scot addresses, for both website and email use, could be available to buy this summer.
DSR said it had "formally agreed terms" with the international regulatory authority, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), to operate the new Top Level Domain (gTLD).
It added: "This means.scot should be available to buy this summer.
"A timetable and details of costs will be announced soon."
The Scottish government welcomed the development, saying it had actively supported DSR in the application process.
'Long overdue'
First Minister Alex Salmond said: "2014 is an exciting year for Scotland, and I'm delighted that this distinct online identity for the nation, and all who take an interest in Scotland, will become available this summer.
"The.scot domain is long overdue in this digital age, and the worldwide family of Scots who have been waiting patiently since it was first proposed, will soon be able to have this marvellously expressive domain as their online identity of choice."
Gavin McCutcheon, director of Dot Scot Registry, said: "Scotland and Scottishness conveys a whole range of positive connotations, which could not really be portrayed on the web before, but with a.scot domain there will be a new option anyone involved in Scottish business, arts and culture and others to identify themselves more clearly as Scottish to the online world.
"We aim to make.scot domains as affordable as possible and our not-for-profit structure means we will be able to do so.
"We hope that.scot will become the first choice for the worldwide family of Scots, allowing them to demonstrate for the first time their affinity to Scotland and for Scottish societies and organisations wherever they are in the world to make.scot their home on the internet."Sarah Huckabee Sanders: James Comey Wrote the Document He Leaked on an FBI Computer, and Therefore Broke the Law About Leaking Official FBI Documents Hit 'em. The White House on Wednesday laid out its most detailed case yet for why the Department of Justice should consider prosecuting former FBI director James Comey, calling it a clear violation of federal law to leak FBI memos to the press like Comey allegedly did. Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, pointed to Comey's acknowledgement during a June congressional hearing that he authorized the leaking of a memo about his conversations with the president to The New York Times. "The memos that Comey leaked were created on a FBI computer while he was the director," Sanders said during Wednesday�s briefing. "He claims they were private property. They clearly follow the protocol of an official FBI document." Sanders added, "Leaking FBI memos on a sensitive case, regardless of classification, violates federal laws including the Privacy Act, standard FBI employee agreement and non-disclosure agreement all personnel must sign. I think that's pretty clean and clear that that would be a violation.� Apparently she hasn't heard of the Special Double Standard that Smart Set Conservatives have so heartily embraced, whereas we are forced to live with the punishments of The Rules that liberals make up, but we're also supposed to say "We're better than that" when it comes to applying the rules to liberals. Apparently she hasn't heard of the Special Double Standard that Smart Set Conservatives have so heartily embraced, whereas we are forced to live with the punishments of The Rules that liberals make up, but we're also supposed to say "We're better than that" when it comes to applying the rules to liberals. It's worked out monstrously well for us so far. So let's just keep preening, repeating Obama's catchphrase "That's not who we are" as we while away the years in political reeducation camps.
It's worked out monstrously well for us so far. So let's just keep preening, repeating Obama's catchphrase "That's not who we are" as we while away the years in political reeducation camps. Posted by: Ace at 05:30 PM
MuNuvians MeeNuvians Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest Hitjobs News/ChatStandard and Poor's says federal budget cuts may have state ratings impact
Updated
The Commonwealth may not have a debt problem after this week's budget, but now the states do.
The Federal Government received plaudits from all three major ratings agencies for its moves to reduce welfare payments and other government spending.
Fitch says Australia is now not only AAA-rated by all three major agencies, but also looks better than almost any of its top rated peers.
"The 2014-2015 Australian Commonwealth budget reinforces the strong public finances and a credible policy framework, confirming the country is well-positioned relative to other AAA-rated sovereigns," the agency noted in a press release.
"It is positive for Australia's long-term sovereign risk profile that the planned fiscal consolidation will be driven primarily by structural reforms to spending."
However, one of the key spending cuts - backing out of agreements struck between the previous Labor government and the states to boost hospital and school funding - is likely to be a ratings negative for Australia's state governments.
As the federal budget currently stands, the states are going to have to find an extra $80 billion over 10 years to fund healthcare and school education, or cut back on their services.
While the Commonwealth funding cuts will not start to hit until 2017, Queensland premier Campbell Newman says states will need to start planning for them now.
"We have to be scrutinised by the ratings agencies and they're quite rightly going to be asking, 'what happens in three years time?'" he said.
"And they will ask that question of Tim Nicholls and Campbell Newman, and indeed my team, not in three years time, they'll be asking that question over coming weeks and months - and they will want an answer."
So what answer will the ratings agencies want?
The ABC asked Standard and Poor's analyst Anna Hughes, who rates the credit risk of Australia's state governments.
"It would definitely put pressure on the states' budget position, they would need to have a look at service delivery, and what services that they continue to provide to constituents within their state," she said.
While state governments could also consider raising their own taxes, Ms Hughes says they do not have many attractive options that could raise the required revenue.
"They don't have as many levers to pull as the Federal Government does have, given that they actually get 50 per cent of their revenues from the Commonwealth through the GST and specific purpose payments," she added.
However, an agreement between the states and Commonwealth to increase the GST would be looked upon favourably by ratings agencies.
"It's a lot less volatile than some of the transaction taxes that the states themselves rely upon, so there's definitely some fiscal reasons for increasing the GST," Ms Hughes explained.
More debt would threaten ratings
One option that would not be looked upon favourably is extra borrowing by the states in order to fund their day-to-day services.
"If a state government was actually needing to fund its operating position by increasing debt then that would put significant pressure on the credit rating," the S&P analyst warned.
Perhaps ironically, Ms Hughes says it is the states with the best credit ratings that have the most to lose, with New South Wales already on a knife edge clinging to its cherished AAA debt rating.
"Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania are AA+ at the moment, and there's a lot more room to move within a AA+ rating than there is within a AAA," she said.
"With the AAA states, New South Wales is on a negative outlook and has some significant infrastructure issues that it's working through.
"While Victoria is in a better position, it still has a fine balance that they need to maintain as well."
However, the states are likely to hang onto their prized ratings, which make borrowing cheaper, for at least a while longer.
Not only do the Federal Government's health and education funding cuts take another three years to start kicking in, the state premiers - mostly Liberal - are kicking down the doors in Canberra to have the cuts reversed.
Anna Hughes says it is |
be ice-breaker tanker support, assistance in mooring and loading, rescue operations, vessel towing, firefighting, and oil-spill response.” Moscow says that it economy which consists mostly of exporting oil, arms and some grain should catch up with the rest of the developed world in ten years. 5. Nigeria There were no new pipeline attacks last week so we can presume that oil production is somewhere in the range of 1.5-2 million b/d until further notice. Nigerian President Buhari told the Nigerian Academy of Engineering that he was impressed by the technical sophistication of the insurgents’ attacks on Nigeria’s oil infrastructure – doing the most damage with the smallest amounts of explosive in just the right places. Buhari suspects that the rebels are getting help from professionals inside the oil industry who understand the vulnerabilities of the oil transport system. Being exempt from the OPEC production cuts, Nigeria is hoping that higher oil prices will increase its revenues in the coming year. The Nigerian cabinet has approved a 20 percent increase in government spending for 2017 on expectations of better times. 6. Venezuela The economy in Venezuela is melting down before our eyes as the value of the bolivar fell 65 percent last month. On Friday the black market of the bolivar was down to 4400 to the US dollar. There are no longer enough banknotes in circulation to keep the economy functioning, but larger denomination currency, up to 20,000 bolivar notes (worth 4-5 dollars), will be issued later this month. With daily withdrawals from banks limited to 10,000 bolivars or a little over $2, there is little left of the economy. Government imposed price caps at food stores keep mass starvation from taking place as the Army guards and controls food distribution. Caracas has been suspended from the regional South American economic group, Mercosur, for failure to maintain democratic principles. Venezuelan oil exports seem likely to fall much lower if not disappear completely as the country edges toward total societal collapse. 7. The Briefs Decommission spending for aging offshore oil and gas assets is on track to increase dramatically from $2.4 billion in 2015 to $13 billion each year by 2040, according to an IHS Markit study. During the next five years, more than 600 projects are expected to be decommissioned in the UK, Norway, the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and Australia. (12/3) Brent pricing: Oil pricing agency Platts is considering the first major overhaul in nearly a decade of its benchmark dated Brent, which is used for most of the world’s crude trade. It may add Norwegian light sweet Troll crude to the basket of oil flows it uses to set the price of dated Brent. (12/3) In Norway, consent by regulatory authorities has been given to energy company Statoil to start drilling an appraisal well in the Johan Sverdrup oil field in the North Sea. Drilling is scheduled to start in December and should last 30 days. The field is under development and production is planned to start in 2019. Developed over a series of phases, operator Statoil said the Johan Sverdrup oil field should account for up to 25 percent of total Norwegian petroleum production once at peak capacity. (11/29) Royal Dutch Shell expects to pump out all the fossil fuel reserves listed on its balance sheet, its chief executive said, dismissing concerns that production limits in the wake of the Paris climate accord could hit the energy giant’s valuation by creating “stranded reserves.” (11/28) Due to an anticipated peak in demand for oil, the Hungarian company MOL is rethinking its traditional focus on fuel supply and shifting investment to petrochemicals, the key ingredient of everyday plastic products and a sector where MOL believes growth will continue even when its fuel business flattens. (11/28) Offshore Israel, Delek Drilling, Texas-based Noble Energy, Israel’s Avner Oil and Ratio Oil, a collective working to exploit the Leviathan natural gas field in the Mediterranean Sea, said they reached a $2 billion agreement with Dalia, the largest private power plant in Israel, to supply fuel for up to 20 years once production begins. (12/2) Vietnam is seeking about $1.2 billion in overseas loans for its only oil refinery before a share sale in 2017 to increase output and meet demand in one of Southeast Asia’s fastest growing economies. When completed in 2021, the expanded Dung Quat Refinery will be able to meet half of Vietnam’s fuel needs, rising from about one-third now with its current capacity of 148,000 b/d. Vietnam’s demand for petroleum products is increasing, and imports of such goods rose 18.7 percent during 2015. (12/2) Indonesia has suspended its membership in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) less than a year after rejoining the cartel, as the net oil importer said it could not agree to the group’s production cuts. OPEC had proposed Indonesia cut oil production by about 37,000 b/d, or about 5 percent of its output. (12/2) Indonesia’s withdrawal from OPEC membership is unlikely to affect the country’s oil supply security, given the limited benefits seen since it rejoined the group on January 1 this year. The net importer of crude oil had expected OPEC membership re-activation as a step towards energy security but saw little benefit in terms of price and supply from other group members. (12/1) In Algeria, the Energy Minister’s shuttle diplomacy between Tehran, Moscow and Vienna before OPEC’s meeting on Wednesday underlines the North African nation’s desperation for a deal. The oil-market rout has seen Algeria burn through cash set aside during the boom years to plug a widening budget deficit. (11/29) Offshore Senegal, oil companies working to exploit frontier reserves are working to submit field development plans as quickly as possible. Africa-focused FAR Ltd. said the SNE offshore field, which could hold up to 641 million barrels of oil, is in the development planning stage. (12/2) African pipeline: The work towards the construction of a crude oil pipeline between Uganda and Tanzania is officially on. To be known as East African Crude Oil Pipeline, the project – which will transport Ugandan crude to Tanga Port in Tanzania – will be built jointly by a French oil giant Total, the UK-based Tullow Oil and Chinese state-owned oil company Cnooc. (12/2) Mexico is preparing to auction rights to drill in the oil-rich deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, considered the crown jewel of the country’s energy industry, which only opened to foreign investment three years ago. Monday’s auction is seen as the first major test of Mexico’s ability to work with the world’s biggest players. (12/3) In Mexico, Chevron Corp. has joined forces with Petroleos Mexicanos and Japan’s Inpex Corp. to bid this week for the right to explore for oil and natural gas, the first time the state-owned operator will partner with private companies to develop crude in the Gulf of Mexico. Seven groups and eight individual bidders have been qualified to participate in the Dec. 5 auctions that include the Trion field joint-venture with Pemex and other ten deepwater blocks. (11/29) The US oil rig count grew by three in the week of Dec. 2 to 477, said Baker Hughes. That stretches the gains to 161 rigs added over the course of seven consecutive months from the low of 316 hit last spring. That’s still a far cry from the height of the boom—1,609 oil rigs active during early October 2014. Rigs in the Permian now stand at 235—which is 18 rigs more than this time last year—and has the distinction of being the only basin other than Cana Woodford to have more rigs in production now than a year ago. (12/3) US crude oil production dropped by 1.9 percent to 8.580 million b/d in September from 8.747 million b/d in August, the US EIA said in a report Wednesday. Last year in September, US crude oil output stood at 9.423 million b/d. (12/2) The Railroad Commission of Texas reported preliminary production of crude oil averaged 2.38 million barrels per day in September, less than 1 percent lower than the previous month and 1.6 percent lower than for September 2015. Texas is the No. 1 oil producer in the US and, over the past 12 months, produced just under 1 billion barrels of crude oil. (11/30) US oil demand in September rose by 2.3 percent, or 446,000 b/d, from a year ago to 19.86 million b/d, according to the EIA. Demand growth was led once again by gasoline, which rose by 2.2 percent from a year ago to 9.49 million b/d in September. Gasoline demand surged over the summer, including record numbers in June. Despite steady demand, U.S. refiners are still battling weak margins due to stubbornly high gasoline inventories built up during the boom years of 2014 and 2015. (12/1) Bankruptcy Update: As the oil and gas industry downturn cycles into 2017, dozens of exploration and production (E&P) companies remain vulnerable to market whims that threaten bankruptcy. Since January 2015, more than 100 North American exploration and production companies have filed for bankruptcy, according to the Haynes & Boone law firm. As of Oct. 19, those bankruptcies and other restructuring arrangements involved almost $70 billion in cumulative secured and unsecured debt. (12/1) BP has approved a $9-billion investment in its Mad Dog project in the Gulf of Mexico, its first major new platform in the region since a 2010 explosion at its Macondo well led to the worst offshore disaster in U.S. history. The decision shows confidence that the company can safely operate in the region and is a bet that oil produced in the deepwater offshore can compete with rival on-shore production. (12/2) Delays to the Dakota Access Pipeline have added millions of dollars to Energy Transfer Partners’ construction tab – but even if the line is approved, the freezing temperatures will bring their own challenges to finishing the drilling process. Frigid weather makes some aspects of pipeline construction more difficult, though not impossible. The majority of the construction on the 1,100-mile (1,770 km) line is already complete. (12/2) US pipeline exports of natural gas continued to grow in 2016, and they have doubled since 2009. Almost all of this growth is attributable to increasing exports to Mexico, which have accounted for more than half of all US natural gas exports since April 2015. U.S. daily pipeline exports to Mexico through August 2016 are at a yearly average of 3.6 Bcf/d, 25% above the year-ago level and 85% above the five-year (2011–15) average level. (11/30) The U.S. has become a net exporter of natural gas, further evidence of how the domestic oil and gas boom is reshaping the global energy business. The US has exported an average of 7.4 billion cubic feet a day of gas in November, more than the 7 billion cubic feet a day it has imported, Platts reported. It has been nearly 60 years since the US last shipped out more natural gas than it brought in annually. (11/29) LNG exports: The US Dept. of Energy on Thursday granted authorization for a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal in Lake Charles, La., to export LNG to countries with which the United States has not entered into a free trade agreement (non-FTA approval). (12/2) The US government said it was revising how it plans for oil and gas drilling, and other resource activity so more of the focus will eventually be put at the front-end. The Bureau of Land Management published an updated rule on how it plans activities on public lands. (12/3) State budgets: Low oil, natural gas, and coal prices will continue to put downward fiscal pressure on states that rely on those resources to fund their budgets, rating agency Fitch said on Thursday. While OPEC’s agreement to implement production quotas boosted oil prices this week, Fitch’s long-term base case price forecast remains $45 a barrel in 2017, $55 a barrel in 2018 and $65 a barrel in 2019. (12/2) Oilfield services company Baker Hughes said it formed a business venture with Goldman Sachs and others that would focus on North American hydraulic fracturing. Baker Hughes will own a 46.7 percent stake in an entity created with CSL Capital Management and Goldman Sachs that includes services tied to hydraulic fracturing operations in the United States and Canada. The new company will operate under the brand of BJ Services with headquarters in Tomball, Texas. (12/1) Delta Air Lines is preparing to market gasoline from a refinery it owns outside Philadelphia, signaling a shift in strategy for managing the plant as a commercial refiner rather than a dedicated jet fuel supplier. Delta became the first airline to own a refinery when it bought the shuttered plant in 2012, hoping to turn the facility into its own jet fuel supplier and capitalize on cheap oil supplies from a boom in U.S. shale output. (12/3) Energy mogul Harold Hamm will not be taking President-Elect Trump up on his offer to name him Energy Secretary. Hamm serves as the CEO of Continental Resources, which is clearly a full-time gig when he’s not busy raking in billions on the back of OPEC deals. (12/2) Harold Hamm, the wealthiest energy billionaire in the U.S., became $3 billion richer Wednesday morning when shares of his Continental Resources Inc. rallied as high as $10.58 a share during morning trading in New York, a 22 percent increase. Hamm is the world’s 66th richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $13.8 billion. (12/1) Biofuels: The Obama administration signed its final plan for renewable fuel use in the United States last week, leaving an oil industry reeling from the most aggressive biofuel targets yet as President-elect Donald Trump takes over. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program, signed into law by President George W. Bush, is one of the country’s most controversial energy policies. It has pitted two of Trump’s support bases against each other: Big Oil and Big Corn. (11/28) Coal conundrum: In northeastern England, a battle is raging between grass roots campaigners and a company intent on digging a new open cast mine as world coal prices soar. A year after Britain closed its last deep coal mine and pledged to phase out coal-fired power generation, the economics of mining have been transformed. Coal prices have risen by well over 100 percent this year to $100 a ton. (11/28) Wind giants: As of the end of 2015, just three manufacturers— General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens—accounted for 55 gigawatts (GW), or 76%, of installed wind generating capacity in the United States. Of the 8.2 GW of total wind capacity installed in 2015, these three companies’ combined share is even greater, representing more than 92% of new capacity. (11/29) A boom in electric vehicles made by the likes of Tesla Motors Inc. could erode as much as 10 percent of global gasoline demand by 2035, according to oil industry consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd. While battery-powered cars and trucks today represent less than 1 percent of total vehicle sales, they are expected to take off after 2025 as governments move to tackle pollution and costs fall. (12/3) The California Air Resources Board released its initial draft plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030—the most ambitious target in North America. The 2030 Target Scoping Plan Discussion Draft builds on the state’s efforts to reach its more immediate goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and outlines the most effective ways to reach the new 2030 goal. (12/3)HOUSTON - Missouri City police are searching for the person responsible for severely injuring a man at a popular watering hole. Jordan Thibodeaux was critically injured Sunday morning at Petrie's Sports Lounge on Highway 6 near Glenn Lake.
"Basically his face is crushed, all the way," said Thibodeaux's mother, Karen. "His nose is obviously broken. He has a fractured neck."
Thibodeaux's mother said her son was jumped in the bathroom near closing time. She said her son never saw his attacker's face.
"They're going to have to rebuild his whole face. We don't even know how many teeth he's missing," said Karen Thibodeaux.
Bar owner Micah Petrie said there was no indication of any problems among patrons that night. Petrie said regular patrons mixed well with members of a youth sports league, who were having a party that night.
Petrie showed KPRC surveillance video from inside the bar the morning Thibodeaux was hurt. While there is no audio on the recordings, Thibodeaux appears to be having a good time at the bar, even giving a high-five to another patron before walking toward the bathroom.
"It hurts my feelings to even think somebody would do something like that," said Petrie.
The video shows one man enter the bathroom. Less than a minute later, another man goes in. Then, 30 seconds after that, Thibodeaux walks in. The video then shows the first man walk out a short time later. About a minute after that the second man walks out.
Several minutes pass before Thibodeaux comes out and sits down. Petrie and another employee try to help him.
"I saw him sitting down over here and he was bloody. His face was bashed in," said Petrie. "He said he didn't know what was going on. He said he got jumped in the bathroom. That's all he could say."
If you know anything about this incident, you are asked to call the Missouri City Police Department or Crimestoppers at (713) 222-TIPS.
Thibodeaux's mother said her son will need several surgeries to repair the damage to his face and neck. The family has set up a GoFundMe account to ask for the public's help with medical expenses.
2016 Click2Houston/KPRC2Najib Razak 1MDB scandal: Malaysian Prime Minister's accounts triggered internal money-laundering alarm
Updated
So much money was pouring so rapidly into the Malaysian Prime Minister's personal bank accounts that it rang internal money-laundering alarms inside AmBank, a major Malaysian institution part-owned by Australia's ANZ.
Key points: PM's personal account held under codename 'Mr X'
Account received more than $US1 billion in two years
Millions of dollars spent on luxury hotels, cars and jewellery
Hundreds of millions of dollars were being wired into Najib Razak's accounts from the Saudi Arabian Government, a mysterious Saudi prince and two shadowy British Virgin Island companies, while the head of a Malaysian state-owned company topped up the Prime Minister's credit card accounts with millions of Malaysian ringgit in cash.
Mr Najib's Platinum Mastercard and Platinum Visa had been overdrawn thanks to a 3,320,670.65 ringgit ($US1,039,369.91) purchase of jewellery in September 2014 — a spending spree described inside AmBank as a "huge volume".
Mr Najib's wife Rosmah Mansor has previously been reported to have purchased a series of luxury items, from diamond jewellery to designer handbags, which appear beyond her husband's $A130,000 official annual salary.
Between opening his account at AmBank on January 13, 2011 and April 10, 2013, Mr Najib received a total of more than $US1 billion — or, more precisely, $US1,050,795,451.58 — including a series of individual deposits that ranged between $US9 million and $US70 million.
Inside the bank, the Malaysian Prime Minister's account was held under the codename "Mr X".
The startling new banking records have been obtained as part of a Four Corners program that aired last night, and which resulted in the arrest of two members of its team, Linton Besser and cameraman Louie Eroglu.
'Highly sensitive' report flags PM's unexplained wealth
The records also show that as well as spending some of the money on hotel accommodation and luxury cars, Mr Najib used the money to fund political affiliates in the run-up to Malaysia's last 2013 elections.
Four Corners has established that Dr Zeti Aziz, the governor of Bank Negara Malaysia, Malaysia's central bank, was repeatedly warned about the Prime Minister's unexplained wealth by senior officials at AmBank.
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Four Corners reporter speaks of his arrest in Malaysia (ABC News)
At one such meeting in September 2012, the ABC has been told Dr Aziz handed back the bank's report, which had been marked "highly sensitive", not wishing for Bank Negara to have a copy on its premises.
When the ABC asked Dr Aziz what action she took when she received these warnings, she said there were limitations on the scope of investigations that Bank Negara could itself conduct, but that it always reported information it received to relevant authorities.
In January, the Malaysian Attorney-General shuttered a corruption probe of the Prime Minister, declaring Mr Najib had no case to answer.
Despite this, Dr Aziz said there remained ongoing investigations.
Asked who was behind the money flowing into Mr Najib's accounts, Dr Aziz said: "I cannot comment on this, it is an ongoing investigation."
Do you know more about this story? Email besser.linton@abc.net.au
'Absolute discretion' over use of 'Gift'
The remittances between 2011 and 2014 seen by Four Corners include payments by the Ministry of Finance in Saudi Arabia of $US49,999,988 on August 19, 2011, and $US29,999,988 on November 29, 2011.
There are also deposits recorded by AmBank as having come from a man named Prince Faisal bin Turkey bin Bandar Alsaud, of Riyadh.
These began on February 24, 2011, and continued into 2012 with $US49,999,965 deposited into Mr Najib's account on April 25, 2012, and another $US24,999,965 deposited on May 23, 2012.
These deposits were sometimes accompanied by letters to Mr Najib from a man described in the letter as "HRH Prince Saud Abdulaziz Al-Saud" which pledged gifts to the Malaysian Prime Minister which ranged from $US100 million on February 1, 2011, to $US800 million on March 1, 2013.
On November 2, 2011, for example, the letter pledged a grant of $US375 million, saying:
"This is merely a token gesture on my part but it is my way of contributing to the development of Islam to the world. "You shall have absolute discretion to determine how the Gift shall be utilised. "This letter is issued as a gesture of good faith and for clarification, I do not expect to receive any personal benefit whether directly or indirectly as a result of the Gift. The Gift should not in any event be construed as an act of corruption since this is against the practice of Islam and I personally do not encourage such practices in any manner whatsoever."
Multi-million-dollar 'donation' returned
There was another major source of funds to Mr Najib that has troubled investigators — a British Virgin Islands-incorporated entity called Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners Ltd, which channelled its deposits via Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore.
The ultimate owner of the company has not been established, but it has been reported the company is associated with Low Taek Jho, known as Jho Low, a playboy financier at the centre of a highly controversial 2009 deal involving Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB.
Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners paid Mr Najib $US69,999,988 on January 3, 2012, $US24,999,998 on March 13, 2012 and another $US24,999,988 on May 23, 2012.
Attempts to contact Mr Low were unsuccessful, but he has denied wrongdoing over the 1MDB deal.
It had previously been revealed by online news site Sarawak Report and the Wall Street Journal that a mystery BVI company called Tanore Finance deposited a total of $US680 million into Mr Najib's accounts in March 2013.
Two months ago Malaysian Attorney-General Mohamed Apandi Ali said $US620 million of this money was a "donation" that had subsequently been returned.
Now the new banking records show Mr Najib also received 4.3 million ringgit in cash top-ups that set off money-laundering alarms inside AmBank.
These were deposited by Nik Faisal Bin Ariff Kamil, the former investment director of 1MDB and chief executive of state-owned company SRC International. The files show he was a signatory to the Prime Minister's account.
In January 2014 he wrote an apologetic letter to an AmBank manager to explain why he had to so hurriedly deposit large volumes of cash into the account, explaining that "there will be occasions when I won't be able to provide necessary transfer authorisations to the account".
Large sums spent on holidays, cars
SRC International has been in the spotlight since it emerged it made a 27 million ringgit payment that also ended up in the personal accounts of Mr Najib.
That payment formed the basis for a criminal charge that was going to be laid against Mr Najib midway through last year, but which was aborted after the Attorney-General was suddenly removed from office.
The bank records also detail how Mr Najib used his new-found wealth. Much of it went to political affiliates in the lead up to Malaysia's last election in May 2013, including party officials, the Liberal Democratic Party and the Sarawak United People's Party, as well as various advertising and media firms.
A company called Solar Shine Sdn Bhd received the largest distribution — 24 million ringgit or $US3.5 million today.
The company has been associated with an entity called 1Malaysia NGO which has run grassroots political campaigns on behalf of Barisan Nasional, the Prime Minister's party.
A sum of 7.5 million ringgit or $US1.9 million went to the Rahah Foundation, which hit the headlines in Malaysia when it donated cows alongside Mr Najib to the Selangor police to be sacrificed for Eid al-Adha, a Muslim ritual feast celebrated each year.
But there are other payments too that may not have had a political purpose.
These include 360,000 ringgit spent with fashion house Jakel Trading, 395,782.40 ringgit at the Shangri-la Hotel Kuala Lumpur, 178,000 ringgit spent with a company called Two One Holidays Malaysia and another 167,959.50 ringgit with Signature Exotic Cars, a dealer that specialises in Audi, Mercedes Benz and Porsche.
The files show Mr Najib directed cheques also to prominent businesspeople, academics and lawyers.
The Malaysian Prime Minister did not respond to written questions from Four Corners.
Topics: corruption, law-crime-and-justice, world-politics, government-and-politics, malaysia
First postedWASHINGTON – With mayor Muriel Bowser running a few minutes late to D.C. United’s incomprehensibly long-awaited stadium groundbreaking, TV broadcaster Dave Johnson took the mic and posed a dangerous question.
“We can wait a few more moments, right?” he asked.
“No!” the crowd replied. Then after some knowing glances, everyone laughed.
Almost an hour later, at 4:01 pm on Feb. 27, 2017, actual shovels finally dug into actual dirt, officially beginning construction on D.C.'s Audi Field. And for a club that has spent almost two decades searching for an upgrade from historic but tiring RFK Stadium, it was catharsis as much as celebration.
“I never let myself think about it, because sometimes you daydream and things don’t get done,” said United co-owner Jason Levien. “I had a sense that it was going to be a process and we were going to grit to the end. And we did that. But I didn’t want to envision specifically what today was going to look like because I wanted to just make sure it happened.”
United had previously explored options in suburban Maryland and Virginia, and even up I-95 in Baltimore. But Levien and Erick Thohir had always worked toward a future inside The District since taking primary control of the club four-and-a-half seasons ago.
Levien always saw the global game the perfect fit for one of the nation’s most global cities, and even suggested that the opening of Audi Field would have ideological and cultural implications.
“So many people from different backgrounds come together to unite around this incredible game and passion for the sport,” he said. “Maybe there’s no better time in our nation’s capital to build a cathedral, a mosque, a house of worship for soccer, for all our fans, for everyone in this community. I think it’s very apropos that we’re doing this here, just a few blocks from the White House, a few blocks from the Capitol.”
United struck a preliminary stadium deal with the D.C. government under Bowser’s administration in September 2015, though there were many procedural hurdles to clear.
A few remain, relative to specific building permits, though Levien expressed great confidence that the stadium could be ready in time for June of next season.
“Because of the site, we’re not building so deeply into the ground, we’re building up,” he explained. “So it’s a little bit more in our control in terms of the timing.”
MLS Commissioner Don Garber has presided over more than a dozen stadium openings since taking the helm of the league in 1999, but he admitted Audi Field was a special one especially given the lengthy pursuit, beginning well over a decade ago with the efforts of former club president Kevin Payne.
“I think every owner, every executive, every player is smiling today,” Garber said. “This is the one I think we wanted most.”
“After years of fits and starts and pseudo-groundbreakings and press conferences,” continued Garber, “to finally sit up there with the mayor and Jason Levien and with Benny [Olsen, DC head coach] and with our new sponsor, to celebrate the new future for soccer in the District really warms my heart. It’s actually a pretty emotional moment.”
So, too, for Olsen, who has been a part of the club since joining as a rookie player in 1998, and who has coached on a budget in recent seasons while the club awaits the opening of its new home.
When the club held a surprise press event to reveal his contract extension in 2014, Olsen even joked with supporters then that he shared their disappointment that the announcement wasn’t a new stadium deal.
“It will be one of the great joys of my life to watch you make Audi Field into one of the best atmospheres in the country,” Olsen told the crowd Monday.
The club is already looking to a future at Audi Field with the signings of Luciano Acosta, Steve Birnbaum and Patrick Mullins. If the new stadium brings even more big signings, Olsen's colleagues around the league may not be as free with their well wishes.
For now, though, Olsen's enjoying them.
“I feel like the whole nation has been rooting for this stadium.” he said. “I can’t tell you how many texts or emails I got today from people around the country congratulating the club and who have just been extremely excited about one of the original clubs to finally have a home of their own.”Cumhuriyet.com.tr Editor-in-Chief Oğuz Güven has appeared for the third time before a judge in the trial brought against him for a post made on Cumhuriyet newspaper’s Twitter account about the death in a traffic accident of Denizli Republic Chief Prosecutor Mustafa Alper. The Republic prosecutor submitted his opinion on Güven, who remained in detention for 32 days having been targeted by Sabah newspaper thanks to the announcement tweet that was corrected in 55 seconds, at the previous session and sought a custodial sentence of between 2 years 9 months and 12 years 9 months for Güven on the counts of “making a terrorist organisation’s propaganda” and “publishing a terrorist organisation’s announcements.”
Güven’s journalist friends and lawyers attended the trial heard at Istanbul Serious Crime Court No 28 to give support to Güven.
I SEEK MY ACQUITTAL
Güven said the following in the statement he made in defence against the prosecution opinion on the merits: “Learned presiding judge and learned members of the bench, 35 years of my life that is nearing sixty years has been spent conducting journalism. I have also spent twenty years in my profession, which I started as a reporter, in a managerial capacity. While being unacquainted with judicial complexes for 35 years apart from covering events there, for the past seven months, apart from being held captive in Silivri along with my other colleagues from Cumhuriyet newspaper, I have been unable to get away from judicial complexes and courts thanks to the investigations and trials initiated into reports that have been made. And the sole reason for this is that we report the truth and oppose those in power. Freedom of thought and expression is indispensable for democracy. If journalists are silent the people’s voice will become inaudible and democracy will also be silent. I wind up this defence of mine against this prosecution opinion by repeating my words. My request of you is, while endeavouring to ensure Turkey’s status as a law-based, democratic and contemporary country and the existence of freedom of thought and expression, not to create a new offence of reading intention. I seek my acquittal in this trial which does not conform to any rule of law or penal article.” Güven’s attorney Tora Pekin said that the charge the prosecutor had filed against Güven was a ludicrous charge.
Following the completion of the defence by lawyers, a recess was taken in the trial for the decision. The decision was made known at 11.32 and Oğuz Güven was sentenced to three years and one month’s imprisonment.
IN DETENTION FOR 32 DAYS
The indictment into Oğuz Güven, who was detained thanks to a tweet in the form, “A truck has mowed down Chief Prosecutor Mustafa Alper, who drafted the first FETO indictment” on Cumhuriyet newspaper’s account, was drafted by Istanbul Republic Chief Prosecution’s Press Office. Güven’s prosecution was called for with a custodial sentence of between two and half years and ten and a half years sought on the counts of “making a terrorist organisation’s propaganda” and “printing and publishing a terrorist organisation’s publications.” Güven remained in detention for 32 days on account of the charges.
DETAINED ON 15 MAY
Oğuz Güven was detained on 15 May by Istanbul Penal Judgship of the Peace No 2 on Istanbul Republic Chief Prosecution’s Press Office’s charges that he had committed the offence of “making a terrorist organisation’s propaganda.” It was asserted in the court order that a tweet in the form, “A truck has mowed down Chief Prosecutor Mustafa Alper, who drafted the first FETO indictment” was posted on Cumhuriyet newspaper’s account, Oğuz Güven had statutory responsibility for checking tweets, and the wording “a truck mowed down” was especially selected so as to create the perception in society of what would befall those who drafted indictments against FETO rather than to sensationalise and emphasise the news. Güven had stated in his defence that he did not post the tweet they had read, this tweet was posted by one of his editors, he was the website’s Editor-in-Chief, he intervened in 55 seconds in any case, they post 200-300 tweets per day, an error occurred here, we corrected it in 55 seconds and no such headline or expression occurs in their reporting.Tony Abbott has made his first comments on wind energy and the Renewable Energy Target as Prime Minister. During an interview with Alan Jones (2GB) PM Abbott had the following to say:
“If you drive down the Federal Highway from Goulburn to Canberra and you look at Lake George, yes there’s an absolute forest of these things on the other side of the lake near Bungendore. I absolutely understand why people are anxious about these things that are sprouting like mushrooms all over the fields of our country. I absolutely understand the concerns that people have. “And I also understand the difficulty because while renewable power is a very good idea at one level, you’ve gotta have backups because when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow. So this is an obvious problem with renewable energy in the absence of much more sophisticated battery technology than we have right now. “We are going to review the Renewable Energy Targets. There was going to be a review anyway next year. We’re taking this review very seriously and one of the things that we’ll be looking at will be the impact of renewable energy on power prices, because not only is the carbon tax adding about 9 per cent to everyone’s power bills and we’re going to get rid of that as quickly as we can, renewable energy targets are also significantly driving up power prices right now.”
The Prime Minister cites two common misperceptions about renewables energy: Firstly, that renewables aren’t up for the job of powering the Australian economy because they’re intermittent. And secondly, that the Renewable Energy Target makes up a significant portion of electricity bills.
Let’s break down these misconceptions for the Prime Minister to assist his government’s energy policy making.
Misconception #1: Australia needs backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
Reality: It is technically feasible for Australia to meet it’s electricity needs from renewable energy alone.
According to the energy experts, shifting to 100 percent renewable energy is both technically viable and affordable. Studies by the think tank Beyond Zero Emissions (PDF), and follow up studies from the Australian Energy Market Operator (PDF) and University of New South Wales (PDF) confirm the technical feasibility of renewable energy. In terms of cost, the 100 percent renewable energy system ischeaper the fossil fuel based business-as-usual approach.
Modelling is one thing, what about real world applications?
South Australia is leading the nation with it’s renewable energy rollout. The state now meets 31 percent of it’s electricity demand from renewable energy sources. Wind farms are doing the heavy lifting, providing 27 percent, while the rapidly growing rooftop solar contributes 4 percent. South Australia is expected to reach 50 percent renewables in a decade.
Misconception #2: Renewable energy is a significant part of power bills, driving up costs.
Reality: John Howard’s Renewable Energy Target makes up a small portion of Australian power bills. The rollout of renewable |
World U20 Championships, capturing one gold, two silvers and one bronze medal, as a junior. In 2006, in addition to a silver medal, he was also named tournament MVP. As a senior, he has played in four IIHF World Championships, winning the gold medal and being named the tournament MVP for the 2012 event. In addition he has won the bronze medals in two other World Championships and has played for team Russia during three Winter Olympic Games, in Turin, Vancouver and Sochi.
Personal life [ edit ]
Malkin was born on 31 July 1986 in Magnitogorsk to Vladimir and Natalia Malkin. Vladimir worked for Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, the largest iron and steel works in Russia and the city's dominant industry, and played in the Metallurg Magnitogorsk youth and club hockey system. Malkin has one brother, Denis, who is older by one year.[4] Malkin began skating at age three. He joined his first organized hockey league two years later. He showed an aptitude for the sport at an early age, as one might expect from the son of a professional. However, because both of his parents were short, no one suspected Malkin would be a world-class athlete.[5]
Malkin owns a restaurant in Magnitogorsk which is designed to look like the inside of a prison.[6]
Malkin became engaged to Russian television personality Anna Kasterova in November 2015. Six months later on 31 May 2016 their first child, a son was born.[7]
In November 2017, Malkin announced his membership of the PutinTeam social movement, launched by compatriot and fellow NHLer Alexander Ovechkin in support of President of Russia Vladimir Putin.[8][9]
Playing career [ edit ]
Malkin is a product of the Metallurg Magnitogorsk hockey program. Prior to being drafted, he made his Russian Superleague debut in the 2003–04 season as a 17-year-old.[4] He also made his international debut for Russia during the 2003 U-18 World Championships, where he skated on the top line with Alexander Ovechkin. The team went on to claim the bronze medal.
Transfer dispute [ edit ]
After his first professional season in Russia, Malkin was drafted second overall (behind national teammate Alexander Ovechkin) in the 2004 NHL Entry Draft by the Pittsburgh Penguins.[10] However, a transfer dispute between the NHL and the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) delayed his Pittsburgh debut.[4] On 7 August 2006, it appeared the 20-year-old Malkin had come to a compromise with Metallurg and signed a deal that would have kept him in Russia until May 2007. However, Malkin stated he signed the one-year contract not as a compromise, but because of the immense "psychological pressure" his former club exerted on him.[11] Desiring to play in the NHL, he left Metallurg Magnitogorsk's training camp in Helsinki before it began on 12 August.[4] It would later appear the team had taken Malkin's passport away to prevent him from leaving, but it was eventually given back to him, and Malkin was allowed to pass through Finnish customs. Meeting with his agent, J. P. Barry, the two quickly departed and waited for Malkin's visa clearance from the U.S. Embassy.
In order to legally leave the team, on 15 August, Malkin invoked via fax a law allowing him to cancel his one-year contract by giving his employer two weeks' notice.[12] Having untied himself of obligations in Russia, he was able to sign an entry-level contract with the Penguins on 5 September 2006.[13]
Following his first NHL game with Pittsburgh, on 19 October 2006, Malkin's former Russian hockey club filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NHL and the Penguins in the United States District Court for the southern district of New York.[14] The lawsuit claimed Malkin should not be permitted to play in the NHL because he is still under contract in Russia. The claim also sought unspecified damages as well. The motion for an injunction was denied on 15 November 2006, ensuring Malkin would continue play in the NHL that season.[15] The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed on its merits by the District Court on 1 February 2007.[16]
Pittsburgh Penguins [ edit ]
Malkin smiling during a practice with the Penguins in 2006
In his first pre-season game with the Penguins, on 20 September 2006, Malkin collided with teammate John LeClair and dislocated his own shoulder, which forced him to miss the start of the season. Subsequently, his NHL debut would be delayed until 18 October, against the New Jersey Devils, in which he scored his first goal against Martin Brodeur.[17]
Malkin set a modern NHL record when he scored a goal in each of his first six games. No player had achieved this feat since the NHL's inaugural season in 1917–18, when Joe Malone scored at least 1 goal in 14 consecutive games to start his NHL career (Malone, however, had played in the National Hockey Association, the predecessor league to the NHL).[18] Malkin's streak was eventually stopped in his seventh game by the San Jose Sharks.[19]
Playing on a team with another highly-touted prospect, Sidney Crosby, Malkin finished his rookie season with 33 goals and 85 points, leading all first-year players and capturing the Calder Memorial Trophy as the NHL's top rookie, the second Penguin to win the award after Mario Lemieux. Malkin was named alternate captain for the Penguins shortly after.
When Malkin arrived in the United States, he spoke little English, but through the help of fellow Russian teammate Sergei Gonchar, he eventually started to give short, simple interviews in the language.[20]
During his sophomore season ( 2007–08 season), Malkin scored 106 points, the second-highest amongst NHL players that season.
In his sophomore season, Malkin recorded his first NHL hat-trick, against the Toronto Maple Leafs, on 3 January 2008. He earned another three-goal performance several games later, on 14 January, against the New York Rangers. Midway through the season, when more heralded teammate and captain Sidney Crosby went down with an ankle injury, Malkin seized the opportunity to lead the Penguins, scoring 44 points in the 28 games Crosby was absent.[21] In total, Malkin completed the season second in NHL scoring with 106 points, six points behind Alexander Ovechkin for the Art Ross Trophy. Malkin continued to dominate into the Stanley Cup playoffs as the Penguins made it to the 2008 Stanley Cup Final. He scored three points against the Detroit Red Wings in the finals, totaling 22 points overall, but the Penguins were defeated by Detroit in six games.
Malkin's sophomore season culminated in a Hart Memorial Trophy nomination as NHL MVP—the award was given to Ovechkin—and First Team All-Star honors. On 2 July 2008, with one year left in his entry-level contract, he signed a five-year, $43.5 million contract extension with Pittsburgh.[22]
Malkin began the 2008–09 season by scoring his 200th NHL point with an assist to Sidney Crosby on 18 October 2008. The goal was also Crosby's 100th career goal and 300th career point. Crosby had a team trainer cut the puck in half so both players could commemorate the moment.[23] Voted as a starter to the 2009 NHL All-Star Game later in the season, Malkin won the shooting accuracy segment of the Skills Competition, initially shooting four-for-four before beating Dany Heatley three-for-four in a tie-breaker. After having finished runner-up to Alexander Ovechkin the previous season for the Art Ross Trophy, Malkin captured the scoring championship with 113 points. He became the second Russian-born player to win it, after Ovechkin, and the fourth Penguin, after Mario Lemieux, Jaromír Jágr and Crosby. However, he would once again be runner-up to Ovechkin for the Hart Trophy, although this time garnering a few more first-place votes. In 2008, he had just one first-place vote (out of 134 votes) and 659 points to Ovechkin's 128 first-place votes and 1,313 points.[24] In 2009, Malkin had 12 first-place votes (out of 133 votes) and 787 points to Ovechkin's 115 first-place votes and 1,264 points.[25]
Malkin, along with his parents (left), during the Penguins' victory parade for their 2009 Stanley Cup victory.
On 12 June 2009, the Penguins won the Stanley Cup after defeating the Detroit Red Wings 2–1 in Game 7 of the Finals. Malkin tallied 36 points (14 goals and 22 assists) to become the first player to lead both the regular season and playoffs in scoring since Mario Lemieux accomplished the feat in 1992. His 36 points were the highest playoff total of any player since Wayne Gretzky amassed 40 points in 1993. Malkin received the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, becoming the first Russian-born and Asian-born player to do so. He is also just the second player in franchise history to win both the Art Ross and Conn Smythe trophies in the same year. The other Penguin to accomplish this feat was Hockey Hall of Famer and team co-owner/president Mario Lemieux (1992).
On 4 February 2011, after missing five games due to a left knee injury and sinus infection, Malkin returned to play against the Buffalo Sabres. At the start of the second period, Sabres defenceman Tyler Myers collided with Malkin against the end-boards, injuring his right knee. He was helped off the ice and went straight to the dressing room, unable to return to the game as he suffered both a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and medial collateral ligament (MCL). On 9 February, it was announced Malkin would undergo knee surgery. The Penguins estimated his recovery period as six months, sidelining him for the remainder of the 2010–11 season and playoffs, but stated he should be ready for training camp in September.[26] According to then Penguins' general manager Ray Shero, Malkin sent him a text message after the incident occurred stating, "I'm sorry." In Shero's words, "I told him he had nothing to apologize for."[27]
Malkin had a bounce-back season in 2011–12. With post-concussion syndrome limiting team captain Sidney Crosby to 22 games, Malkin led the Penguins on a line with newly acquired winger James Neal.[28] Despite missing seven games due to lingering effects of his knee surgery, Malkin scored 50 goals for the first time in his career, including three hat-tricks, and won his second scoring title with 109 points. He was the only player in the NHL during the 2011–12 season to score at least 100 points.[29] Malkin would go on to win the Hart Trophy as the NHL's MVP for his performance in the season. He also became the first player in the past ten NHL seasons to win two scoring titles, putting an end to a streak of nine different players over nine seasons leading the NHL in points. Despite Malkin's impressive season, the Penguins were eliminated in the first round of the 2012 playoffs by the Philadelphia Flyers. Malkin scored eight points in the six-game series.
Following the Penguins' playoff exit, it was announced Malkin would again represent Russia at the 2012 World Championships.[30]
With the 2012–13 NHL season delayed due to the 2012–13 NHL lockout, Malkin went to Russia and played for Magnitogorsk, his former team, who had joined the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) since he last played there.[31] By the time the lockout ended in early January, Malkin was second in KHL scoring with 23 goals and 65 points in 37 games.[4][32] Though he missed the final part of the KHL season, he still finished third overall in scoring.[33] A concussion and shoulder injuries limited Malkin to 31 games during the NHL season, rather than the 48 scheduled, in which he scored 33 points. In the 2013 playoffs, Malkin and the Penguins faced the New York Islanders in the first round, eliminating them in six games.[34] Malkin had an excellent series, recording 2 goals and 11 points in the 6 games.[35] In the next round, the Penguins defeated out the Ottawa Senators in five games, with Malkin scoring two more goals and five points.[36] The Penguins were then swept in the conference finals against the Boston Bruins.The entire Penguins team was kept to two goals in the four-game series, with Malkin held off the scoresheet and posting a −5 plus-minus rating.[37]
In the 2013–14 NHL season, Malkin was held out of 22 games, missing two games with a lower body injury on 5 December, nine games with another lower-body injury on 15 December, and then 11 games with a foot injury on 25 March. In the 60 games he was healthy, Malkin scored 72 points, second on the Penguins behind only Sidney Crosby. In his second-last game of the season, against the Tampa Bay Lightning, Malkin had two goals and two assists for four points.[38] In the playoffs, the Penguins met the Columbus Blue Jackets in Round 1, eliminating them in six games. Malkin was unable to score for Pittsburgh in the first five games, and only managed four assists in that time, causing Penguins fans to worry, especially since Crosby was being held off the scoresheet as well. But Malkin broke through with a hat-trick in Game 6, propelling his team to Round 2.[39] In Round 2 against the New York Rangers, Malkin and the Penguins were eliminated in seven games, despite holding a 3–1 lead in the series. The Penguins only managed three goals in the last three games.[40] Malkin had a solid series, scoring three goals and seven points in seven games, leading the Penguins.
Malkin was an integral part of the Penguins lineup that helped the Pens win back-to-back Stanley Cups during the 2015–16 and 2016–17 seasons. He led the 2017 playoffs with 28 points, edging Crosby by one point.[41] He also became the 29th player in the history of the NHL to record 150 points in the playoffs.[41]
Playing style [ edit ]
Malkin is primarily a centre with very good offensive abilities and decent defensive awareness. He has also been known to play on the wing alongside Sidney Crosby, and on the point during the power play. A good skater with firm balance and decent speed, he is not generally physical when it comes to seeking out contact, although he will on occasion deliver heavy hits for a particular purpose. He rather relies on his athleticism most times to avoid checks by opponents. A very emotionally driven athlete, he has been known to let emotions affect his play both positively and negatively (in the form of taking "bad" penalties). He has a strong arsenal of shots (slap, wrist, backhand, and snap), and has remarkable stick-handling ability. An excellent passer who knows how to open up the game and create space, Malkin is capable of driving the length of the ice to score goals due to his speed, size, and excellent stick handling.
"He's just one of those guys that wants the puck all the time. For me, it was get him the puck as much as possible. With his ability to feed me and my ability to shoot the puck, it worked really well. I just got open as much as I could. I'd just get him the puck as fast as I could because I knew I was going to get it back wherever I was on the ice, it was coming back."[42] James Neal on Malkin, December 2017
International play [ edit ]
Malkin made his first international appearance with Russia at the 2003 IIHF World U18 Championships in Yaroslavl. He helped Russia to a bronze medal, scoring nine points in six games. He was named Russia's U18 captain for the 2004 IIHF World U18 Championships the following year and scored eight points as Russia improved to a gold medal in the tournament.
Several months prior to his second and final U18 tournament, Malkin debuted at the under-20 level with Russia at the 2004 World Junior Championships. In his first of three tournament appearances, he contributed five points in six games but could not help Russia reach the podium. The following year, Malkin finished second in team scoring at the 2005 World Junior Championships to Alexander Ovechkin with ten points. Led by the duo of Malkin and Ovechkin (the two had also played together the previous year), Russia won the silver, losing to Canada in the gold medal game. Later in 2005, Malkin made his debut with the Russian men's team at the 2005 World Championships. Despite failing to score a goal in the tournament, Malkin contributed four assists to help Russia to a bronze medal in Vienna.
In 2006, Malkin did triple duty for Russia, competing in his third World Junior Championships, his first Winter Olympics and his second World Championships. He was named the top forward and MVP of the 2006 World Junior Championships in January, captaining Russia to a second straight silver medal and gold medal game loss to Canada. Less than two months later, Malkin was given one of the final spots on Team Russia for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, where he helped the team to a fourth-place finish with six points in seven games. Then in May, Malkin played in the 2006 World Championship, where he led Russia in team scoring with nine points.
Following his NHL rookie campaign with the Pittsburgh Penguins, Malkin was named to the Russia squad for the 2007 World Championships, where he achieved a personal best for the tournament of ten points. Malkin played in the first line of team Russia together with Ilya Kovalchuk and Alexander Frolov. He also captured his second World Championships bronze.
Malkin was selected to play for the Russian Olympic Team at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, where he led Team Russia in points yet again with three goals and six points in four games. Russia ultimately lost to Canada in the quarter-finals, finishing sixth overall, which incidentally is their worst placing ever at an Olympic Games (including the former Soviet Union and Unified Team teams).
Malkin was named MVP, the best forward and to All-Star Team at the 2012 IIHF World Championship, where he scored 11 goals and made 8 assists, winning the scoring league with a total of 19 points.[43] He recorded at least one point in every game played. He also had two hat-tricks, against Sweden in the preliminary round and against Finland in the semi-final. Russia won the gold medal.
In 2014, Malkin was named to the 2014 Russian Olympic Ice Hockey Team. He played all six games for Russia as they finished fifth in the tournament after losing to Finland in the quarter-finals. Malkin had one goal and two assists by the end of the tournament.
Career statistics [ edit ]
Regular season and playoffs [ edit ]
Regular season Playoffs Season Team League GP G A Pts PIM GP G A Pts PIM 2003–04 Metallurg Magnitogorsk RSL 34 3 9 12 12 — — — — — 2004–05 Metallurg Magnitogorsk RSL 52 12 20 32 24 5 0 4 4 0 2005–06 Metallurg Magnitogorsk RSL 46 21 26 47 46 11 5 10 15 41 2006–07 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 78 33 52 85 80 5 0 4 4 8 2007–08 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 82 47 59 106 78 20 10 12 22 24 2008–09 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 82 35 78 113 80 24 14 22 36 51 2009–10 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 67 28 49 77 100 13 5 6 11 6 2010–11 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 43 15 22 37 18 — — — — — 2011–12 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 75 50 59 109 70 6 3 5 8 6 2012–13 Metallurg Magnitogorsk KHL 37 23 42 65 58 — — — — — 2012–13 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 31 9 24 33 36 15 4 12 16 26 2013–14 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 60 23 49 72 62 13 6 8 14 8 2014–15 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 69 28 42 70 60 5 0 0 0 0 2015–16 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 57 27 31 58 65 23 6 12 18 18 2016–17 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 62 33 39 72 77 25 10 18 28 53 2017–18 Pittsburgh Penguins NHL 78 42 56 98 87 9 4 4 8 16 NHL totals 784 370 560 930 803 158 62 103 165 216
International [ edit ]
Year Team Event Result GP G A Pts PIM 2003 Russia Jr. U18 6 5 4 9 2 2004 Russia Jr. WJC 5th 6 1 4 5 0 2004 Russia Jr. U18 6 4 4 8 31 2005 Russia Jr. WJC 6 3 7 10 16 2005 Russia WC 9 0 4 4 8 2006 Russia Jr. WJC 6 4 6 10 12 2006 Russia OG 4th 7 2 4 6 31 2006 Russia WC 5th 7 3 6 9 6 2007 Russia WC 9 5 5 10 6 2010 Russia OG 6th 4 3 3 6 0 2010 Russia WC 5 5 2 7 10 2012 Russia WC 10 11 8 19 4 2014 Russia OG 5th 5 1 2 3 2 2014 Russia WC 4 2 1 3 2 2015 Russia WC 9 5 5 10 8 Junior totals 30 17 25 42 61 Senior totals 62 36 38 74 75
Awards and honors [ edit ]
NHL [ edit ]
IIHF [ edit ]
Pittsburgh Penguins team awards [ edit ]
Penguins Team Awards Award Year Michel Briere Memorial Trophy 2007 (with Jordan Staal) A.T. Caggiano Memorial Booster Club Award 2008, 2009, 2012 Most Valuable Player Award 2008, 2009, 2012 The Edward J. DeBartolo Community Service Award 2012
Other awards [ edit ]
Records [ edit ]
First player since 1917–18 to score goals in each of his first six NHL games (first accomplished by Joe Malone, Newsy Lalonde and Cy Denneny in inaugural NHL season) [44] (18 Oct – 1 November 2006)
(18 Oct – 1 November 2006) Longest point streak by a Russian player in the NHL – 15 games (accomplished twice) (surpassed Dmitri Kvartalnov of the Boston Bruins – 14 games in 1992) [45]
Most consecutive post season games with multiple points for the Pittsburgh Penguins – 6 games (9–23 May 2009)
First Russian player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy (2009)(Adds government denial)
HONG KONG, Sept 22 (Reuters) - A well-known contemporary Chinese dancer says she has been removed as a judge from a television talent show despite the objections of the show’s producers, and believes it is because she is a transsexual.
Shanghai-based retired dancer Jin Xing announced on her microblog that she had received the news in a telephone call this week from the director of the singing show, which is made by a television station in the eastern province of Zhejiang.
“He told me that the reason for my removal, according to the regulator’s letter, is because I am transsexual, which will have negative effects on society,” Jin, a one-time colonel in a People’s Liberation Army dance troupe, told Reuters.
She said the directors of the programme strongly opposed the decision to remove her, but were “helpless” upon receiving an official order from the Zhejiang branch of the national broadcasting regulator.
“I’ve received around 50,000 messages that have given me a lot of encouragement and comfort, so I think there is a sense of righteousness in society and the people’s eyes are enlightened,” said Jin, whose name literally means “gold star.”
But the official Xinhua news agency denied that the local regulator had ordered Jin off the air because she is a transsexual, saying that the decision was made by the station itself and “the bureau has not interfered with the show”.
Once a taboo topic during the heyday of Chinese communism, society’s attitude towards sex and sexual minorities have relaxed considerably in the past decade, though conservative views also remain common.
One, microblogger Chen Ji, wrote: “It seems that the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television wants to create a uniform society.”
Jin questioned why the regulator did not order her to be dropped from the start.
“Maybe it’s because during this period, there have been a pattern of restrictions toward stations in Zhejiang and Hunan from the top, from Beijing,” said Jin, who is legally recognised as a woman on her identity card.
China this month ordered a hit talent show akin to American Idol produced in the central province of Hunan off the air for a year for exceeding broadcasting time limits.
Beijing’s prudish censors routinely block anything they consider politically sensitive, offensive or too racy, from songs to films, in contrast to the stirring patriotic fare the government promotes on mainstream stations.
Jin said television stations may feel the need to go to extremes to express their agreement with orders from the top.
“So as a result, in order for Zhejiang’s television bureau to express their attitude, they must go to extremes to show that they’re in agreement, and I’ve been axed in the process,” she said.
“But using my transgender status as an excuse? That is unforgivable.” (Reporting by Sisi Tang; Editing by Ben Blanchard, Elaine Lies and Yoko Nishikawa)In a recent PHP conference in London some great speakers spoke about new features in PHP to be released in PHP 5.3. PHP 5.3 contains functionality that was scheduled for PHP 6, which takes PHP 5.3 from being a minor release to a significant and huge release. A release that no PHP developer should ignore. Most of these features are pretty complicated additions for novice PHP programmers. I have listed some features and some ways to use them.
1) Namespaces for classes and functions
This feature will help us shorten the class names and function names. To appreciate this feature, we need to go back to the days before there was Object Oriented Programming in PHP. Imagine all the function names with name save(). How would you differentiate if the call save() was to save a blogs or save comments? The solution was to use blog_save() or comment_save() before the introduction of classes in which we could write the save() function within the Blog class or the Comment class. Using classes is obviously a much more elegant solution.
We now have the same situation with the large number of classes and functions. Using namespaces, we could simply separate the two functions above in the code below:
<?php namespace Blog; function save() { echo "Now saving the blog!"; } namespace Comment; function save() { echo "Now saving the comment!"; } // To invoke the functions Blog\save(); // This prints - Now saving the blog! Comment\save(); // This prints - Now saving the comment!?>
EDIT: A final decision was made on October 2008. Developers will have to use \ backslash operator to dereference namespaces.
2) MySQL Native Driver
PHP 5.3 has a native driver specific to PHP, optimised for the ZEND engine. It is an alternative to connect to MySQL server versions newer than 4.1. Being a native driver we should be able to get much faster execution times. The native driver will also be licensed under the PHP license. If you are like most users, you are currently using libmysql (A MySQL database client library) you will be able to easily switch over to mysqlnd without making any changes to your existing PHP Scripts!
3) phar – PHp ARchive
This is a cool new feature. Think of it like an archive, like a.zip file or a.tar file. Besides just being able to group all the files into one simple file, we will be able to deliver and run an entire PHP application from a single file!
We will also be able to use phar archives within PHP, so the following will work in PHP 5.3 and above
<?php include "singlefilelibrary.phar"?>
Obviously, there will be a performance hit but the possibilities are endless, imagine being able to upload phpMyAdmin to the server as a single phar file instead of hundreds of small files.
4) Closures & Lambdas
This gets into the list because this is something most web developers would have been familiar with while working on Javascript. A lambda can be declared anywhere and they can be assigned to a variable. A closure on the other hand are lambda funcions but have access to the variables where they were declared. This is something called lexical scoping. To see this in action take a look at this example.
<?php $hellolambda = function () { echo "Hello world via Lambda"; } $hellolambda(); // Outputs Hello world via Lambda?>
5) All of the rest!
There are a lot of other things in PHP 5.3 which I thought are nice, I have just described all of them very succinctly.
Functors: This allows an object to be invoked as a function.
Traits: This is a new unit of reuse, traits can be incomplete, provides reusability, modularity and structure. In short it is copy-paste glorified!
Magic functions: We have a couple of new magic functions for classes (interceptors) __callstatic() and invoke()
Ternary operator: You can now display the a value that exists $value1 or $value2 using this simple statement echo $value1?:$value2;
There are many more things added like Late Static Binding, Variable Static Calls, Changes to PHP Error Levels, new PHP functions, improvements to help with OpenID, Command line and many more.
Final Thought
Well, this gives us much more to play with. It is definitely a lot to include into PHP 5.3 and I would have expected so many changes to go into PHP 6. I sometimes wonder if there will be anything new left to add into PHP 6 given the fact that so much has been released already. If you are interested in PHP 5.3, do give it a try here, it is in beta at the time of the writing.0 Flares Filament.io 0 Flares ×
That leaves a total of eight states that are competitive in terms of party identification, with none showing a party advantage of greater than two points. These include Mississippi (+1 Republican), North Dakota and Nebraska (even), and Kansas, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina, and Montana (all +2 Democratic).
According to analysis of Gallup Poll Daily tracking data from the first six months of 2009, Texas is a competitive state based on party identification.
The poll found that 42% of respondents identified as either a Democrat or lean Democrat with 40% indicating they were Republican or lean Republican. 9,149 surveys were conducted over the first 6 months of the year.
The margin appears to be +/- 3 points so the number is basically a push. These numbers seem to represent what we are seeing on the ground. In 2006, Rick Perry only received 39% of the vote. It has been speculated this was the baseline or raw voter count of the Republican Party in Texas. With this Gallup poll showing 40% Republican/Lean Republican in Texas, we see a long term trend that shows the Republican ceiling.
If Democrats put together a solid slate and continue to appeal to suburban and exurban independents (like we have for 2 cycles), Democrats could win big November 2010.
Regardless of what the Republican noise machine will say in Texas, Democrats are on the brink in the lone star state.
The full story can be found on the Gallup website.Nintendo's Eiji Aonuma gave a new interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu, in which he revealed a number of new details about the company's upcoming title, Skyward Sword. The details were printed in this week's issue of the magazine, based on an interview taken at E3.
In Skyward Sword, Zelda is a childhood friend of Link—not royalty. "She's not a princess this time," says Aonuma. "[It] is something I'll pretty much have to put forth right now in order to talk about this title. She's a childhood friend, but she goes away in the midst of the game and it's Link's job to search for her."
The game's starting plot unfolds rather differently than the previous Zelda titles. "This game's plot is something like a school drama, you could say," said Aonuma. "The flying sequence at the E3 demo is Link competing against his classmates. One of them looks kind of like a bad guy, as you saw, and he shows up in other ways in the game too, since he has a major thing for Zelda."
The game progresses much in the same was as the previous titles, however. "The game starts in Skyloft, this city that's floating in the air, and you'll come back to this town multiple times. Things are always proceeding along in town, and in that respect it's very much like Majora's Mask.
"Like with Majora, there are a lot of new game events involving the townspeople that get intertwined with the main story."
Skyloft is described as being the entire 'world' in Skyward Sword, and the game's main storyline is said to tie in with Ocarina of Time. "This game talks about the birth of the Master Sword, and it touches on why Ganondorf showed up. If you play it, I think you'll get some understanding on that. It connects to Ocarina, so if you play Ocarina of Time 3D and move on to this game, I think you'll catch onto a lot of things."
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Description
All new 3D engine - rotate the environment 360 degrees and move seamlessly in and out of buildings, submarines, planes, underwater and zoom in and out of the environments.
Interact like never before - steal enemy uniforms and weapons, climb and swing from cables, jump from windows and utillize vehicles.
Control 9 commandos - including the green beret, sniper, demolitions expert, seductress, thief and even a dog!
Authentic WWII scenarios - 10 missions spanning 9 different environments in night and day with realistic weather effects.
Multiplayer - players can go to war in the co-operative multiplayer mode.
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Alternate Titles
"盟军敢死队2：勇往直前" -- Chinese spelling (simplified)
"קומנדו 2: אומץ תחת אש" -- Hebrew spelling
"Commandos 2: Награда за смелость" -- Russian spelling
"Commandos 2: Homens de Coragem" -- Brazilian title
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Critic Reviews
Gamer's Pulse Windows Oct 14, 2001 96 out of 100 96 games xtreme Windows Oct 24, 2001 9.5 out of 10 95 Consoles Plus Xbox Sep, 2002 93 out of 100 93 IGN Windows Oct 08, 2001 9 out of 10 90 GameSpot Windows Sep 28, 2001 8.8 out of 10 88 4Players.de Windows Oct 02, 2001 85 out of 100 85 Deaf Gamers PlayStation 2 2002 7.2 out of 10 72 Game Over Online PlayStation 2 Nov 30, 1999 72 out of 100 72 Gamereactor (Sweden) PlayStation 2 May 07, 2003 7 out of 10 70 Gaming Target PlayStation 2 Sep 16, 2002 6.9 out of 10 69
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From the heart of the Third Reich to the most remote islands in the South Pacific, Sergeant Jack "Butcher" O'Hara and his elite group of gritty soldiers must combine their expertise and venture deep into enemy territory...in an attempt to change the course of the war.This sequel contains the following enhancements:
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1001 Video Games
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German version
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Awards
Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland 2001 - Gold Award
Information also contributed by Xoleras.
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Tom Holland will be the newest star to don the iconic Spider-Man costume in the latest reboot of the popular franchise, and will swing into action in Marvel's upcoming Captain America: Civil War.
Before Holland was chosen to take on the mantel, Andrew Garfield played the web-slinging do-gooder as recently as 2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Garfield, who has has been absent on red carpets for the past year, addressed Holland's casting for the first time.
WATCH: Tom Holland Has Officially Been Cast in Marvel's 'Spider-Man' Reboot
"It feels lovely, especially because Tom Holland is a really, really great actor," Garfield told ET's Cameron Mathison at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Annual Grants Banquet in Beverly Hills on Thursday. "He was in this movie The Impossible and he was just this incredibly powerful, sensitive, just wonderful young actor."
"And [he's] a dancer, so his body’s the right [form]," Garfield added.
As for the 31-year-old actor himself, he says he can't wait to see Holland's performance, and is happy to not have the pressure of playing the beloved character.
"I’m just really excited to just be a fan again as opposed to bearing the weight of it," Garfield admitted.
WATCH: ‘Spider-Man’ Writers on Taking ‘John Hughes’ Approach: ‘We Are Going to Write a Real Kid’
Garfield, sporting a mustache and a man bun, also discussed his return to the red carpet for the first time in a year and a half, calling it "strange."
"It's interesting," Garfield said, laughing nervously. "It’s nice bumping into friends, that’s really nice."
As for Spider-Man, Garfield isn't the only one who thinks Holland is the right choice. ET recently caught up with Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee to get his thoughts on the young web-slinger. Check out the video below to hear what the comic book legend had to say.
Related GallerySam Houston State Believes They Have More Depth Than Texas Tech Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Video
LUBBOCK, TX - Public enemy number one for Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury since he stepped on campus has been lack of depth. Now, entering year three; he feels like he has it.
And not just any kind of depth. Quality depth. The coaching staff has told Red Raider Nation that they feel like they can go two or three lines deep at almost every position and they trust their back-ups will get the job done.
However, surprisingly enough, Sam Houston State believes they have more.
"Our plan is to play fast, their plan is to play fast. I think it helps us because we think that our two's are closer to our one's, than their two's are to their one's," Sam Houston State head coach K.C. Keeler said. "So, if we have to go into a situation where we're playing extra linemen, extra running backs, extra wide-receivers, extra d-tackles, I think we have more than they do, just in terms of total depth. I think that's an advantage for us."
Click on the video provided to hear his full response.In the animated television series Gargoyles and the spinoff comic books Gargoyles (SLG comic) and Gargoyles: Bad Guys, Gargoyles are a species of winged humanoid creatures that are the focus of the show.
Gargoyles [ edit ]
Several clans of gargoyles exist worldwide (although until recently, they were unaware of each other's existence), and each clan has distinct cultural and morphological characteristics. All gargoyle clans are alike in that each has a particular item, area, or concept that they strive to protect. They are fierce warriors and are incredibly powerful and resilient; their appearance and ferocity (along with the fact that they are nocturnal creatures) often means that humans vilify them as demons and monsters. Most of the world's gargoyle clans do not peacefully co-exist with humans.
Gargoyles are particularly notable for entering a sort of stone hibernation, called "stone sleep", during the day, during which they resemble Gothic statues. During daylight, they can quickly heal from injury and illness, and are protected from most natural threats. However, this state makes them easy targets for destruction by their enemies and humans who hate them.[1] The character Anton Sevarius postulated that, in this hibernation, they absorb solar radiation that allows them to store energy; otherwise, he concluded, the strenuous activity of gliding would require a nutritional intake equivalent to eating three cows a day.[2] Damage during stone sleep can be fatal to a gargoyle. If a gargoyle dies during its hibernation, its body will remain stone.[1]
Gargoyles, despite having large wings, can only fly by gliding on updrafts and on the wind. They have sharp claws that can dig into any kind of solid surface, and they can use these to climb vertical surfaces.[1] They are also excellent swimmers.
While not inherently immortal, gargoyles can be extremely long-lived, a result of stone sleep—which slows or halts their aging process until they wake again the following night. Even in old age (as evidenced in the episode "Grief"), they are not as frail and incapacitated as other creatures. Because they spend half their day asleep as stone, they age at half the rate of a human, thus living twice as long.[3]
The Manhattan Clan [ edit ]
The Manhattan Clan are the protagonists of the series.
Othello (voiced by Michael Dorn) – Othello was a rookery brother to Goliath who is shown to be hot-headed. Resurrected as the cyborg Coldstone. The Coldstone robot was designed to resemble him.[19] (The name Othello was used to identify the character in the script.)[20] He rejoined the clan in 1997.[7]
Desdemona (voiced by CCH Pounder) – Desdemona is Othello's Mate.[21] She helped to keep Iago at bay, and was eventually transferred into the robot shell of Coldfire.[22] The name Desdemona was used only for script and credit only.[20] She rejoined the clan in 1997.[7]
Coldstone [ edit ]
Coldstone is the spirit of a deceased gargoyle from the Wyvern clan resurrected through science and sorcery into a cyborg body.[19] He was formed from the remains of three different gargoyles (usually called Coldstone or "Othello", his mate Coldfire or "Desdemona", and his rival Coldsteel or "Iago"),[20][21] and each personality remains mostly intact. Eventually, each personality is transferred to a separate robotic body.[22] Since the Coldstone robotic body only had one voice box, Coldstone was always voiced by Dorn, regardless of the personality in control; however, in "Legion" Coldstone's tone changed whenever Desdemona was in control.
Iago or Coldsteel is Othello's enemy. He convinced Othello that Desdemona was secretly pursuing a relationship with Goliath.[21] He was eventually transferred into the robot shell of Coldsteel.[22] Upon Demona's reactivation of the Coldstone robot, Iago took control of the body, until Othello was convinced to help Goliath and clan.[23] In 1996, Coldsteel aided Xanatos and Coyote 5.0. in retrieving the Stone of Destiny, in exchange for removing a tracking device from his body.[7] The name Iago was used only in the script and credits.[20] Voiced by Xander Berkeley.
Demona [ edit ]
Demona (voiced by Marina Sirtis) - Goliath's former mate[1] and Angela's biological mother;[15] who is no longer frozen in stone by daylight like the others, thanks to Puck's pre-Gathering intervention.[24] She has been continuously alive for a millennium, because of a magical pact with Macbeth granted to them by the series' version of the Three Witches, giving both of them nearly-irrevocable immortality. Demona developed a hatred of all humans, making her an enemy of the clan. She was named by Macbeth, after her demonic fighting skills,[25] Demona literally meaning "She-Demon". Over the centuries that she has been alive, Demona was the enemy of the Canmore family, who all took on the moniker of The Hunter; because of this, Demona was indirectly responsible for the destruction of the Manhattan Clan's clock tower home.
Avalon Clan [ edit ]
The Avalon Clan are the gargoyle eggs of Castle Wyvern that were protected by Princess Katharine, Tom, and the Magus. The eggs were taken to Avalon, where they hatched and grew to adulthood.[16] Members of the clan include Gabriel (the son of Coldstone and Coldfire), Ophelia, the gargoyle beast Boudicca, and other unnamed members.[26] Katharine and Tom raised them as their own children, and thus gave each a name to be told apart from each other, so the Avalon Clan holds great respect for them.
London Clan [ edit ]
The London Clan are a prosperous English clan resembling the creatures of heraldry. The London Clan roosted at a country estate called Knight's Spur.[7] They also ran a magic shop in London to supplement their income, and until the mid-1990s (the timeframe of the Gargoyles series) had abandoned their mission of protection. Their names were derived from the heraldic creatures they were based on: Leo (lion), Leo's mate Una (unicorn, and the clan's leader), Griff (griffin),[27] Staghart (stag, rumored to have a close friendship with Lexington), Constance (sow), Old Pog (hippogriff) as the clan's eldest member, Lunette (winged unicorn, as she is Leo and Una's daughter, born the same year as Brooklyn's son Nashville) and 189 other members.[7]
Clan Ishimura [ edit ]
Clan Ishimura was a gargoyle clan in Japan and the only clan thus far that lived in harmony with humans, teaching them Bushido, (lit. the "Way of the Warrior"), since feudal times. It includes Kai, (lit. "The Ocean" or "The Sea"), the Clan leader, Sora, (lit. "The Sky" or "The Heavens"), Yama (lit. "The Mountain"), who was banished from the clan for criminal activity — resulting in his joining Robyn Canmore's Redemption Squad unit in the future to atone for his own misdeeds — and many other unnamed members.[28] In the Gargoyles comic series issue "The Lost", it is revealed that the gargoyles of Japan are properly called tengu, as a possible inspiration for Japan's folkloric creatures with similar physical characteristics.
Guatemala Clan [ edit ]
The Guatemala Clan members are protectors of the Guatemalan rainforest and associated with the Kaqchikel people's culture. The four surviving gargoyles of the clan wore special talismans linked to a special occultly-enchanted artifact called the Mayan Sun Amulet, that let them avoid their stone sleep. Their names are Spanish words for precious gemstones— the red-skinned, legless Zafiro (sapphire) as the clan's leader, with a unique feather-winged appearance reminiscent of the Mayan deity Kukulkan but with human-form arms, or possibly one of the cuoatl, specifically Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent; the green-skinned Jade (pronounced HAH-day, as it would be pronounced in Spanish) with a facial appearance reminiscent of Goliath; and the blue-skinned females Turquesa (turquoise); and Obsidiana (obsidian), who has developed skills as an herbalist (similar to Maya ethnobotany) with medicinal plants of the rain forest, in healing physical injuries. Due to malicious business actions initiated in 1993 by the Cyberbiotics Corporation's Preston Vogel in and near the clan's rain forest protectorate (see below), a sizable number of the Guatemala Clan's earlier gargoyle membership was destroyed in stone slumber only a few years before the "Avalon World Tour" visit to them by Goliath, Angela, Elisa and Bronx; without the Guatemala Clan's rookery of gargoyle eggs ever being discovered in the tragic event.[29]
Labyrinth Clan [ edit ]
The Labyrinth Clan lived underground, protecting the homeless individuals who also lived there.
The Mutates [ edit ]
The Mutates were created when Sevarius combined animal genes with humans in an attempt to create gargoyle-like creatures for Xanatos.[2] They rebelled against Xanatos,[30] and now protect the homeless in the underground facility known as the Labyrinth.[31] They also take care of the clones. All the Mutates resembled humanoid cats with bat-like wings on their backs (giving them enough strength to glide), and had the ability to store and discharge electricity, due to having electric eel DNA and the associated storage organ to naturally accumulate an electric charge.[2]
Talon Talon became the leader of the Mutate Clan; originally, he was against leadership as he preferred everyone being equal, but took control when Fang attempted mutiny. Resembled a black panther hybrid. Talon was originally Derek Maza, Elisa Maza's younger brother. He took a job as a pilot for David Xanatos, with a series of events leading to his mutation. The mutate Maggie Reed is shown to love him, and the feeling is mutual.[2] Fang Fang was originally a member of the Mutate Clan but eventually betrayed them. He resembled a puma hybrid with bat wings. Fang was a human named Fred Sykes before Sevarius mutated him. He found several laser rifles and used them and a pair of human followers to attempt to take over the Labyrinth where the mutates lived.[31] He later joined forces with Thailog and Demona.[32] He is a loud mouthed bully who likes dominating those weaker than himself,[2] which causes Yama to become antagonistic towards him as both Yama and Fang are eventual members of Robyn Canmore's Redemption Squad. Claw Claw is a strong-but-silent Mutate.[2] The transformation process rendered him mute, brought on by either physical damage or psychological trauma (it is never specified). Resembled a tiger hybrid.[30] Claw is shown to be a coward, doing what he is told out of fear; however, he has brief moments of bravery. Maggie Reed Maggie Reed is an innocent young homeless woman who was tricked by Sevarius, she was the most desperate to find a cure for her condition. Brooklyn had a crush on her for a time,[2] but she fell in love with Talon/Derek. Maggie was listed in the show's credits as Maggie the Cat, an allusion to the female lead in the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. Maggie was voiced by Kath Soucie. Maggie resembled a lion hybrid.[30] In the comic continuation, it was revealed that she was pregnant with Talon's child.
Non-combat Mutates [ edit ]
To continue with his experiments in mutating, Sevarius and Fang abducted four residents of the Labyrinth.
Thug Thug was in charge of guarding Fang's cell, before he was freed by Sevarius. Mutated into a human crocodile. He took the two kids back to the Labyrinth. Tasha Tasha was a woman who was mutated into a human armadillo. She committed suicide after discovering that Sevarius had no intent to cure them. Benny Benny is a boy who was mutated into a human woodlouse. Erin Erin is a girl who was mutated into a human turtle. She is Benny's older sister.[33]
Both Benny and Erin are modeled after Greg Weisman's kids. They got to choose which mutated forms that their comic book versions were given.[34]
The Clones [ edit ]
The Clones were made by Sevarius at the request of Demona and Thailog. Their intellects were originally deliberately stunted to make them obedient to Thailog, but with Thailog's supposed death they regained their freedom. Talon offered to take the clones with him to the Labyrinth to educate them.[35] Issues 3 to 5 of the comic depict Thailog later going to Castle Wyvern to persuade the clones to rejoin him, as they still had not developed free will at that time. After a battle with Goliath and his clan, most of the clones decide to return to the Labyrinth, at the insistence of Delilah. Only Brentwood decides to remain with Thailog.[11]
Malibu (voiced by Jeff Bennett) - Malibu is the clone of Brooklyn. There are hints to a possible relationship between Malibu and Delilah (much to the disappointment of Brooklyn, before his initial meeting with his own future mate Katana). [11]
(voiced by Jeff Bennett) - Malibu is the clone of Brooklyn. There are hints to a possible relationship between Malibu and Delilah (much to the disappointment of Brooklyn, before his initial meeting with his own future mate Katana). Brentwood (voiced by Thom Adcox-Hernandez) - Brentwood is the clone of Lexington. Unlike the other clones, he decides to remain with Thailog, viewing him to be smart. He was the only clone, however, to stay out of the fight between the clans. Brentwood parallels with the evil Lexington from Future Tense. (Lex comments on his decision, saying "You're really making me look bad.") [11]
(voiced by Thom Adcox-Hernandez) - Brentwood is the clone of Lexington. Unlike the other clones, he decides to remain with Thailog, viewing him to be smart. He was the only clone, however, to stay out of the fight between the clans. Brentwood parallels with the evil Lexington from. (Lex comments on his decision, saying "You're really making me look bad.") Hollywood (voiced by Bill Fagerbakke) - Hollywood is the clone of Broadway.
(voiced by Bill Fagerbakke) - Hollywood is the clone of Broadway. Burbank (voiced by Edward Asner) - Burbank is the clone of Hudson. Much like Hudson, Burbank carries a weapon, in his case, a mace. and lacks the injured left eye Hudson still possesses.
(voiced by Edward Asner) - Burbank is the clone of Hudson. Much like Hudson, Burbank carries a weapon, in his case, a mace. and lacks the injured left eye Hudson still possesses. Delilah (voiced by Salli Richardson) - Delilah is not an exact clone; she is a binary clone of Demona and Elisa's DNA, programmed to be a servile concubine for Thailog, replacing Demona. Delilah is voiced by Salli Richardson. Goliath went to the Labyrinth requesting Delilah's company for a Halloween dance (as Elisa had broken up with him). After Thailog crashes the party, Delilah is given the choice to remain with Thailog or go back to The Labyrinth. After deciding to leave Thailog, she asked the other clones to make the same choice, and was joined by all of them except for Brentwood. Delilah was angry that Goliath tried to use her as a replacement for Elisa when they temporarily broke up. Goliath had explained to Elisa that he could never feel anything for Delilah, because Gargoyles mate for life.[11]
In the unmade spinoff, Gargoyles 2198, Delilah's eponymous descendant would have been a main character, close friends with Samson (the grandson of Broadway and Angela, resembling Goliath).[36]
'"Anton"' also called Little Anton - Made by Sevarius using the DNA from all the gargoyles.
The clones differ from the originals by their colors, and some features like horns or teeth. To gain a physical advantage, Malibu, Brentwood, Hollywood and Burbank were aged to be in their biological 20s: older than the young trio, yet younger than Hudson.
The clones' names are places in Los Angeles, contrasting with and spoofing (as chosen by Demona) their counterpart protagonists' New York City placenames.
Thailog [ edit ]
Thailog (Thailog is the reverse spelling of "Goliath"), was a clone of Goliath created by Anton Sevarius and educated by David Xanatos, (via a "subliminal education program"), giving him many of Xanatos's personality traits. He would prove to be both a genius and a persistent enemy. Thailog debuts in season 2, in Double Jeopardy, which aired in November 1995. Like Goliath, he was also voiced by Keith David.
Deciding that he would never be free under Xanatos' thumb, Thailog planned his own kidnapping by Sevarius, blackmails Xanatos for 20 million dollars for his safe return, and, after meeting his genetic source, Goliath, for the first time, seemingly perishes in an explosion. Xanatos later guesses that Thailog had planned to fake his death all along, leaving him both free of Xanatos, and free to spend the 20 million without interference. Xanatos realizes that he has created a monster, one as strong as Goliath, and as smart as, (if not smarter than), himself.
Under the name "Alexander Thailog", Thailog would later form a partnership/relationship with Demona, (business-wise they formed a company, called "Nightstone Unlimited"), but was planning to let her and Macbeth die, in order to inherit both their fortunes. (Demona, in her human form, planned to marry Macbeth and then claim that he was dead in order to inherit his fortune, Thailog planned to kill Macbeth and Demona and as her sole business partner, her Banker, he would inherit their combined fortunes).[15] Both of them later commissioned Sevarius to create a clan of clones, which he eventually betrayed.[15]
Thailog eventually "dies", (or, more accurately, lapses into a permanent stone sleep), in the third season of the animated series; but as that is considered a "non-canonical" event by series creator Greg Weisman, Thailog would be clearly depicted as alive in the canonical SLG Comic Book.
The dynamics between Thailog and Xanatos somewhat mirror that of Lex Luthor and the clone of Superman in Vatman, in season one of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, which aired in March 1994.
Humans [ edit ]
In addition to the gargoyles, human characters figure prominently in the series, both as allies and enemies of the gargoyles.
Residents of Castle Wyvern 954-994 [ edit ]
Princess Katharine [ edit ]
Princess Katarine is the leader of Castle Wyvern (and, by default, the Scottish clan of gargoyles) during the 990s. Katharine was at first prejudiced against the clan, but after they saved her life, she vowed to protect the clans' unhatched eggs[1] and raise them on Avalon.[16] She was voiced by Kath Soucie.
Katherine's parents [ edit ]
Prince Malcolm Prince Malcolm was Katharine's father, the previous lord of Wyvern Castle, Hudson's good friend, and brother to King Kenneth. He formed a co-existence alliance with the gargoyles who had been there for centuries, and built Castle Wyvern. Goliath, Demona, and Hudson saved his life from an attack by the Archmage. He also inadvertently inspired hatred of gargoyles at Wyvern, particularly in Princess Katharine—he told her that the gargoyles would get her if she didn't stay in bed.[4] He was apparently deceased by the time of the Viking attack in 994. Voiced by Roger Rees. Princess Elena Princess Elena is Katherine's mother. She married Prince Malcolm in 975, and intended to give him the Phoenix Gate as a dowry (until it was stolen by Demona). Voiced by Kath Soucie.[37]
The Magus [ edit ]
The Magus was a court magician of Castle Wyvern and Katharine's top advisor. It was the Magus who cast the spell that imprisoned Goliath's clan in stone, believing that the Viking Hakon had murdered the Princess and blaming the gargoyles for her death. He later discovered that Princess Katharine had been rescued by Goliath; unable to restore the gargoyles (as Hakon had burned the page with his counterspell), he agreed to place Goliath under the same spell, so that he might one day be reunited with his clan.[1] The Magus guided Princess Katharine and the eggs to Avalon, and harbored unrequited feelings for the princess for many years. He died after using a great deal of energy to defeat the Weird Sisters.[16] He was voiced by Jeff Bennett.
Tom the Guardian [ edit ]
In 10th-century Scotland, Tom was a peasant boy at Wyvern Castle, who was eager to make friends with the gargoyles, especially the future-named Lexington & Brooklyn, despite his mother's objections. He also accompanied Princess Katherine and the gargoyle eggs to Avalon, where he took on the role of Guardian, protecting the eggs & training the young gargoyles when they hatched. While living on Avalon, the adult Tom became Katharine's confidante, and eventually her husband.
Mary [ edit ]
Mary, Tom the Guardian's mother, was fiercely anti-gargoyle like Katharine,[1] but had a change of heart as she, too, vowed to protect the eggs. Along with Finnella, she did not go to Avalon, instead choosing to stay on Earth and guard the Grimorum Arcanorum, stating that, "a woman alone might run into trouble: two women can cause plenty of it".[16] When a Timedancing Brooklyn arrived in Scotland in 997, Mary recognized him as one of the gargoyles from Goliath's clan. Together, the three of them joined Constantine's enemies, led by King Kenneth III. She and Finella would continue guarding the Grimorum while leaving 997 with Brooklyn.[7] In October 1996, Mary (or a woman resembling her) attended a Halloween party atop The Eyrie Building.[11] Voiced by Kath Soucie.
The Archmage [ edit ]
The Archmage was an evil sorcerer and an enemy of the gargoyle clan at Castle Wyvern. He was defeated by Goliath,[4] but his future self saved him from his fall in a perpetual time paradox—as his future self existed in the 1990s, and rescued his past self, without any explanation for how the loop began. The Archmage continues to live through this loop, despite his later defeat, after rescuing himself in the past.
The Archmage was encouraged to conquer the world, but first had to retrieve the trio of occult objects he most desired, the "three keys to power" in the series, comprising: the ancient book of magic spells named the Grimorum Arcanorum, the Phoenix Gate and the Eye of Odin; as well as to conquer Avalon as a base of operations. His future self secured an alliance with the Weird Sisters to watch out for the mystical artifacts, as well as guide the destinies of Demona and Macbeth, advising them to bend Oberon's law of non-interference.
The "Future Archmage" brought his past self nearly a thousand years into the future, where his past self swallowed the Grimorum in order for the spellbook to be brought onto the island ("human magic" is not allowed on Avalon by law; consuming it created a "legal loophole"), thus making him very powerful. However, he was defeated by Goliath, who stripped him of the Eye of Odin, causing the Grimorum to turn the Archmage into a pile of dust.[16] During some unspecified time, the enhanced Archmage undertook additional time travel, thus meeting a Timedancing Brooklyn.[38] He was voiced by David Warner.
The Captain of the Guard [ edit ]
The Captain of the Guard was the head of Castle Wyvern's garrison in 994. Resentful of the lack of appreciation that he and the gargoyles received for defending the castle, he struck a deal with Demona and the Vikings to have the castle sacked, forcing out the humans and leaving only him and the gargoyles. The plan included sabotage, such as severing bowstrings, but backfired when the Viking leader Hakon shattered most of the gargoyles during the day after the siege, prompting Goliath and the survivors (Hudson, Brooklyn, Broadway, Lexington and Bronx) to go after the Vikings for revenge. The Captain was killed along with Hakon in 994, when they fell off a cliff,[1] but their spirits remained trapped in the area as punishment for their actions. When Goliath returned to the Wyvern site a thousand years later, the Captain and Hakon, in spirit form, attempted to steal Goliath's lifeforce and thus free themselves from the area. He stopped midway, after realizing his guilt for his treachery, and instead turned on Hakon. Having atoned for his sins, his spirit was set free to rest in peace.[39] Voiced by Ed Gilbert.
Residents of New York [ edit ]
Elisa Maza [ edit ]
Elisa Maza is a NYPD detective, friend of the Gargoyles,[1] and later love interest for Goliath. Voiced by Salli Richardson. Her family also figures prominently in the series:
Peter Maza Peter Maza is Elisa's father.[13] A Native American who was once an NYPD officer. He never argues with Elisa once she sets her mind on something.[40] Voiced by Michael Horse. Diane Maza Diane Maza is Elisa's mother[13] whose ethnicity was Nigerian. She went to a Nigerian village to get in touch with her roots as a griot.[41] Voiced by Nichelle Nichols. Derek Maza Derek Maza is Elisa's brother [13] who was a cop and also a pilot. He was later transformed into the mutate Talon by Xanatos. Voiced by Rocky Carroll. Beth Maza Beth Maza is Elisa's sister[13] who is a student of the fictional University of Flagstaff.[40] Voiced by Monica Allison in The Cage and Roxanne Beckford in Cloud Fathers.
Macbeth [ edit ]
Macbeth, former King of Scotland, was loosely based on the Shakespearean character as well as the real historical figure, depicted with a white chin curtain beard in the 1990s main storyline of the series. He is eternally bound to Demona and is forced to live in conflict with her forever; neither one can die until one simultaneously kills the other.[25] Initially an enemy of the gargoyles, he later becomes their ally. He tried to claim the sword Excalibur for himself but did not succeed in doing this. After being impressed with Macbeth's skills and honorable behavior King Arthur offered him a place in the New Round Table has would create. Macbeth, while honored, refused this offer because he felt he could not submit to Arthur's rule as he was a self made man. But, Macbeth offered his services should there ever be a crisis. He sometimes uses the alias Lennox Macduff. (after two characters in the Shakespeare play). He was voiced by John Rhys-Davies.
Macbeth's family [ edit ]
Duncan Duncan was the ancient king of Scotland, Macbeth's foe, and the second to wear the Hunter mask. He secretly ordered the death of Macbeth's father, and destroyed the few remaining gargoyles in Scotland. It was because of Duncan that the Weird Sisters forged the spell between Macbeth and Demona. He was defeated by Macbeth.[25] Voiced by Neil Dickson. Gillecomgain Gillecomgain started the Hunter line as part of his revenge on Demona, who had scarred his face as a child. As an assassin under Duncan, he started a spree of terror and violence that included assassinating Macbeth's father, Findláech of Moray, and nearly wiping out all of the gargoyles in Scotland. After betraying Duncan, he was defeated by both Macbeth and Demona.[25] Young Gillecomgain was voiced by Cam Clarke, and the older Gillecomgain was voiced by Jim Cummings. Gruoch Macbeth's beloved in ancient Scotland, Gruoch is pressured into marriage to Gillecomgain by her father Boite. When Gillecomgain is revealed as the Hunter and slain, she happily marries her love and becomes Lady Macbeth, Queen of Scotland. They are later severed when Macbeth "dies" and begins his centuries-long struggle with Demona.[25] Lulach Lulach was the son of Gruoch and (historically) stepson of Macbeth (though this is not made explicit on the series). Ascends to the throne of Scotland after his father's "death." His ultimate fate is not shown, but it is implied that he is slain by Duncan's son, Canmore, in a later battle.[25] Voiced by Jeff Bennett. Boite The father of Gruoch and friend to Macbeth's father Findláech, Boite serves as an advisor to his son-in-law, Macbeth, throughout his life. Boite counseled Macbeth to destroy the remaining gargoyles (a plan which Macbeth rejected), ultimately leading to Demona and Macbeth's falling-out.[25] Voiced by Ed Gilbert. Canmore Son of Duncan, Canmore is only a boy when his father is slain in battle by Macbeth. Canmore is banished to England, but returns to Scotland as a grown man for revenge. Like his father before him, Canmore takes up the mask of the Hunter and declares war upon the gargoyles. He "slays" Macbeth in single combat, unaware of Macbeth's immortality. It is implied that he later has Macbeth's son, Lulach, killed. Canmore's descendants each become the Hunter in turn, hunting Demona through the centuries.[25] Voiced by Neil Dickson.
The Pack [ edit ]
The Pack (Wolf, Jackal, Hyena, Coyote, and formerly Fox and Dingo, voiced by Clancy Brown, Matt Frewer, Cree Summer, Jonathan Frakes, Laura San Giacomo and Jim Cummings, respectively) are mercenaries organized by Xanatos first to be TV stars, then to hunt gargoyles. They were subsequently "upgraded" into more deadly forms through the use of genetic and cybernetic enhancements.[6] Unlike the others, Coyote is a robot constructed in Xanatos' image, sent to infiltrate and lead the Pack. Lexington harbors a bitter hatred against them.[10] Dingo, over time, misses the adulation he received as a fictional hero while on television — and to both atone for his own past misdeeds, and to actually be a real-world hero, joins Robyn Canmore's Redemption Squad after allowing the cybernetic being Matrix to join with him to achieve the ability to be a real hero.
Fox [ edit ]
Fox (born with the name Janine Renard)[42] had her name legally changed. Her birth surname, "Renard", is the French word for "fox". She is the daughter of entrepreneur and business magnate Halcyon Renard, and his ex-wife Anastasia Renard (the name used by Titania, "Queen of the Third Race", while in the guise of a mortal human woman.).[17] A former mercenary and former leader of The Pack, Fox quit the group and married David Xanatos.[37] They later had a son, Alexander Fox Xanatos.[17] Like many villains of the series, Fox initially had no love for the Gargoyles, seeing them as pawns to be manipulated; however, after they saved Alex, she changed her opinion and went out of her way to make amends—particularly to Lexington, who she had once hurt. She was voiced by an uncredited Laura San Giacomo.
Tony Dracon [ edit ]
Tony Dracon is an organized crime figure in New York,[13] Dracon knows about the Manhattan Clan that often foil his plans,[43] and has a score to settle with Elisa. He often clashes with Goliath and Broadway.[44] In his last appearance, he was imprisoned with Czech gangster Brod.[45] He was voiced by Richard Grieco.
Glasses Glasses is one of the associates of Tony Dracon. He was voiced by Rocky Carroll. Pal Joey Pal Joey is the other associate of Tony Dracon.[13]
Margot Yale and Brendan Quarters [ edit ]
Margot Yale and Brendan Quarters are a yuppie couple who have the misfortune of running into the gargoyles often.[1] Margot became the assistant district attorney of one of the New York City boroughs, and spoke out against the gargoyles in a heated televised public debate with Macbeth, who defended them. During the Halloween Party at the top of the Eyrie Building, she berated Brendan for dressing as a Gargoyle (as other partygoers had done). Brendan later came across Goliath, injured, and sent for a doctor.[11] Margot is voiced by Marina Sirtis, and later by Tress MacNeille in Season 3. Brendan is voiced by Pat Fraley.
Jeffrey Robbins [ edit ]
Jeffery Robbins is a blind author, a former Vietnam Vet, and a friend of Hudson. He helps Hudson find Macbeth. Afterward, he taught Hudson how to read, and decided to write a book based on the Scrolls of Merlin which he called The Sword and the Staff.[46] When Demona unleashes a spell to turn the citizens of Manhattan to stone by broadcasting the spell on all television channels, Hudson and the clan visit Robbins and discover that blind people are immune to the spell.[25]
During the Halloween of 1996, Robbins admitted to being aware that Hudson is a Gargoyle—due to the late night visits, Scottish accent, scents of leather and concrete, and Hudson's refusal to shake his hand.[11] (The scene was based on a similar one from a Goliath Chronicles episode).[47]
Robbins helps a blind Hudson recover his eyesight after discovering Hudson is a gargoyle.[48] Voiced by Paul Winfield |
at night would have been novel and would, therefore, have been more likely to attract people with inquisitive minds.
Other research with adults has similarly found night owls to be brighter. One study showed that evening types among US Air Force recruits were significantly more able to think laterally than morning types, even when they were evaluated in the morning. A University of Southampton study found that night owls had larger mean incomes and were more likely to have a comfortable home, a non-manual job and access to a car.
The study also found that night owls' school achievement was rated lower than that of larks, by about 8 per cent. The researchers suggested that evening types might be adversely affected by morning school schedules.
Among famous larks are George W Bush (reportedly always in bed by 10), Thomas Edison, Napoleon, Condoleezza Rice, who always wakes at 4.30 in the morning, and Ernest Hemingway.
"It is an interesting study," said Professor Jim Horne, of Loughborough University. "Evening types tend to be the more extrovert creative types, the poets, artists and inventors, while the morning types are the deducers, as often seen with civil servants and accountants.
"We have looked at morning and evening types and we found that personalities tended to be different. Evening types were more social, more people-oriented. They will probably be good at cryptic crosswords, while morning types go for the more logical ones."NOTE: Four years ago on this date, the Time Lord and I officially tied the knot. I wrote the piece below last fall, as The Calculus Diaries was coming out, but it didn't really seem to fit anywhere --too "math-y" for the mainstream, too intensely personal for your average science publication, and honestly, still kind of a work in progress. But in the spirit of the blog as "writing lab," it seems appropriate to post it here, on our fourth anniversary, as a way of saying thanks to the man who irrevocably changed my life... for the better. Here's to many more years to come.
Shortly after becoming engaged, my now-husband and I drove from a conference in San Francisco to our new home in Los Angeles via the scenic route along the Pacific Coast Highway. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel just north of Malibu and found ourselves admiring the brilliant orange, red, and purple hues stretching across the darkening horizon, savoring the peaceful sound of ocean waves lapping against the shore.
Against this idyllic Hallmark moment, Sean put his arms around me, pressed his cheek to mine, and gently whispered, “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?”
A Fourier transform is a mathematical equation that takes a complex wave of any kind – water, sound, light, even the gravitational waves that permeate the fabric of space time – and breaks it down into its component parts to reveal the full spectrum of “colors” that are otherwise hidden from human perception.
Another woman might have been taken aback by Sean injecting a bit of cold hard math into the warm hues of a romantic ocean sunset – talk about over-analyzing the scene and spoiling the mood! Me? I found it charming, yet another intriguing color in the spectrum that makes up this multifaceted man with whom I have chosen to share my life.
My husband is a theoretical physicist. He spends his days pondering big questions about space, time, and the origins of the universe. It’s not just Fourier transforms that lurk in the nooks and crannies of our marriage. Our pillow talk includes animated discussions about Boltzmann brains, the rules of time travel, poker, phase transitions, and the possibility of a multiverse: the notion that there are an infinite number of universes out there, beyond our ken, perhaps containing carbon copies of ourselves – the same, and yet somehow different.
I have issues with this concept, especially when I’m sleepy: all those universes filled with doppelgangers cluttering up the landscape just strikes me as crowded and untidy. But Sean wrestles with these questions all the time, and is adamant in his defense. “It’s infinity,” he reassures me. “It’s not like we’ll run out of room!” I guess the multiverse has unlimited storage space.
I wasn’t looking to fall in love, and never imagined I would be a wife. Years of failed relationships had convinced me that I had no gift for making love work. My romantic calculations seemed doomed to failure, always slightly off, never quite yielding the right combination, no matter how intricately I manipulated the numbers.
By the time Sean entered my orbit, my heart had been broken into little pieces and reassembled so many times, I was convinced the telltale cracks would never fully heal. I gave up on dating, buried myself in work and told myself it was better this way. I built a thick wall around my heart and guarded the perimeter zealously.
Love stole back into my life, ninja-like, while I was looking the other way. Sean is a scientist, and I am a science writer, but our day-to-day lives were like parallel lines that never met. Our paths didn’t cross until we discovered each other’s blogs online. We quickly formed an online friendship, both recognizing a kindred spirit across the vast expanse of Cyberspace. Two months and many emails later, we arranged to meet over dinner at a physics conference in Dallas.
Physicists are often unfairly characterized as absent-minded geniuses, socially inept, with zero fashion sense, a la Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. It's an exaggeration, but there is a tiny element of truth to that. So I was pleasantly surprised when a tall, lanky man with boyish good looks and an engaging smile appeared in the hotel bar, sporting jeans and a casual-yet-chic jacket. This was not your stereotypical physicist.
He ordered a martini. “I’d like to taste the vermouth,” he instructed the bartender. (He is a man who takes his cocktails seriously.) We chatted about science, art, music, and books, with the odd foray into personal details and more philosophical musings. A first date is usually fraught with self-conscious anxiety, as each person strives to present only the most flattering colors in their personal spectrum -- preferably through a soft-focus lens. But we had an instant rapport, an easy familiarity from our electronic exchanges that translated effortlessly into “meat space.” By the end of the evening, I was smitten, and happily, the feeling was mutual.
We defied the geographical distance, racking up countless frequent flyer miles. Six months after that first encounter, he proposed, and a year later, I found myself married and living in sunny southern California. I felt as if I’d stepped into an alternate universe where the calculations of love had finally worked out in my favor. I had become my own doppelganger.
With my new life came a new appreciation for the secret language of scientists: mathematics. Like many people, I had steadfastly avoided all things math since high school. My eyes glazed over at the merest glimpse of an equation. I was convinced it was irrelevant to my life – or at the very least, unnecessary.
But now that life featured a man who left technical papers scattered about the house, filled with mysterious symbols that might encode the secrets of the universe. Our living room boasted a white board with a constantly changing parade of scrawled equations, and our groaning bookshelves now included massive tomes on quantum mechanics and general relativity.
The deep, technical aspects of his work was the one part of Sean’s life that was truly closed to me, although as someone who writes about physics for a living, I certainly grasped the basic concepts -- far more than the average non-physicist. But if I wanted to appreciate the full spectrum of the man I’d married, I would have to learn a little bit more of his language. So I resolved to overcome my longstanding kneejerk rejection of all things numerical and teach myself the basics of calculus.
Sean was patience personified during my quest, explaining basic concepts, leaving practice problems on our white board every morning for me to solve, and artfully dodging the occasional bit of metaphorical heaved crockery whenever I hit a frustrating obstacle (“Integrate that!”). The frustration was real: Our communication gap when it came to math was a yawning chasm at the outset. Often I didn’t even know how to phrase my questions in a way he could comprehend.
Slowly, surely, that gap began to close as he helped me see that equations were all around me. We found calculus in the rides at Disneyland, and the exquisite architecture of Antoni Gaudi. We went to Vegas, learned to shoot craps, and Sean tutored me in the calculus of probability (and a spot of game theory for good measure). Even our quest to buy a house became fodder for exploration.
It turns out that the world is filled with hidden connections, recurring patterns, and intricate details that can only be seen through math-colored glasses. Those abstract symbols hold meaning. How could I ever have thought it was irrelevant?
This is what I have learned from loving a physicist. Real math isn’t some cold, dead set of rules to be memorized and blindly followed. The act of devising a calculus problem from your observations of the world around you – and then solving it – is as much a creative endeavor as writing a novel or composing a symphony. It isn’t easy, but there is genuine pleasure to be found in making the effort.
As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.
Does mathematically analyzing a sunset, or the ocean waves, make either any less romantic? Not to me. It only enhances my sense of wonder. When we listen to the rhythmic cycle of waves crashing on the shore, we can hear those waves because our brains break apart that signal to identify the basic “ingredients.” And every time we gaze at a sunset —a spectacular orange-red, or a soft pinkish glow—our brain has taken a Fourier transform so we can fully appreciate those hues.
I will never listen to ocean waves or view the setting sun in quite the same way again. I looked out over the water that evening and saw a picture-perfect ocean sunset, but there was so much more that I missed. Sean looked out onto the same scene and saw the rich complexity of nature expressed in mathematical symbols, the fundamental abstract order lying just beneath the surface. And through his eyes, I can now catch a glimpse of that hidden world -- proof that love can transform you just as surely as the Fourier equation transforms a seemingly simple ray of white light into shimmering technicolor.
Happy anniversary, Time Lord!
UPDATE: Was running around doing anniversary stuff all day yesterday, but as a commenter points out, I failed to identify xkcd, Randal Munroe's brilliant Webcomic, as the source for the two cartoons. Usually I link to image sources somewhere in the text, but failed this time. Although if you didn't recognize the source, you really should be reading xkcd on a regular basis. He updates three times a week. Go! Read him!
Wedding photo by Jen Kerker Photography. And the video -- for those who didn't click through to YouTube -- was an award-winning entry to a UK jobs site ad campaign, believe it or not: reed.co.uk's "Love Mondays" series.Five years ago today, IU football coach Terry Hoeppner died of cancer. At the time of Hoeppner's death, it was extremely sad but hardly a surprise. Hep's battle with cancer began on December 17, 2005, shortly after the end of his first season as IU's head coach, when he had surgery to remove a brain tumor. On September 12, 2006, Hoeppner announced that he would be missing two weeks for a follow-up surgery. He returned two weeks later, and finished the 2006 season on the sidelines, but essentially, that was it. Hoeppner missed spring practice, and on June 15, 2007, just four days before he died, IU announced that Bill Lynch would coach the Hoosiers in 2007.
It's difficult to know what Hoeppner's legacy would be today if he had lived and had been able to continue as IU's coach. On one hand, IU has long been regarded as a coaching graveyard, if you'll pardon the expression in this context. The last IU coach to leave IU for a better job was Bo McMillin in 1947 (the Detroit Lions), and even Bill Mallory, the most successful IU coach since McMillin, ultimately was fired. The odds were against Hoeppner simply because of where he coached. Still, it's not hard to imagine that he would have been successful. Hoeppner was from Indiana. He had head coaching experience and came from the cradle of coaches, Miami University, a school that had produced two of IU's most successful coaches, John Pont and Bill Mallory. Perhaps alone among his Division I-A peers, Hep dreamed of being the head football coach at IU. His charisma and enthusiastic representation of the program actually had people talking about IU football.
After a rough 4-7/1-7 season in 2005, IU began 2006 with a 2-0 record, although the Hoosiers needed a big comeback to win at Ball State. During Hep's absence, with Lynch at the helm, IU dropped winnable home games to Southern Illinois and Connecticut to drop to 2-2. In Hoeppner's first game back, IU lost badly at home to Wisconsin to fall to 2-3. With a road trip to Illinois looming, followed by a home game against a very good Iowa team, the season appeared to be coming to a quick end. This feeling was further enhanced when IU fell behind 25-7 at Illinois, where IU had not won since 1979. Instead, the Hoosiers rallied and beat the Illini on an Austin Starr field goal at the gun. The next week, IU upset #15 Iowa, and suddenly, IU was 4-3 and in the bowl hunt for the first time in over a decade. On October 28, IU hammered Michigan State 46-21 in a game that the Hoosiers led 44-7 before calling the dogs off, and IU, at 5-4, needed just one more win to become bowl eligible. It didn't happen, of course. IU lost badly at Minnesota, lost badly at home to #2 Michigan, and at Purdue, IU intercepted Curtis Painter four times, but the Hoosiers couldn't get out of their own way, and lost 28-17. That was Hep's last game as IU's coach. The season was IU's 13th straight without a postseason bid, but the 3-5 Big Ten record was IU's best in five years, and nearly every key contributor was returning for 2007.
It's easy to dwell on how things could have been different. Would IU have lost the SIU and UConn games in 2006 had Hep been on the sideline? Just one of those wins would have sent IU to a warm weather bowl in 2006. Would Hep have done even better than 7-5 with the talented 2007 squad? Could he have kept Kellen Lewis in line? Could he have taken IU beyond the realm of minor bowls? It's all unknown and unknowable. It's possible that he wouldn't have done well. It's possible that he would have done better than Cam Cameron and Gerry Dinardo, but perhaps by now, in his eighth season, he would be where Bill Mallory was in the early 1990s, respected but hearing some grumbling about whether IU could ever break out of the middle of the pack.
I wish we had been given the opportunity to find out, but regardless, Hoeppner's short tenure at IU had a lasting impact. Most significantly, during Hoeppner's tenure IU finally raised the funds to enclose the north end zone of Memorial Stadium. That project had been on campus master plans for years, but with Hep's enthusiastic leadership of the program, it finally happened. Hopefully, Hep's old friend Kevin Wilson can use the enhanced facilities to turn IU football into the winning program that Hep dreamed of building.Well, with the Alex Lewis news from Sunday morning, you needed good news this afternoon. I am here to bring it to you right now!
Congrats to client Brett Maher @brett_maher on signing w New York Jets! — Robert Roche (@rsrsports) May 12, 2013
Maher, who was undrafted in the 2014 NFL Draft, was in New York for a tryout camp this weekend. The Jets had signed Nick Folk in March and had also added Derek Dimke in April, obviously setting up a nice training camp battle we will be watching closely.
Also, this is a friendly reminder about the "Rex Ryan Foot Fetish". Hey, that's just another reason he'll love Brett.
Maher, who hails from Kearney, was 20 for 27 in field goals and 49 for 50 on extra points in the 2013 campaign for a 109 point total. In 2012, he wasn't even named a Lou Groza finalist, yet was the B1G kicker of the year.
For insight on the New York Jets, please visit Gang Green Nation.Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is looking for big ideas A government-led summit on the future of Australia has led to renewed calls for a republic and the end of the British monarch as the head of state. Australia's foreign minister Stephen Smith said a split from the British monarchy was "inevitable". Prime Minister Kevin Rudd invited 1,000 people, including actors Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman, to the two-day summit to brainstorm ideas. Aboriginal issues and climate change are also on the Australia 2020 agenda. The meeting, which started on Saturday in the capital Canberra, has brought together Australia's best and brightest brains with the aim of plotting the country's future trajectory. Delegate cheers A move towards a republic is one of the main ideas being put forward, with the panel on governance originally agreeing on a 12-year target to have an Australian head of state. But the government's home affairs minister, Bob Debus, challenged the group to agree to a shorter time frame - a Republic by 2010 which drew cheers from many delegates. Mr Rudd, whose election in November ended almost 12 years of conservative rule, is a longstanding republican but he has said he does not regard it as a high priority. On Sunday, Mr Smith said while the centre-left Labour government favoured a split from the country's former colonial power, it was not an urgent matter. "I regard it as inevitable. I don't see it occurring in 2010," he told Australia's Network Ten. "It's one of those things I think the nation will attend to in due course." In the weeks leading up to the summit, radio talk shows invited listeners to call with ideas and about 9,000 messages were sent to the Australia 2020 website. Final proposals will be delivered to the government but there is no certainty any will be implemented. Setting 10 themes for discussion, Mr Rudd said: "The old way of governing has long been creaking and groaning. "Some of these ideas we will be able to embrace, others we will not, and some we will take in part and change."
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StumbleUpon What are these?With just around $32.8 million in cap space before handling their in-house free agents, the Lions have room to make moves. How many moves they make, however, depends on what needs the team will prioritize after free agency kicks off in two weeks time.
Detroit could potentially be in need of a new starting guard, right tackle and wide receiver. Whereas the former two positions could be solved by re-signing Larry Warford and Riley Reiff, the latter seems to hinge on a very different and unique set of circumstances.
Anquan Boldin was a vital part of the team’s success on offense. He was the team’s most targeted receiver in the red zone, and arguably their most reliable pass catcher when the team needed a completion. Another season of football might not be in the 14-year veteran’s future, though, and that means Detroit could be in search of a replacement.
Career stats:
2012: 15 games - 104 targets, 64 receptions, 626 receiving yards, 4 touchdowns
2013: 16 games - 139 targets, 94 receptions, 1,079 receiving yards, 2 touchdowns
2014: 14 games - 93 targets, 57 receptions, 715 receiving yards, 6 touchdowns
2015: 10 games - 60 targets, 36 receptions, 408 receiving yards, 3 touchdowns
2016: 11 games - 42 targets, 29 receptions, 416 receiving yards, 3 touchdowns
Should Boldin retire, the Lions depth at wide receiver is either halfway out the door or too inexperienced to fulfill Boldin’s 2016 role. Andre Roberts is an unrestricted free agent, TJ Jones is likely to return to camp as an exclusive rights free agent, Jared Abbrederis was signed as a flyer and Jace Billingsley, even though his time is coming, has no experience.
Detroit and Kendall Wright makes sense in case Boldin makes that decision to not return.
ESPN’s Bill Barnwell brought some credence to this match earlier this month:
Wright isn't a big name, but as a third wideout in an offense that loves to go three-wide and throw short passes, Wright's agility makes him a solid fit. He caught 94 passes in 2013 and looked to be on the verge of a Jarvis Landry-style career, but Wright fell out of favor in Tennessee and eventually landed in a scheme that didn't play to his strengths under Mike Mularkey. The Titans ran three-WR formations a league-low 422 times in 2016, while the Lions had the NFL's fourth-highest mark (732 snaps). Wright won't have the blocking ability of Anquan Boldin, but he should be a more dynamic receiver with upside.
Barnwell’s stat digging reveals something more important than just the possible fit Wright would be in Detroit: The Lions go three-wide a lot. Jones and Tate lined up 879 and 866 times respectively, but Boldin’s 830 snaps would be something significant to replace.
Why he’s the Wright fit
I couldn’t help myself.
As mentioned by Barnwell, Wright isn’t the physical blocker Boldin is—in fact, he’s not much of a blocker at all, 67 of his 308 snaps last season were on run plays—but he’s as effective a slot receiver as the Lions could land in free agency. Options like Victor Cruz and DeSean Jackson will garner much more attention and interest because of their names, but would probably be out of Detroit's budget—more so in the case of Jackson.
In Wright, the Lions could nab a former first-round pick that simply fell out of favor in Tennessee when there was a coaching change. Wright’s most productive season, the 2013 season where he totaled 94 receptions and 1,079 receiving yards, was impressive, but situated behind those numbers is a part of Wright’s game that meshes really well with the Lions offensive scheme: his ability to make plays happen after the catch. In 2013, Wright’s 596 yards after the catch placed him eighth among all players.
In 2014, Wright’s most productive season from a scoring standpoint, his eight red zone targets resulted in 5 receptions—all of them good for touchdowns. His shiftiness and burst make him a dangerous target all over the field, but in Detroit, Wright would find a red zone role where Boldin thrived in 2016 and Wright has shown the ability to be productive in the past.
His hands are another reliable aspect of his game and would serve him well as the team's slot receiver. He's dropped only 16 passes through his five NFL seasons and never posted a drop rate above five percent in a season. Now, five percent isn’t the highest benchmark to set, but keep in mind that his time in Tennessee overlapped with the likes of Jake Locker, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Zach Mettenberger and Charlie Whitehurst, none of which are exactly the benchmark for throwing accuracy either.
Why it just ain’t Wright
Last time, I promise.
As mentioned earlier, Detroit has cap space, and they have plenty of areas to upgrade before they address the wide receiver position. Eric Ebron is as pseudo a wide receiver as a tight end can be, and if the team decides to prioritize acquiring a more in-line traditional tight end, Ebron could be utilized in a similar way as to how Boldin was in 2016, thus alleviating the need to find an immediate replacement for Boldin’s snaps and targets.
After signing Marvin Jones to a five year, $40 million deal, Lions GM Bob Quinn may be less inclined to invest in upgrading a position he did so a year ago at this time. And that would be fine, so long as they have a contingency plan--whether that be the aforementioned idea or maybe using draft capital to bring in a young, cost-controlled option.
The Verdict
If Boldin splits to enjoy the retired life—which, at this point, how could you blame him if he did?—Wright seems like a sensible option for Detroit to pursue in free agency.
At 27, Wright is still young, and his skill set fits nicely for the role Detroit would want him to fill. According to Spotrac.com, Wright’s market value is somewhere around $7.1 million per year, but I’m not sure his price tag will be much more expensive than that. Big names I mentioned earlier like Cruz and Jackson could earn sizable contracts, but other options like Kamar Aiken and Kenny Stills seem to fit the profile of receivers Wright will be lumped into and thus receive similar compensation.
A lot of dominoes must fall into place, and it's dependent upon a unique set of circumstances with Boldin’s future up in the air, but should those circumstances become a reality, the Lions will need to shore up their depth at receiver; Kendall Wright would make for a sure upgrade over the depth beyond Boldin, and at 27 years old, he could solidify the slot position for the foreseeable future.
And, come on, he’s got all the Wright moves.A Pflugerville woman is recovering today from injuries sustained when a car struck her during the Austin Marathon.
Lani Nguyen Martinez, 31, had passed the 17-mile marker of the 26.2-mile race Sunday when she was hit from behind on Foster Lane, between Great Northern Boulevard and Shoal Creek Boulevard.
Nguyen Martinez was running in the center of the marked-off runners’ lane when she went down just before 11 a.m. A middle-of-the-pack marathoner, she was looking forward to the next water station, staffed by volunteers of the Down Syndrome Association, because she was running for charity for the organization.
“I saw a runner look back at me, and wondered what he was looking at,” she said. “All of the sudden I just felt impact and the back of my head hit the hood. I remember seeing a flash of part of the car and then I rolled off and hit the pavement.”
Runners and bystanders came to her aid. An ambulance transported her to North Austin Medical Center, where she was treated for bruises, a concussion and a neck strain and released a few hours later.
“I woke up today feeling like I got hit by a car, then thought ‘Oh wait, I did,'” the billing analyst for Apple Inc. said. “I’m banged up and have a lot of headaches, but for once I’m not sore from running.”
Nguyen Martinez finished last year’s marathon, and plans to finish this year’s, too, as soon as doctors clear her to run again. Austin Marathon officials told her they would give her a finisher’s medal when she completes the race.
“So instead of my hospital wristband it’ll be the medal,” she said.
She’ll also still qualify for her Austin Distance Challenge finisher’s jacket, according to Iram Leon, president of Austin Runners Club, which awards the prize to runners who finish each in the series of six races.
“I’m a little frustrated, but at the same time at least it was just me and not a group of runners, and I came out with nothing broken. I feel blessed to be here,” she said.
Conley Sports, which puts on the race, could not immediately be reached for comment.
We’re checking to find out if charges have been filed against the driver of the car.The Pet Shop Boys are pulling out all the stops with their Catalogue: 1985-2012 reissues series, revisiting all their studio albums on the Parlophone label with two- and three-disc special editions that feature the remastered original CDs packaged with lavish booklets and tons of bonus material. Neil and Chris's first six albums were reissued in 2001 with extra 'Further listening' discs and those are being remastered for re-release soon so first out of the Catalogue gate is 1999's Nightlife. Notable for the Kylie duet In Denial and the camp classic New York City Boy, it's an album that's heavy on electronics and was written in tandem with the Closer To Heaven musical so it has a bit of a schizophrenic feel – veering from the thundering disco opener For Your Own Good to the beautiful melancholy of You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk – but the play on darkness and light is really interesting.If ever a PSB album was ripe for reevaluation it's Release, which came out in 2002 and underperformed everywhere except Germany. It was like nothing they'd ever done before, heavy on guitars (a lot of which were actually synthesised, although Johnny Marr from The Smiths strummed in the studio for real), very laid-back, not a dance floor banger within earshot. It's also rather lovely, boasting such sublime tracks as London and The Night I Fell In Love.Released three years later, Fundamental was true to its title – very Pet Shop Boys in the epic disco of The Sodom And Gomorrah Show, the poignancy of Casanova In Hell and the droll brilliance of I'm With Stupid, all wrapped up in a lavish Trevor Horn production. All three albums have been masterfully remastered for extra bite and brightness. The accompanying booklets are brilliant, featuring essays that place each album in the context of the PSB pantheon, plus Neil and Chris riffing on every track. And the extra discs (two each for Nightlife and Release and one for Fundamental) are an embarrassment of riches, collating demos, discarded tracks, remixes, even ringtones.Some gems: the Bee Gees-channelling Nightlife title track that somehow never made it on to the album, three duets with Elton John, the Marvin Gaye-sampling Between Two Islands and the hilarious Kander and Ebb pastiche of Tall Thin Man where Tennant mickey-takes musical theatre (“Oklahoma! is still too bloody long”). Rating: 5/5 Nightlife, Release and Fundamental are out now on Parlophone Words by Simon ButtonIn his latest Twitter tirade, US president-elect Donald Trump rebuked CNN for reporting that he will continue to work as an executive producer for Celebrity Apprentice when he becomes president, a day after one of his top advisers defended him for keeping the role.
Trump received extensive criticism when the story emerged that he would be continuing to work on the reality TV show when he moves into the White House. On Saturday, however, he took to Twitter to vociferously deny the reports.
READ MORE: Democrats outraged as Trump may keep ‘Apprentice’ credit
“I have NOTHING to do with The Apprentice except for fact that I conceived it with Mark B [Burnett] & have a big stake in it. Will devote ZERO TIME!” he said, “Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are rediculous [sic] & untrue – FAKE NEWS!”
I have NOTHING to do with The Apprentice except for fact that I conceived it with Mark B & have a big stake in it. Will devote ZERO TIME! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2016
Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue - FAKE NEWS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2016
Trump starred in the show for seven seasons before bowing out in February 2015, ahead of launching his presidential bid. His claim that he will devote zero time to the program differs entirely from what his chief campaign adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Friday.
Speaking to CNN, Conway compared Trump working to Obama golfing. “Were we so concerned about the hours and hours and hours spent on the golf course of the current president? I mean presidents have a right to do things in their spare time,” she said.
READ MORE: Bernie Sanders congratulates union leader at center of Trump twitterstorm
“Whether it's President Obama or President Donald Trump, the idea that these men are going to be all work and nothing else all the time is just unrealistic because it's never happened in our lifetimes,” Conway explained, adding that work is Trump’s hobby.
Late last month, the president-elect said on Twitter that he would leave his business “in total” so he could fully focus on running the country. “I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
READ MORE: Disgraced ex-NBC ‘fake news’ journalist Brian Williams on crusade against false reporting
Questions still remain, however, over whether he will keep royalties from The Apprentice and if he will still be listed in the credits.
This is far from the first time Trump has turned his ire on main stream media outlets such as CNN. Throughout his presidential campaign, he was continuously critical of companies such as CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. As recently as last week, he cited lack of accuracy and honor in the press as the reason why he tweets so much.I bet you clicked on this thinking it would be some sort of funny tongue in cheek comparison of something LIKE a chicken and a duck.. but not really a chicken and a duck.
Right?
Well, wrong. I am LITERALLY comparing chickens and ducks.
“Why?” you ask?
Here’s the thing. I was walking up from the field this evening, after putting everyone away for the night and it struck me how very, very different these fowl friends of our are.
Like apples and oranges different. Or apples and carburetors even.
Take chickens.
Chickens are well behaved, orderly little birds. While they may peck amongst them, they are usually pretty well behaved with humans. They file one by one out of their hut in the morning and go about their days business looking for bugs and bits to snack on.
Come dusk, the handsome rooster files everyone back into the coop, settles them on their perches and stands waiting for the door to be shut away from predators.
Very orderly. Pleasant. Responsible birds.
Ducks on the other hand.
Total chaos. Every moment of their life is spent in a state between panic and aggression. They don’t know if they are coming or going, defending or attacking. they stumble, and slip, and they run in a herd, much like you would imagine lemmings would.
They have to be herded back into their coop at night, and herded out again in the morning.
And they complain. About everything. They are the noisy, gossiping neighbour who is never, ever happy with a given situation.
Ducks and chickens... we “think” they are the same. I mean, eggs from both. Meat from both.
A whole lot of “fertilizer” from both.
But if I had the choice, I would take a chicken, any day.
Oh, and don’t get me started on Rabbits. They manifest that bitter cat like personality, except with fuzzy ears.As a computer scientist I'm always looking to improve my knowledge of the subject. There are lots of great sources of information available online, but nothing really beats the depth of knowledge that you can find in a book. It is possible to get the best of both worlds though, as many books are now available online in full, and free of charge!
Below is a selection of 25 of the best free computer science books that I've found online, with a brief description of each one. Where the book is also available in printed form I've included a link to Amazon, using my affiliate link. If you'd like to buy one of the books but would rather not help towards the cost of running this blog then you can search for the books directly on the Amazon site.
Become An X coder A guide to MacOSX development with Cocoa using Objective-C. The book contains lots of examples and detailed screenshots.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric Raymond's brilliant book about Open Source software, and its impact on software development projects. View on Amazon
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Java Also available in C#, Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua, C++ and PHP versions. View on Amazon
Dive Into Accessibility Another Mark Pilgrim guide, on creating accessible websites.
Dive Into Greasemonkey Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. Mark Pilgrim presents lots of example code and case studies in this book.
Getting Real The influential book from 37 Signals which describes a smaller, faster, and better way to build web based software.
Getting Started with awk Awk is the perfect tool for many system admin tasks. This book contains loads of great examples, and will turn you into an awk master in no time!
Git Magic A complete guide to the popular distributed version control software Git, from Linus Torvolds.
GPU Gems NVidia's book on GPU graphics programming covers topics such as lighting, shadows, modelling materials, and performance issues. View on Amazon
How to Design Programs An introduction to computer programming and designing programs with the Scheme programming language. View on Amazon
Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4 From the book itself: C++ is taught "The Qt way", with an emphasis on design patterns, and re-use of open source libraries and tools. By the end of the book, the reader should have a deep understanding of both |
the son said he does not know, he was then shot. This is the story we are getting from Deraa.
Our correspondent added that the latest developments reveal how quickly the situation in Deraa was deteriorating.
"In the past few days, Syrian television has been putting people on television saying that they are confessing that they belong to terrorist groups and that they were given money and weapons from different people in Deraa, including the Imam of the Omari mosque," she said.
"We are told by residents that the imam was always asking for calm, for dialogue, and when I went to Deraa and I met him myself, and he did not say that people should carry guns or should fire at security forces, he was adamant that people have the right to protest, that things need to change in Syria.
"He said something to me I will not forget "for the first time in my life, I feel like a free man"... so people in Deraa are shocked that these accusations are being levelled at the Sheik. They see him as a voice of moderation, and when they see someone like him is being targetted by security forces, they are scared and do not know what is coming next," our correspondent added.
Friday's violence
At least 62 people were killed in nationwide clashes on Friday when tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, activists said, while authorities said nine members of the security forces were killed by "terrorist groups".
Pro-democracy protests were held against Bashar al-Assad's government in most cities and major towns after Muslim weekly prayers, as on past Fridays for a month.
The protesters pledged new countrywide demonstrations from Sunday at the start of what they called "the week of breaking the siege".
Demonstrations would take place on Sunday in Deraa, which has been besieged by security forces since Monday along with the Damascus suburb of Douma.
Activists also called for rallies on Monday in Damascus, Tuesday in the northern towns of Baniyas and Jableh, Wednesday in Homs, Talbiseh and in Tall Kalakh on the border with Lebanon, and night vigils on Thursday.
Friday's deadly Day of Rage protests gripped many Syrian cities and towns, the London-based rights group, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP news agency, with 33 people reported killed in Deraa alone.
The Committee of the Martyrs of the 15 March Revolution gave a slightly lower overall death toll for Friday, saying 56 people were killed, including 33 in Deraa and 25 in the central province of Homs.
The group said in a statement after the bloodshed that a total of 582 people have been killed since protests erupted on March 15 by security forces firing live rounds and tear gas.
The military said five soldiers were killed and two captured by "armed terrorists" in the Deraa region of southern Syria, while three soldiers were killed when gunmen tried to cut off the highway linking Homs to Hama.
A policeman in Deraa was also among the dead, the military said, adding that dozens of assailants were killed and wounded and 156 arrested.
Assets blocked
As the violence raged, the US blocked the assets of Assad's brother, Maher al-Assad, who commands Syria's feared Fourth Armoured Division. The US also announced sanctions against several other senior officials and Syria's intelligence services.
"The United States strongly condemns the Syrian government's continued use of violence and intimidation against the Syrian people," the White House said in a statement on Friday.
EU ambassadors in Brussels launched preparations for an embargo on the sale of weapons and equipment that might be used for internal repression and decided to put on the brakes on trade deals with Syria.
The 27-nation bloc will also "urgently consider further appropriate and targeted measures with the aim of achieving an immediate change of policy by the Syrian leadership", said EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council endorsed a US call for an investigative mission on the bloodshed as it voted in favour of a resolution condemning the crackdown.
But Assad's government reiterated its running ban on demonstrations, despite lifting a decades-old law barring them earlier this month, as the Muslim Brotherhood accused it of "genocide".
Adnan Mahmud, the Syrian information minister, told AFP the crackdown would continue, saying the "authorities are determined to restore security, stability and peace to the citizens".
The interior ministry urged Syrians not to join the protests and warned that unauthorised rallies would not be tolerated.
Friday's protests also rocked the coastal city of Baniyas, where about 10,000 turned out to shout "liberty, solidarity with Deraa" and "down with the regime," activists said.
Some 15,000 people also protested in the majority Kurdish city of Qamishli and neighbouring towns.Malidoma Somé was given his name by his village elders while he was still in his mother’s womb. Malidoma means one who “makes friends with the stranger/enemy.” Thus, Malidoma’s destiny was written before he was born, although he was left to discover the details on his own.
When Malidoma was a small boy he was taken from his village by a Jesuit priest and brought to a boarding school more than 100 miles away, where the Jesuits were hoping to build a cadre of African missionaries to help them convert the native population. There Malidoma (now called Patrice) remained for 15 years of education, indoctrination and various forms of abuse—physical, sexual, and cultural—until he escaped at the age of 19 and managed to find his way back to his village. Now, however, he was a stranger to his own people—unable to speak the language, uneducated in the ways of village life, and an object of suspicion because of his Western education and ability to read and write. In a final attempt to re-integrate him to village life, he was allowed to go on a month-long initiation with about 60 other village boys—most of them much younger than he. To the surprise of some of the elders, Malidoma survived initiation and returned to the village ready for the responsibilities of an adult Dagara male. But shortly thereafter, the village elders came again to Malidoma and told him that he would fulfill his destiny by living his life in the West as a teacher of African ways and wisdom. “You must go and let yourself be swallowed,” they told him. “We cannot survive if you stay here.”
So Malidoma traveled to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, where he allowed himself “to be swallowed” in the ways of Western education. He earned three bachelor’s degrees and a master’s in four years, along with an airline ticket and a scholarship to the Sorbonne in France. There he earned another master’s degree and a doctorate in political science before coming to the United States and enrolling at Brandeis University, Massachusetts. Six years later, he graduated with a third master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. Malidoma then taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for three years.
For the past 25 years, Malidoma has lived in the United States, teaching workshops and conducting divinations, rituals, and traditional Dagara ceremonies for those in the West. He is the author of several books, including Of Water and the Spirit (an autobiography), Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, and The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community.
Interviewed by Leslee Goodman.
(Continued…)Florida only hosted three official visitors this past weekend but one of those official visitors was a prospect who is currently committed to the Gators in-state rival, Florida State.
That prospect was receiver C.J. Worton (6-0, 170, Homestead, FL South Dade) who had a flawless visit to Gainesville.
“It was awesome,” Worton said. “I can’t really say a best part because everything was good. Everything truthfully was good from the moment I got there to the moment I left. I was kind of in awe the whole time.”
Worton was hosted by Florida’s freshman quarterback on his visit and spent most of the time with Will Grier as well as a certain defensive back who is committed to Florida but was on his official visit as well.
“I was hanging out with Quincy Wilson a lot,” Worton said. “Will Grier was my host and he’s a great guy and we hung out a lot as well. He was recruiting me a good bit about how there is a great thing going on at Florida right now with Kurt Roper as the new offensive coordinator. He was telling that he needs receivers like myself to help make him look good on the field.”
While on his official visit Worton had the chance to sit down and talk football with new Florida offensive coordinator Kurt Roper who was explaining his offensive scheme to Worton.
“Coach Roper was telling me that with his offensive I can be a big impact on the field,” Worton said. “He said that he’s going to run three receivers and one tight end a lot and that he needs slot receivers to run in the middle of the field and find the holes in the defense and sitting down there.”
After sitting down with Kurt Roper the South Dade receiver spoke at length with Will Muschamp about the state of the Gators program.
“Coach Muschamp is awesome, he’s a great guy and I spent a lot of time with him talking,” Worton said. “He was telling me that there is good thing going on at Florida right now and that they struggled last year and it was a humbling experience for him and that the defense has always been really good but that they need help on offense.”
Despite an impressive visit to Florida this past weekend Worton still says he’s committed to the Noles but the Gators gave him something to think about.
“I’m still committed to FSU,” Worton said. “I like Florida a lot and I could see myself playing there in the future. I plan to make a final decision before signing day. It’s going to be real hard to pick between the schools.”
This coming week is the last week college coaches can visit a prospect at his home and two coaches plan to visit Worton plus the receiver has an official left on the table.
“I plan to visit FSU next weekend and maybe Oregon on Sunday if I can fit the visit in,” Worton said. “That visit will tell a lot as well as the in-home visits next week because Jimbo Fisher visits me on Monday and coach Muschamp on Thursday.”Where others may have seen nothing but a vacant auto body shop, Chas Wagner saw an opportunity to create a temporary place for people to showcase their artwork, play sports, and gather for events.
Wagner, a Pittsburgh native who moved to the Boston area nearly four years ago, is in the midst of transforming the former Unlimited Auto Body Inc. building on Somerville Avenue in Somerville into what he’s dubbed “The Clubhouse” — a multi-use space that features an outdoor basketball court.
Wagner will be occupying the space until the fall of 2017. He envisions scheduling “pop-up” events like basketball tournaments with food trucks, outdoor spin classes, indoor art galleries, yoga classes, and movie nights using a projector and a shop wall as a big screen.
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The garage is slated to come down to make way for condominiums. Wagner cut a deal with the building owner to occupy it until then.
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“If we didn’t take it over, it was going to sit here vacant, on one of the main drags in Somerville,” said Wagner. “We’re just trying to give something back to the community.”
Wagner is working with 2,600 square feet of space outside and roughly 2,400 square feet inside the garage.
Cambridge artist Caleb Neelon applied his craft and turned the bland brick exterior of the garage into a colorful mural with bursts of red, blue, green, and purple.
Wagner then drilled a basketball hoop into the wall outside with a crocheted net created by Cara Kuball. Maria Molteni and a collective called the New Craft Artists in Action added the finishing touches, and painted onto the ground a colorful court.
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The shop’s interior is mostly vacant. Wagner spruced it up the best he could, scrubbing away years worth of oil marks that stained the gray floors. He installed a projector overhead in the main portion of the space, allowing for videos to be shown on a blank wall.
In the smaller portion of the auto body shop, where workers used to paint vehicles, Wagner has on display sports-themed items and artwork. Custom-made wooden hockey sticks lean carefully against a wall on one side, while pennants and sports magazines and journals line homemade shelves on the other. A table in the middle hosts T-shirts and sweatshirts that read, “Somerville” and “617,” the local area code.
He wants art walls. He sees dance parties. He pictures a marketplace for local retailers or food vendors.
“It’s going to be a sports and art hub,” said Wagner, a former Runkeeper employee who now runs an e-commerce business called Rally Sports. “It’s all about collaboration.”
While Wagner anticipates opening up “The Clubhouse” in May, he still has some hurdles to jump. Because the garage is zoned as a commercial space and Wagner is looking to change its use, the building needs to meet certain fire and safety codes before the public can go inside.
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He has applied for a certificate of occupancy, but changes need to be made to the property before he gets clearance, according to Max MacCarthy, small business liaison for the city of Somerville.
City officials have supported the endeavor but want to make sure it’s done safely and legally.
“We are working with him right now in developing ways to solve some of the challenges,” said MacCarthy. “I’m confident that, working with him, we can figure out the issues. If we can find solutions, we think it would be a great addition to the city.”
MacCarthy said that as Wagner wades through the paperwork, he can seal off the building and utilize the outdoor space for events.
Already, the space has attracted attention. On Wednesday, as the sun beat down on the basketball court, bringing to life the bright colors of the mural on the garage, two curious passersby stopped to examine the building.
The artwork drew them in. But as Wagner explained his vision of what the garage will become, they stuck around and shot hoops.
“It’s such a beautiful space, and I love the idea of how it’s interactive,” said Kasha Rigby, who took a couple of shots on the basketball hoop outside, making both. “It’s opening the doors to your community and making it playful and beautiful.”
Steve Annear/Globe Staff Inside “The Clubhouse” in Somerville
Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannearMerchants may soon begin to impose a surcharge each time a customer pays with a credit card, a practice Visa Inc. (V) and MasterCard Inc. (MA) currently prohibit.
Retailers have long pushed for the right to charge extra to customers who pay with plastic versus cash, saying the practice would help defray their costs for accepting credit and debit cards. Merchants pay transaction fees on each card swipe.
But Visa and MasterCard, which operate the world's largest card-payments networks, ban the practice in the U.S. as part of rules they require retailers to follow to accept their cards. That ban is expected to be eliminated or altered, though, under a potential settlement of long-standing lawsuits retailers have brought against the card networks and numerous banks that issue their cards.
[More from WSJ.com: America Has Too Many Teachers]
"Merchants prefer complete flexibility, and in their eyes relaxing some of these rules like surcharging [is] something that will be permanent," said Glenn Fodor, an analyst with Morgan Stanley.
Settlement discussions have taken place over the past year, and Mr. Fodor and other analysts have predicted a deal would be reached before a September trial date for the litigation, which includes more than 50 lawsuits filed since 2005. The suits have been consolidated in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.
A settlement is likely to include changes to Visa and MasterCard rules, including the card companies' ban against surcharges, analysts have said.
A spokeswoman for Visa and a spokesman for MasterCard declined to comment on the status of discussions Friday. Several attorneys involved in the case also declined to comment. A settlement could be finalized as soon as this week, Bloomberg News reported last week.
[Click here to check current credit card offers, including rates and terms.]
The lawsuits, filed by merchants including Kroger Co. (KR), Payless ShoeSource and Safeway Inc. (SWY) and several trade groups, contend the card giants engage in anticompetitive behavior by conspiring over the fees, known as interchange, that retailers pay every time a consumer swipes a card.
Last year a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law known as the Durbin amendment took effect, cutting in half the swipe fees on debit-card transactions. However, it left credit-card swipe fees untouched.
So-called swipe fees are set by Visa and MasterCard but collected as revenue by the banks that issue their cards. In addition to the card networks, the suits name large banks including Bank of America Corp. (BAC), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Citigroup Inc. (C) and Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC).
[More from WSJ.com: Obama to Push Extension of Middle-Class Tax Cuts]
"We continue to believe that a settlement is the likeliest outcome as neither side wants a drawn-out legal battle and the defendants don't want to risk having to pay treble damages if they lose," Sanjay Sakhrani, an analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, wrote in a research note last month.
A settlement is likely to have three components: payments by the defendants ranging from $8 billion to $12 billion, a temporary reduction in interchange fees and the elimination of the no-surcharge rule, according to KBW.
Retail experts say the ability to assess a surcharge would have a longer-term benefit to merchants than a temporary reduction in fees or monetary payments. The rationale is the practice could exert pressure on Visa and MasterCard to make more permanent cuts to card fees. The networks rely on transaction volume for revenue, and the threat of losing transaction volume if consumers stopped using their cards because of surcharges may prompt the card networks to lower costs.
[Related: Saving Money: 5 Things You Can Live Without]
"If there were surcharges in the market place…the networks, who are primarily responsible for establishing prices for acceptance, would bring their product costs down," said Mark Horwedel, a former executive at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) who handled payments-related matters and is now chief executive officer of the Merchant Advisory Group, which represents merchants in payments-industry issues.
Visa and MasterCard in the past have loosened other rules that have been a thorn in the side of merchants. Under a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department last year, the two companies agreed to drop rules that prohibit merchants from offering discounts and other perks to steer customers to lower-cost cards or cash. The card companies have been more agreeable to discounting as opposed to surcharges because the former practice is seen as being less punitive to consumers.
[More from WSJ.com: Chevron Pushes Ahead With North Sea Investment]
In the U.S., 10 states, including New York and California, have laws prohibiting surcharges, according to Visa. It is unclear whether merchants in those states would be able to engage in the practice if Visa and MasterCard allow it.
A change in Visa's and MasterCard's rules also wouldn't affect purchases made with cards from American Express Co. (AXP) and Discover Financial Services (DFS), which aren't part of the litigation.
American Express's contracts discourage surcharges but allow it so long as merchants also surcharge customers who pay with other payment networks' cards, a spokeswoman said. Discover has a similar policy. This has meant that merchants who accept all four card brands have been unable to surcharge because of Visa and MasterCard rules prohibiting surcharges on their cards.About
In 6 months one man, his bicycle and 25kg of odds and ends can get himself into a lot of mischief in the land of the rising sun. Beginning and ending in the biggest metropolis on earth, small town farm hand Daniel Doughty with his trusting steed plunges head first into the deep end as he tackles all 47 of Japan’s prefectures in Tokyo to Tokyo. Where around every corner uncertainty awaits, not to mention mountains, bustling cities, nudists, typhoons, the rainy season, 100% humidity, culture clashes, language barriers, volcanoes, macaque attacks, sexy donuts, drivers of unscrupulous quality, grizzly bears, earthquakes, hobo-sexuals, battered communities, starvation, hangovers, dicey bowel movements, nuclear fallout, more mountains and an all round general fear of the unknown.
A tale of up’s and downs in quite literally every sense considering both the country’s geographic detail and its emotional fortitude. But one of untimely reward, within a country of whom’s people are kind, gracious and accommodating, descended from a culture rich in history and steeped in tradition. A people that even in the face of equally debilitating man-made and natural disasters have shown true spirit and courage, the adventurers first-hand accounts being all too evident of this. So saddle up or saddle down, this is Tokyo to Tokyo.
Early days on the road.
In 2014 I would cycle close to 7000 miles around Japan; absorbing its culture, its people, its rugged and awe-inspiring terrain, its inclement climes and the sheer and utter devastation that has dumfounded its north-eastern coastline. For the journey I would cycle to every single of the country’s 47 prefectures, both starting and finishing in Tokyo, hence the book’s title ‘Tokyo to Tokyo.’ It is a feat no westerner has achieved to date, and more exclusively one that no one has ever written a book about. An untapped niche perhaps thus far, in a world whereby cycle tour writing appears to be on the rise and inducing many a big draw amongst the most budding and fully bloomed of cyclists the world over. This will be my first feature length book, I’ve blogged on a small number of accounts about my expedition at my Tokyo-to-Tokyo and Facebook website’s whereby I‘ve garnered a small, yet warm following. Yet most of the orgasmic fodder I feel is only really applicable for the confides of the book itself.
Now I’m no Michael Palin or Bill Bryson, and I’m certainly no Ranulph Fiennes, but I do like to think that I have my own unique blend of writing, slightly earthy for some maybe, and perhaps the reason as to why many a publishers and agents weren’t willing to take the bait. But there is a story here nonetheless, and I can’t wait for you to read it. And with me at the reigns this book can be everything I want it to be without conviction or any vicious in-house editorial advice that may well go against my very principles as a writer. Please see the following link for a couple of sample chapters from the book of what you can expect from me. Please bear in mind this is a draft so any deficiencies will in time hopefully be sifted, yet for now I hope you find the words encouraging enough to help me out on this next chapter of my journey.
https://tokyo-to-tokyo.com/the-book/
Thus far I have finished writing my second draft, to aid further development towards publication I will next need to hire a professional copy-editor to siphon out any grammatical anomalies and to make the words read as they are intended in fully blown and publically acceptable English.
Sex sells: Meanwhile with the copy-editor hard at work I will also need to hire the skills of a cover designer to make my book look easy on the eye from both afar and up close and personal.
Piecing the puzzle together: Once the copy-editor has helped to polish my writings I will send the manuscript off to an internal designer to be typeset, they are responsible for what I consider to be the science part. Font, layout, paragraphing, pictures, page numbering, etc.
Under the microscope: With the text all in order and if funds allow I shall send the book to a professional proofreader who will then meticulously scan the book for any last errors before the grand finale.
It’s alive!!! : The words go to the printers and viola, I've published a book. No, I’m sorry, we’ve published a book!!
This is the general gist of the plan anyway for a book that I hope can be with us by October 2016 of which will then mark the anniversary of finishing the actual bicycle ride in Tokyo some 2 years previously. Reading between the lines however there are going to be a multitude of fine hurdles and tribulations to counter along the way and to be honest it will probably cost more than 2k and run on a little longer than expected, but whatever I can raise will be a massive help and will aid the project towards publication. If any extra is raised it will be put towards the first run of books to be printed with better paper, more photographs and an all-round more superior finish.
Regardless of the outcome, I thank you all kindly for taking the time to consider my proposal and if you have any questions then please feel free to get in touch.
Kind Regards,
Daniel Doughty.He doesn’t know what club he’ll suit up for in the fall, and isn't totally sure what position he'll play for the U.S. when the Copa America begins June 3, but DeAndre Yedlin is ready for every possibility.
The 22-year-old spent last season on loan from Tottenham to Sunderland, who he helped survive an English Premier League relegation battle after turning into a regular starter late in the season.
Sunderland are now apparently trying to make Yedlin’s deal permanent, with English outlets reporting last week that the club had made Tottenham a transfer offer for the former Seattle Sounders defender. SI.com followed up on those reports on Monday, when Grant Wahl reported that “there’s a very real possibility” that Spurs sell Yedlin, who joined Tottenham in January 2015, to Sunderland.
Yedlin told reporters on Monday from the USMNT’s pre-Copa America Centenario camp in Dallas that he’d be open to returning to the Black Cats.
“Nothing’s come up yet, but, like I said before, I wouldn’t mind going back to Sunderland, whether it be on loan or whatever,” he said. “I think it’s a great club and I had a great experience there, so I’d be open to that. But as of now nothing has come up, so right now I’m just focusing on Copa America and doing the best that we can in this tournament.”
One of the questions facing the USMNT ahead of the tournament is just where Yedlin will line up. Used a right back during his tenure with the Sounders and at Sunderland, Yedlin has played the position for the national team, but has also played on the wing. Head coach Jurgen Klinsmann started Yedlin on the wing in the US’s World Cup qualifying loss at Guatemala on March 25, but moved him to right back for the 4-0 home win against los Chapines four days later. Yedlin started at right back in the US’s 3-1 friendly win at Puerto Rico on Sunday.
"Obviously you saw over the last two years – especially since the World Cup in Brazil – we had our issues on both right back and left back positions," Klinsmann said. "Right now we have a very good option coming through the ranks with DeAndre Yedlin, who [Sunday] against Puerto Rico played a good game, breaking through at Sunderland as a right back but still learning the position in a tactical way in terms of the awareness – what happens behind him if he goes forward, and so on.
"DeAndre is, for us, also always an option maybe to bring in as a winger, but right now we hope that he is going into the Copa America as a right back with a lot of confidence."
“I’m looking forward to playing wherever Jurgen decides to put me,” Yedlin said said. “I don’t know where that will be, but wherever it is on the field, I’m looking forward to playing there.”Titanium dioxide is a common additive in many food, personal care, and other consumer products used by people, which after use can enter the sewage system, and subsequently enter the environment as treated effluent discharged to surface waters or biosolids applied to agricultural land, incinerated wastes, or landfill solids. This study quantifies the amount of titanium in common food products, derives estimates of human exposure to dietary (nano-) TiO 2, and discusses the impact of the nanoscale fraction of TiO 2 entering the environment. The foods with the highest content of TiO 2 included candies, sweets and chewing gums. Among personal care products, toothpastes and select sunscreens contained 1% to >10% titanium by weight. While some other crèmes contained titanium, despite being colored white, most shampoos, deodorants, and shaving creams contained the lowest levels of titanium (<0.01 μg/mg). For several high-consumption pharmaceuticals, the titanium content ranged from below the instrument detection limit (0.0001 μg Ti/mg) to a high of 0.014 μg Ti/mg. Electron microscopy and stability testing of food-grade TiO 2 (E171) suggests that approximately 36% of the particles are less than 100 nm in at least one dimension and that it readily disperses in water as fairly stable colloids. However, filtration of water solubilized consumer products and personal care products indicated that less than 5% of the titanium was able to pass through 0.45 or 0.7 μm pores. Two white paints contained 110 μg Ti/mg while three sealants (i.e., prime coat paint) contained less titanium (25 to 40 μg Ti/mg). This research showed that while many white-colored products contained titanium, it was not a prerequisite. Although several of these product classes contained low amounts of titanium, their widespread use and disposal down the drain and eventually to WWTPs deserves attention. A Monte Carlo human exposure analysis to TiO 2 through foods identified children as having the highest exposures because TiO 2 content of sweets is higher than other food products, and that a typical exposure for a US adult may be on the order of 1 mg Ti per kilogram body weight per day. Thus, because of the millions of tons of titanium based white pigment used annually, testing should focus on food-grade TiO 2 (E171) rather than that adopted in many environmental health and safety tests (i.e., P25), which is used in much lower amounts in products less likely to enter the environment (e.g., catalyst supports, photocatalytic coatings).
Introduction
As a bulk material, titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) is primarily used as a pigment because of its brightness, high refractive index, and resistance to discoloration. The global production of TiO 2 for all uses is in the millions of tons per year. Nearly 70% of all TiO 2 produced is used as a pigment in paints, but it is also used as a pigment in glazes, enamels, plastics, paper, fibers, foods, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and toothpastes [1]. Other TiO 2 uses include antimicrobial applications, catalysts for air and water purification, medical applications, and energy storage. Recently more attention has been given to the use of TiO 2 as a nanomaterial. In 2005 the global production of nanoscale TiO 2 was estimated to be 2000 metric tons worth $70 million [2]; approximately 1300 metric tons were used in personal care products (PCPs) such as topical sunscreens and cosmetics. By 2010 the production had increased to 5000 metric tons, and it is expected to continue to increase until at least 2025 with greater reliance upon nano-size TiO 2 [3]. Consequentially, many sources of nanoscale TiO 2 could result in human exposure and entrance of this material into the environment (air, water, or soil compartments).
TiO 2 -containing materials are produced in a range of primary particle sizes. Many applications of TiO 2 would benefit from smaller primary particle sizes, and the percentage of TiO 2 that is produced in or near the nano range is expected to increase exponentially [4, 5]. TiO 2 nanoparticles are generally synthesized with a crystalline structure (anatase, rutile, or brookite, each of which has unique properties) [6]. The most common procedure for synthesis of TiO 2 nanoparticles utilizes the hydrolysis of titanium (Ti) salts in an acidic solution [7]. Use of chemical vapor condensation or nucleation from sol-gel can control the structure, size, and shape of the TiO 2 nanoparticles [8, 9]. To increase photostability and prevent aggregation, TiO 2 nanomaterials (particles, tubes, wires, etc.) are commonly coated with aluminum, silicon, or polymers [10, 11].
TiO 2 nanomaterials in foods, consumer products, and household products are discharged as feces/urine, washed off of surfaces, or disposed of to sewage that enters wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Although WWTPs are capable of removing the majority of nano-scale and larger-sized TiO 2 from influent sewage, TiO 2 particles measuring between 4 and 30 nm were still found in the treated effluent [2, 12, 13]. These nanomaterials are then released to surface waters, where they can interact with living organisms. One study monitoring TiO 2 nanomaterials found the highest concentrations in river water to be directly downstream of a WWTP [14]. TiO 2 nanomaterials removed from sewage through association with bacteria may still end up in the environment if the biomass is land applied.
Although the release of TiO 2 nanomaterials to the environment has been shown qualitatively, quantification of how much is released is difficult. The same is true for the human exposure, as estimated uptake rates of different types of nanoparticles range from 0 to 8.5% depending on type, size, and shape of the nanoparticles [15, 16]. Because it is impossible to determine all sources or measure the amount of TiO 2 nanomaterials, emissions are often modeled to better predict the impact of TiO 2 nanomaterials on the environment [17].
Toxicity studies mainly report a risk from nanoparticular TiO 2 due to inhalation (inflammation and possible link to asthma), but titania has also been linked to Crohn's disease from gastrointestinal intake and it has been classified as possibly carcinogen [18-21]. However, a risk assessment has not been published yet and care has to be taken when comparing exposure to effect. Not only modifications have been reported to have diverging toxicological properties (anatase is 100 times more toxic than rutile in the nanoparticular form), but also coatings, size and shape modify the toxicity of nanoparticles and only a small number of them have been tested [20, 22]. Once in the environment, even less is known about how TiO 2 nanomaterials affect organisms, although nanosized TiO 2 has been shown to inhibit growth of algae and bioaccumulate in Daphnia magna [23, 24]. However, several studies have indicated that TiO 2 tends to be less hazardous to organisms than other nanomaterials such as multi-wall carbon nanotubes, nano-cerium oxide, and nano-zinc oxide [3, 23]. Previously, primary particle size was generally accepted as a large factor in toxicity, with smaller particles tending to be more toxic. However, recent studies have shown that particle size is only a single (and perhaps minor) factor influencing the toxicity of nanoparticles [24]. Risk assessment of certain nanomaterials is still quite difficult because nanotoxicology studies rarely have enough reliable information on the physicochemical characteristics of the nanoparticles tested [25, 26].
Many fate and transport as well as toxicity studies have used a readily available TiO 2 nanomaterial (Evonik Degusa P25) because the primary crystals are <50 nm in size and uncoated. P25 is advertised as “titanium dioxide without pigment properties”. Based upon information on the manufacturers website P25 is used primarily as a photocatalyst, catalyst carrier, and heat stabilizer for silicon rubber. This material is agglomerated in the dry powder state and readily aggregates to several hundred nanometers in water [27, 28]. However, usage of TiO 2 in the food, beverage, and paint markets dwarfs the usage of P25. For example, food-grade TiO 2 (referred to as E171) is purchased by the ton and is available as synthetic forms of anatase, rutile, and others. Only one study reports the titanium content of a few commercial products [29]; we know very little about size or surface properties E171 forms of these TiO 2 in comparison with the vast amount of data on P25 even though E171 and other commercially used whiteners represent the majority of TiO 2 -containing materials that enter the ecosystem today.Hillary Clinton first came to my attention when she unintentionally threw shade on American housewives back in 1992. Bill was campaigning for the presidency, and she'd been asked why she continued to work as a lawyer while Bill was governor, since it had opened the couple up to accusations about conflicts of interest (accusations that would later morph into the Whitewater investigation). "Well, I supposed I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas," she said, "but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life."
It was clear to me what she meant—she decided to continue down her own path rather than get sidelined into a First Lady role just because she was someone's wife. I found the idea exhilarating, that her goals came first and that she wasn't confined to a ceremonial role. But the nightly news at the time was a cauldron of invective from offended cookie bakers and voters who found her bitchy and overly ambitious.
Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1992 Getty Images
In the full interview, she'd said specifically that she worked as an advocate for women to "assure that women can make the choices, whether it's full-time career, full-time mother |
One unintentional and subtle message of Mars Hill was, “If you want to be part of what Jesus is doing in our city, then you should be here,” Sinnett said. “When we got out of that ethos and into the church-planting realm, I was blown away by the million things Jesus was doing in the city which were unnamed and unbranded but just as spectacular.”
Plasch agreed. “We felt many times we learned that Mars Hill was the only place that knew Jesus and the gospel, and as we started branching out we were like, ‘There are a lot of churches out here that love Jesus,’” she said. “Right off the bat, we really had our eyes opened to a vibrant community of people who love Jesus surrounding this city.”
Mars Hill Remnants
At Trinity West Seattle, the bleeding finally stopped sometime last fall, two years after Mars Hill announced it was closing. The church of 800 that dropped to 400 has crept back up to 550, Fairchild said.
“The first sermon series we picked was 1 Corinthians on purpose,” Fairchild said. “It was called ‘This Beautiful Mess’ because that’s where we were.... We were reading 1 Corinthians and saying, ‘There’s hope for us.’”
The church took a year to heal, intentionally staying away from vision casting, initiative creating, or hype. But they didn’t stay away from serving.
And in that, Trinity West Seattle found that being a local church “made us more nimble,” Fairchild said.
Instead of routing money and resources through central services, Trinity West Seattle has been able to dig right into its neighborhood. Community groups do after-school tutoring with at-risk kids, throw neighborhood parties, care for shut-ins, and hand out bottles of water during summer street fairs.
And not having “an 800-pound gorilla that overshadows every other small- to mid-size work” has been a good thing for networks, Fairchild said. Mars Hill “planted churches without working for a collective approach,” making it easy for smaller churches to feel hurt or passed over, he said.
“Since then, what’s happened is it’s forcing us to talk,” Fairchild said. “There’s no way to do mission work here without working with one another. There has been a necessary movement of repenting from our egos and an effort to say, ‘What would a focus on the kingdom look like?’”
“It has been really challenging and difficult and heartbreaking,” he said, “but also really gloriously beautiful because we work with churches now in ways that would not have been possible had we continued on as Mars Hill.”
At Doxa, where the numbers have climbed from 700 to 1,000 weekly attendees, Vanderstelt sees much the same thing. He started with being “a good spiritual father, caring for the family and building trust that I wasn’t going to leave.”
But at the same time, “we can’t make the church into a hospital,” he said. “We know God has saved us for good works, so we want to help people get healthy so they can walk in the fullness of that.”
The fruit of such reaching out—both giving and accepting help from other churches—has been “one of the beautiful benefits God has brought about through a lot of pain,” he said.
Moving On
“I meet with people all the time that have never heard of Mars Hill,” even those who are interested in faith, Sinnett said. “A few weeks ago, I sat down with a guy at Starbucks who just became a Christian, and he had never heard of Mars Hill.”
Among those who weren’t involved, the storm has essentially run its course.
“Very few people are talking about Mars Hill anymore,” Sinnett said. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t people still working through what happened in their own lives, but in general, Seattle is in a much better spot.”
In fact, Sinnett’s church is “in the best spot we’ve ever been,” he said. Downtown Cornerstone has grown to 700 and has two gatherings—“ironically enough, we meet in one of the old Mars Hill downtown campuses.”
But for Seattle-area pastors, a front-row seat to the implosion of Mars Hill taught lessons that will stick around for a while.
“I’m thankful for what I did learn from Driscoll, from reading a lot of his books and observing what he did right and wrong,” said Faust, who read Vintage Church before taking a congregation in Seattle. Watching Mars Hill collapse “was a holy moment for me. I modeled some of my leadership after him, and I had to look at areas of my life to see where I needed to repent and change my own leadership style.”
Particularly, “if you tell people they need to follow leadership, but don’t give good reasoning or explain things well, it makes people feel coerced.”
He’s far from alone. The introspection is especially sharp among Mars Hill’s former staff pastors.
“To a man, every one of them has struggled with what role of complicity they’ve had in the whole thing,” Fairchild said. “That has been very good for us. I have learned the difference between intent and impact—you can have good intentions, but that doesn’t always translate into helpful, gracious impact.”
The elders from Bellevue and Sammamish “truly repented of their participation in any of the sin,” Vanderstelt said. “There was a deep godly sorrow, a genuine repentance, a real desire to walk out the fruit of repentance.”
In the larger region, “every pastor is saying, ‘Noted,’” Sinnett said. “I am having regular conversations with guys who are saying, “If that’s what it means or takes—or who you become—to get that kind of church, I don’t want it.... It is a total [win] to be faithful to your wife, to love your kids, and to faithfully teach the Bible week after week and shepherd the flock among you.”
Former congregants are also still working through sometimes-painful lessons.
“There is so much I haven’t processed about Mars Hill yet,” Plasch said. “Much of what I learned there was wonderful. But there was an undercurrent or culture that seeped into the way you saw things, and that sometimes skewed the message a little.”
She’s also sifting through Driscoll’s black-and-white convictions, which “seemed to be communicated as law instead of a method to live out a biblical principle.”
Huck didn’t think he’d ever want to be a member of a church again. But recently he and Ashley have started serving in children’s ministry and hosting a community group in their home.
“I’m open to being a member again, where I wasn’t before,” he said. “With the fallout from Mark... I’ve been forced to think through what I’m being taught and if I agree with it. I’m grateful for places where it’s been okay for me to ask those questions and not be rebuked or shut down.”
Some marriages split; others grew stronger. “I’ve seen a lot of divorce,” Huck said. “But [Mars Hill’s troubles] helped [Ashley and me] come closer together because we had to figure out what was important to us.”
Softened by time, Mars Hill’s notoriety has even opened doors to evangelism.
“The drama of Mars Hill going away has allowed me to do a lot of living out my faith outside of my church,” Santana said. “By that I mean, meeting other fellow Christians and nonbelievers who are like, ‘Oh, that church was weird,’ and being able to say, ‘I went to that church. This is my story. This is why I am in Christ.’”
The dimming of the limelight has “allowed people to look past the [Mars Hill] name” and listen to what he has to say, Santana said.
Looking Forward
“More time and space and thought are going to produce a lot of lessons about who the church is and how the Spirit forms the church,” Braga said. “Mark changed the face of Christianity in the United States for this generation. Mars Hill helped popularize the neo-Calvinistic movement and complementarianism. In the early stages, it was a vital component of a return to conservative biblical family ideals.”
In the end, Mars Hill’s final announcement wasn’t optimistic enough. Counting previous campuses and new plants, the megachurch gave way to 15 new churches, not 11. And even though the collapse of Mars Hill left hundreds hurting and soured on the idea of belonging to a church, it also sparked a wave of healthy soul-searching and a realignment of churches with the gospel.
“The story is that Jesus’s church isn’t dependent on any one man,” Sinnett said. “It’s dependent on the risen Savior, who is a mighty God who grows and expands his kingdom through weakness and humility and the preaching of a crucified Savior. He isn’t hindered by a fallen pastor or an imperfect leader or imploded megachurches.”(EU NAVFOR)
Somali pirates may be terrorizing the waters off of East Africa, but maybe they should pick their targets a little more carefully and stop targeting European warships.
Earlier today, some Somali pirates got a little too greedy and attacked the Spanish warship serving as the flagship for the European Union's fleet of ships carrying out a counter-piracy mission off of Somalia.
Needless to say, it wasn't a fair fight.
At first light Thursday, the Spanish warship ESPS Patino had just completed escorting a ship carrying food aid into the Somali capital of Mogadishu. In addition to a counter-piracy effort, the EU's main mission is to escort freighters carrying food from the World Food Programme.
That's when a skiff carrying six pirates sped towards the warship and the pirates began to fire their light-caliber weapons at the ship in an attemp to board it.
The Patino's crew immediately began to fire back in self-defense and launched the ship's helicopter.
The pirates realized they were outgunned and broke away from the attack, but eventually surrendered to the helicopter. But only after first throwing their weapons, ladder and fuel barrels overboard.
Somali pirates often dump their weapons into the ocean in an attempt to avoid detention.
Five of the pirates were injured and two required medical treatment on board the Patino. The crew of the Spanish warship is also looking into the pirates' claim that another pirate was lost overboard during the attack.
Taking on a warship might sound like a unique event but, amazingly, this isn't the first time that Somali pirates have taken on a warship.
In October 2009, a group of pirates attempted to take on the French warship BCR Somme about 250 miles off the coast of Somalia.
They met a similar fate to the pirates involved in today's incident and were detained after their unsuccessful attack.Sonia Dridi / FRANCE 24 | Bernie Sanders supporters Marta and David at the regional campaign headquarters in Richmond, Virginia
Bernie Sanders has delivered one of the biggest surprises of the US presidential race by proving to be a genuine contender for the Democratic nomination. FRANCE 24 met with some of the campaigners helping him take on the Clinton political machine.
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"Going door to door, talking to your neighbours, your friends – that’s what’s going to get Sanders elected," says Peter Clerkin, Sanders’s 35-year-old campaign manager for Virginia, as he motivates his troops.
The team of local supporters, numbering a little more than 50, are gathered in a municipal hall in the state capital Richmond to inaugurate their new headquarters. Clerkin’s speech is interrupted by a chorus of Sanders’s campaign slogan, “Feel the Bern!” followed by a burst of applause. The atmosphere is electric.
Sanders has been dubbed the new political idol of Democratic “Millennials” – in the Iowa caucuses he won 84 percent of the votes among the 17-29 age group – as well as a certain section of white middle-class voters.
At the Virginia HQ, however, people of all ages and backgrounds have turned out to offer their support.
Many are completely new to the world of political campaigning. When Clerkin asks people to raise their hands if this is their first experience in politics, arms shoot up from at least half the people in the room.
‘The American dream hasn’t happened for us’
What they all share is their enthusiasm for the self-proclaimed democratic socialist, as well as a sense that the current system is not working.
Sanders has promised to fix the economy, break up banking giants, end collusion between politicians and the world of finance, provide universal health coverage and make affordable the exorbitant costs of university tuition.
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They are proposals that resonate with many Americans who are struggling to make ends meet. Americans like Marta Powers, one of the millions of Americans working two jobs in order to get by – in her case, as an accountant in an architecture firm and as a seamstress.
Marta and her husband David are busy writing on a large piece of paper on the wall, asking people to list the reasons they support Sanders.
“There are so many people like us who have been working all our lives and the American dream hasn't happened for us,” she says. “We are getting close to retirement ourselves and things have only gotten much, much worse." They are afraid, says Marta, ”that we won't be able to retire with any dignity".
David, who works in a factory, adds: "We have children and we need to have a future to believe in.”
For Jessica, a 31-year-old self-described Sanders “fan”, the senator’s appeal is that “he is very honest” and “supports the people”.
Jessica must use a cane to walk after recently having surgery on her spinal column, and she says she cannot afford certain drugs because she does not have health insurance. This is her first foray into political activism.
“I used to not be into politics at all because I didn't have any faith in them until Bernie Sanders came along,” she says.
Taking on the Clinton political machine
Words like “sincere” and “passionate” are used often by the activists at the Virginia headquarters to describe Sanders – qualities that contrast favourably with the perception many Democrats have of his rival, Hillary Clinton.
When asked about the former first lady, Randy, Jessica’s boyfriend, has only one word for her: "Liar".
The long-running scandal over Clinton’s emails while secretary of state has weighed down the campaign of a candidate already criticised in some quarters for being too artificial and too close to Wall Street.
Dereck Toro, a web designer in his 40s, does not mince his words when it comes to how he feels about Clinton. “She is corrupted,” he says. “She has been in the establishment for too long, she takes a lot of big money. She is tied to corporations and lobbyists.”
He admits that Clinton may have the edge over his preferred candidate when it comes to foreign policy, but says that Sanders has “good judgment. That’s the most important thing." He offers Sanders’s opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion as an example.
Confident that Sanders already has the Democratic nomination sewn up, Dereck sees populist billionaire Donald Trump as the most dangerous opposition – a political “outsider” like Sanders, but from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Winning over minorities
Significant barriers still remain for Sanders, however, not least of which is his standing with minority votes.
Clinton polls well among African Americans, especially in the southern states that will hold their primaries in the coming weeks.
"Sanders doesn't have much of a chance to beat Clinton unless he improves his numbers with non-white voters,” says Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia.
According to Evandra Catherine, a 33-year-old African-American member of the Sanders campaign team, it's only a matter of time until he does just that.
“I think that once African Americans know Bernie Sanders’s civil rights legacy and that he has been fighting for us for the past fifty years, they will start to [come round],” she says.
But there are other hurdles to overcome. Not only does Clinton benefit from the support of the Democratic Party elites, Sanders is seen by many as too left-wing to win a general election in a country where “socialism” has long been a dirty word.
His supporters, encouraged by Sanders’s incredible rise in recent weeks, remain optimistic.
Clerkin says he is impressed by the way people have been energised by the campaign. “I’ve not seen anything like it in politics these last 10 years,” he says. “People are more enthusiastic than Obama supporters were in 2008.”
Nevertheless, Clerkin is always on the lookout for new volunteers to help the cause.
“How many people have your heard saying they like Bernie Sanders, but they don’t think he can win? Come on, it's time to convince them!"By WizardCrab
With new content on the horizon, we're adding a few days to the beginning of our twice-a-year Extra Bonus RP promotion. You’ll get Extra Bonus RP on every purchase from now until March 10th at 7:59 GMT.
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Extra Bonus RP does not apply to mobile payment methods, and because of the advance notice, there will be no refunds for RP purchases made prior to the promotion.CHARLESTON, S.C. — Jay DeMerit says Achilles tendinitis shouldn’t keep him out of the Vancouver Whitecaps’ MLS opener on March 2 at B.C. Place.
The Caps’ captain, who missed half of 2011 with a groin injury, said on Monday he dealt with the Achilles injury all last year but it never kept him out of a game.
It’s flared up in recent days, though, following prolotherapy, which is a nonsurgical injection treatment for ligament and tendon reconstruction. DeMerit has been watching from the sideline as his teammates continue preseason at the College of Charleston soccer field.
“I got some prolotherapy injections into the tendon and there’s been a little bit of an adverse effect I suppose,” he said. “It’s just been a little more sore lately than expected and we’re just trying to ease our way in. We tried to jump back in but it got worse so now it’s just about doing it slowly and get on the bikes and going from there.
“This early on [in a season] you’ve got to err on the side of caution rather than fight through it and make it worse. It wasn’t supposed to take this long, but it is.
“I was hoping that I’d play Wednesday but, if I can’t, I’ll play Saturday and get a full 90 under my belt and be ready to go [for March 2].”
DeMerit said the plan was to be proactive with the Achilles injury this year because prolotherapy had worked so well on his groin last season.
He started 31 regular-season games in 2012, though he limped off the field at the Home Depot Center with a groin pull after the L.A.Galaxy tied their playoff game at 1-1. DeMerit could only watch as Landon Donovan drew a penalty on his replacement, Martin Bonjour, and L.A. went on to the 2-1 win.
If DeMerit isn’t ready to go against Toronto on March 2 then coach Martin Rennie will look to Brad Rusin as a partner for Andy O’Brien in central defence. Rusin signed in January after a season-and-a-half in Denmark. He’s a former player of Rennie’s from the Carolina RailHawks.
O’Brien and Rusin started last Saturday in Vancouver’s 3-2 win here over the Charleston Battery.Get the biggest football stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A lot of things are supposed to feel like trophies in the age of vast squads and oligarchs, when the cartel of big clubs persists in hoovering up almost every available pot. Fourth place, derby wins, official potato snack partners - if you’re not enjoying real success, you need to suck any joy you can get out the game wherever you find it.
And in Newcastle, Alan Pardew leaving will probably make Margaret Thatcher’s death look like a
Pardew has endured a very strange reign in his four years at the club. He’s nearly been relegated, nearly finished in the Champions League spots, and
but has seen off about fifty Sunderland managers.
It was a rollercoaster era of triumph, disaster, Henry Winter being made to swim the Tyne,
, horses getting punched, and f***ing old c**ts being told to shut their noise. For the neutral, they were great times.
Newcastle might ultimately court as much controversy as their departing manager, but it’s probable that the only fair assessment of his reign will come by seeing what happens to his successor.
Like Roy Keane at Sunderland, he may look better in time after a plague of continued failure and mediocrity.
Row Zed:
(Image: Rex)
It would also be harsh to deny that he has faced certain off-pitch challenges. He was thrust into the job after the sacking of a manager popular with both fans and the players, has endured boycotts and protests, and had no control over transfers while his best players have been sold at odd intervals.
Yet in some way, there has been continuity.
The strangest part would seem to be that this chaos has come against the backdrop of Newcastle enjoying a remarkably uncharacteristic period of stability, apparent progression, and sensible deals in the transfer market. Bargains have been found from France and Holland, and the club very quickly returned to a position of never seriously looking like imploding on the pitch.
(Image: Getty)
The signings may owe more to Alan Carr’s dad than the manager, but there should be some credit where it’s due. It’s almost as if Pardew has taken a leaf out of Alex Ferguson and José Mourinho’s book, courting controversy to alleviate the pressure on his team, but taken it to the greatest extreme possible, cultivating an image of a Caligula-esque figure in charge so nobody notices what’s going on on the pitch. Whether by design or not, it seems to have worked to some extent.
As well as the obvious controversy, there were always rumours and suggestions of deeper, darker problems.
The classic anecdote of demanding his fitness coach swapped meals with him because “When you’re the King, you can do anything” seemed completely believable. He had become a bogeyman figure, the kind of man you’d wake up sweating in the middle of the night after having a nightmare that he’d become your mum’s new boyfriend, or even worse, your club’s new manager.
Yet despite that, someone has been prepared to pay actual money for his services. Pardew doesn't exactly fit the Sacchi/Mourinho mould of the analytical, academic manager with no playing career, but it’s equally difficult to imagine him as a player.
Pardew was once watched, applauded, cheered on, perhaps even loved. And now,
His grand gesture may be sincere or not, but either way, we’re likely to get the same rebrand, of going from a hated, arrogant pantomime villain to a man of soul and heart, going back to a club he loves in their hour of need.
Pardew might seem like the most mis-cast, out-of-place new romantic since The Krays hit the cinemas, but it makes a sort of sense.
Like everyone else, doesn’t he just need to be loved? Even if it’ll never be as much as he loves himself.The Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board launched a new ad campaign today, and its message, “Everyone is welcome,” is intended to remind travelers that the Trump administration’s general “Stay the hell away, foreigners!” vibe does not enjoy local support. The video, set to the Father John Misty song “Real Love Baby,” follows a series of bright paper airplanes as they fly over various neighborhoods, revealing the city’s diversity. The tourism board posted the 90-second commercial on its Discover Los Angeles social media accounts this morning with the message, “We believe that what makes us different brings us together. Help Los Angeles share this welcome message with the world.”
As exclusionary policies from Washington send a decidedly unwelcoming message to international visitors, the city is rightly worried about the economic impact of fewer tourists. Don Skeoch, CMO of Discover Los Angeles, told Adweek, “We felt compelled that we had to do something about this to try and mitigate these losses.” The new ad campaign extends an open invitation to potential visitors. It ends by displaying the words: “We welcome everyone” in several languages.
RELATED: Republican John McCain Just Annihilated the Entire Trump Agenda in Four MinutesAnti-Muslim Rhetoric Hits Home: Bias Attack Against NYC Cabdriver
Doug Mataconis · · 21 comments
See, this is why all that anti-Muslim rhetoric isn’t such a good idea:
A city cab driver is in the hospital after being stabbed by a passenger who allegedly asked if he was Muslim, police tell NY1. Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan. Police say the passenger asked the driver, “Are you Muslim?” When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip. The 43-year-old driver was able to lock the passenger in the back of the cab and call 911.
Fortunately, this didn’t end in tragedy.
Update: The New York Times has further details on the incident:
The passenger, Michael Enright, 21, of Brewster, N.Y., hailed the cab at Second Avenue and East 24th Street around 6 p.m. Tuesday, the police said. Twenty blocks north, they said, he slashed and stabbed the 43-year-old driver in his throat, face and arm. The driver, identified by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a drivers’ group, as Ahmed H. Sharif, 43, stopped the cab and approached a police officer on Third Avenue near 42nd Street. Mr. Enright was arrested at the scene. According to the taxi workers’ alliance, Mr. Sharif’s fare started the ride asking him in a friendly way if he was Muslim, whether he was observing Ramadan, and how long he had been in the United States. After falling silent for a few minutes, the passenger began cursing and screaming, and then yelled, “Assalamu alaikum — consider this a checkpoint!” and slashed Mr. Sharif across the neck, and then on the face from his nose to his upper lip, the alliance said. (“Assalamu alaikum” — “peace be with you” — is a traditional Muslim greeting.) Both men were taken to Bellevue Hospital Center. The driver was in stable condition. A law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said Mr. Enright was “very drunk” at the time of the attack. “I feel very sad,” Mr. Sharif said in a statement released by the taxi workers’ alliance. “I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All my four kids were born here. I never feel this hopeless and insecure before.”
Enright is charged with attempted murder as a hate crime and other offenses.Yes, this is another multitasking/app switcher concept video. Why’d I make it? Well one: because they’re fun to do; and two: because every second day you’ll hear someone whine about the lack of ‘actual multitasking’ in iOS, yet most app switching concepts don’t actually attempt to address this complaint. So, taking cues from my imagination and inspiration from current concepts, I began to create and iterate upon a design that is vastly different from the app switching you use every day on your iOS device. Essentially, this post is my attempt to verbalise this design process.
Before I begin though, want to see what the switcher concept would look like on your iPhone 5? Check out this video from your device, to watch an 1136 x 640 demo.
To start, I want to clarify: there is a huge difference between app switching and multitasking. Arguably, Apple’s implementation is closer to the former, as there are limited ways in which you can truly ‘multitask’. Currently in iOS, one ‘active’ app is present on the screen at any given time. Switching to a different app gives it the ‘active’ status, replacing the content that previously filled the screen.
To be honest, the switcher concept is also likely categorised as app switching than multitasking. However, it has some significant differences/advantages, that start to bridge the gap between the two terms. Probably the most beneficial advantage, is it’s ability to allow apps to maintain a ‘semi-active’ status even when not in use. The benefits of such a system are seen in the switcher concept video, where the user is able to switch between the Mail, Haze and Flipboard apps, whilst watching them update live. There are more benefits then simply live updates however. For example, the combination of full app previews, the large icon and name presented underneath each app, make it much more obvious which app you’re switching to, and prepares you for what to expect when revisiting that app. The switcher concept also solves the problem in which the iPhone’s screen is too small to use multiple finger gestures (as the iPad does to switch between apps). By double tapping the home button, you are now in the switcher, and are able to switch between apps in a manner similar to an iPad. Further, it allows for prime positioning of the toggles, brightness and music controls. By separating the controls from the apps, they can now be positioned off to the left and right of the screen, minimising total swipes.
Additionally, a simple but largely useful aspect of the concept is included in the search function: simply type the name of the app you’re after, and it will appear. Yes, I realise spotlight provides system wide search already, but that’s the thing: it searches system wide. The benefit here, is that you’re searching for apps and apps only. This will ostracise apps from other general data, allowing them to be found much quicker. Plus, you’re seeing a live tile at the same time. In a way, this is similar to launchpad for OS X.
As for the music controls, a scrubber was excluded as it would begin to blur the line between the switcher and an actual music app. My opinion, is that the switcher should provide important controls… accidentally start a loud song in the middle of a church service? Use the switcher to pause or lower the volume. Scrubbing through a song isn’t quite as necessary.
As for the actual design, I decided not to go flat (despite it’s vocal supporters) as that clearly isn’t a large part of Apple’s design ethos… yet. Yes, I realise that neither is the grey gradient used in the background. To me however, that is more justifiable. I tried it with multiple variations of Apple’s linen, but of course it just looked awful. Further, the grey gradient aims to give the music controls better visibility, and act in contrast to apps that may have a similar, uniform background colour.
Finally, during the early design stages, there were plans to have favourite apps ‘pinned’ to the start of the stack, allowing them to be accessed quickly. Issues were evident after more thought however. Most obvious, was that the home screen already provides this functionality. Secondly, it would oppose the whole intent of the switcher, which is to provide easy switching between recently used apps.
So that’s it: my thoughts and justification for my concept. If you haven’t seen the video yet, get to it… I would love to hear your feedback on the design. Also if your interested, check out the original Dribble post here!Although Sony managed to significantly reduce its overall losses during the third fiscal quarter, its video game business is still looking worse for wear, with forecasted PS Vita sales in particular once again slashed.It was mainly a reduction in television losses, coupled with stronger movie sales, that pushed Sony closer to profitable territories -- in comparison, Sony's Game division suffered a drop in both sales and profits during the quarter ended December 31, 2012.The company put this down to "the slow penetration of the PlayStation Vita," adding that it recognized the poor sales of the device as a "particularly important issue."As a result, it now estimates that the PS Vita and the PSP together will sell 7.0 million units during the fiscal year ended March 31, 2013.This forecast has been cut multiple times over the last year -- originally Sony estimated it would sell 16 million Vitas and PSPs during this fiscal year. This was then cut down to 12 million, and then once again slashed in November to 10 million In comparison, Sony's PlayStation 3 also saw declining sales during this quarter, with PS3 and PS2 hardware sales down to 6.8 million compared to 7.4 million year-over-year, and software sales down to 61.7 million compared to 68.7 million year-over-year.Sony's plan to bring its game business back into play involves providing users with a more attractive video game software lineup, as well as offering more games through mobile devices.For the quarter ended ended March 31, 2012, Sony's Game division saw revenue of 268.5 billion yen ($2.9 billion), down 15.1 percent year-over-year, and operating income of 4.6 billion yen ($49.1 million), down from 33.8 billion yen ($360.1 million).Overall, the company posted revenues of 1.9 trillion yen ($20.8 billion), up 6.9 percent year-over-year, and losses of 10.8 billion yen ($115.3 million), improved significantly compared to losses of 159.0 billion ($1.7 billion) year-over-year.Image caption Mr Loughner has pleaded not guilty to federal charges
The man accused of killing six people and injuring a US congresswoman in a January shooting rampage in Arizona has been found incompetent to stand trial.
The ruling by US District Judge Larry Burns puts Jared Loughner's prosecution on hold indefinitely.
He will be sent to a federal facility in an effort to restore his competency.
Six died and 13 were injured in the shooting, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Mr Loughner, 21, has pleaded not guilty to the attack.
Watched on television
At the hearing into Mr Loughner's mental competency in Tucson, Arizona on Wednesday, he was removed from the federal court following an outburst.
The defendant lowered his head, loudly mumbling what sounded like "thank you for the freak show. She died in front of me," and was taken away by US marshals, the Associated Press reported.
Judge Larry Burns later allowed Mr Loughner to watch proceedings on a television in another room, then handed down his ruling.
Before Wednesday's hearing, Mr Loughner had spent five weeks in March and April undergoing a mental evaluation by court-appointed experts, and Mr Burns based his ruling on the undisclosed report.
Mr Loughner, who was rejected by the US military and suspended from college over concerns for his mental health, has been held since the 8 January attack on Ms Giffords' constituency event at a store in Tucson, Arizona.
He is charged with 49 federal counts in connection with the attack.
Treatment attempt
Ms Giffords, who was shot in the head, has made what doctors have called a remarkable recovery, but she has yet to appear in public.
Mr Loughner will now be sent for a maximum of four months to a facility where doctors will attempt to treat him.
If he is later deemed competent, the trial will proceed, and if not his detention at the mental health facility can again be extended.
If doctors say they are unable to restore Mr Loughner's competency and a judge rules he cannot be tried, authorities can still petition to have him held.The July 2013 bar exam is exactly two weeks from today. Some of you have been studying your asses off since graduation, and some of you just started studying. In either case, no matter what you do, some of you will fail — perhaps miserably (been there, done that), or perhaps by just a point or two (been there, done that, several times), but still, you’ll fail. But maybe it’s not so bad? Come on, even famous people have failed. No. Just no. It is that bad.
The experience is absolutely mortifying because for the first time in your life, you’ve been beaten by a test. Maybe you studied the “wrong” way, maybe you had an anxiety attack halfway through the test and had to take a few crying breaks in the bathroom, maybe you skipped a bubble on the Scantron sheet and didn’t realize it until time was about to be called. Whatever happened, whatever bar exam horror story you experienced, you failed. You failed, and it’s a mark that will follow you for the rest of your life, even if you eventually pass.
This is a test you do not want to fail: you’ll be disappointed in yourself, and worse yet, even though they’ll say they aren’t, your parents will be disappointed in you. You do not want to fail this test. But if you think you’re going to fail, perhaps you should start preparing yourself for the worst before the exam.
For a great example of how to shrug off your impending bar failure with humor, keep reading…
Knowing how utterly shocked and disappointed your parents will be that their precious little angel somehow failed the bar exam, why not present them with an even worse failure to soften the blow?
That’s exactly what this July 2013 bar examinee did. He hasn’t even taken the test yet, but he’s already preparing himself in epic fashion for his possible fall from grace. Here’s his letter to his parents:
Because when you’ve fathered a future basement baby with a girl whose parents farm cocaine in Colombia for a living, failing the bar exam should be the least of your parents’ worries. Excellent work!
We wish this guy the best of luck on the exam. Hopefully he won’t have to use this letter in November.
Earlier: The Bar Exam: A List of Famous Fail |
state of Georgia, and its overseer, the Department of Natural Resources, were not going to let any of the pigs onto the Georgia mainland, dead or alive. The DNR had been treating the pigs as a dangerous invasive species, killing them off at an aggressive rate. They believed that any pigs let loose on the mainland would spread diseases, breed prolifically, and destroy crops and native species.
The state had approved the scientists’ removal of the pigs — but with plenty of red tape and caveats that Brisbin believed were intended to doom the mission. The scientists were expected to carry out a series of weeks-long quarantines using their own private veterinarians. The operation had only been possible thanks to the help of Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West, the former owner of the island and its only full-time resident, who housed and fed the scientists, let them use her land for their quarantine enclosures, and lent them her barge, and the Eleanor, in which they were now making their getaway.
All 26 of the hogs onboard the barge had passed the quarantine with clean bills of health. But now, Brisbin wasn’t quite sure what to do. The state’s final demand loomed like a brick wall: the DNR had deemed that not a single live Ossabaw Island hog could set foot on the mainland of Georgia. Brisbin had hoped to dock in South Carolina, just a short distance away, but that state’s Department of Natural Resources had denied him; they didn’t want to be part of any operation that angered their neighboring state.
So Brisbin decided to take a risk. “We had one of these big livestock trailers,” Brisbin said, “and we just backed it up on the Ossabaw dock. The pigs walked straight across from that barge across the dock — in the inland waterway, which is not the mainland — into that livestock truck. They never set foot on Georgian ground.”
The truck and its load rumbled off toward their final destination, the University of Missouri, where a full research facility, helmed by Sturek, awaited them. But Brisbin wasn’t done worrying. “Maybe I’m paranoid,” he said, “but I just knew we were gonna pull onto the highway with our tractor-trailer, and the state troopers would be waiting to pull us over and confiscate those pigs.” The troopers never materialized.
No hogs have been brought off the island alive since. Brisbin and Sturek’s pigs have become a potent weapon in the fight to cure some of America’s deadliest diseases, but in recent years their future has become unsure. On the mainland, a micro-culture of farming the pigs has sprung up, raising questions of cross-breeding; their pork has become the darling of some of America’s greatest chefs. And the state of Georgia, meanwhile, has set a course to destroy the last of the breed on the island.
Combined, this unfortunate mixture of good intentions, human folly, and natural selection might have ensured the demise of a precious breed. It could soon be that the only pure remnant of the Ossabaw Island hog — pest, delicacy, and cure — is the dried blood Brisbin and his scientists collected on slips of special paper in 2002.
At 40 square miles, Ossabaw Island is nearly twice the size of Manhattan. Its undeveloped wilderness is crowded with live oak groves, swarms of insects, flat expanses of saltmarsh, the occasional alligator, and thousands of feral hogs.
There are many sun-dappled clearings among the live oaks, palmettos and loblolly pines on Ossabaw Island. But on a sunny day in March, only one held a screaming-mad hog. From inside a heavy steel live-trap cage, the pig eyed its captors suspiciously, every minute or so dropping its head and charging into the side of the cage with the force of a SWAT team battering ram. It made the cage jump a few feet — its captors, too.
The hog’s captors — and soon-to-be executioners — were Eric Esser and Kara Day, both employees of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which owns and oversees this near-deserted island 20 miles south of Savannah. Day, a young wildlife biologist, wore tall rubber field boots to guard against snakes. Esser, a brawny Floridian in a tan DNR polo, carried a.22 pistol and tried to keep his little terrier, Kenya, away from the pig. Both were self-professed lovers of the island. Day was tasked with overseeing the preservation of its native species; Esser had lived on the island alone between 2009 and 2011 as a state employee, fixing roads and overseeing organized hunts and supply shipments. His main job had been killing hogs. For the last 16 years, members of the DNR have spent every day killing them in an effort to control their damage to the island’s ecosystem.
On the day of my visit, Esser and Day gave a tour of the heart-shaped island. It’s no quick job: at 40 square miles, Ossabaw is nearly twice the size of Manhattan. There are few roads here, and even fewer destinations. On the south end is the hunting camp, a ramshackle open-air garage used for skinning and butchering, surrounded by brush-cleared woods for camping. On the north side are the fuel pump, the old slave huts, the utility shed and the clubhouse, a small bed-and-breakfast for temporary visitors. Smack dab in the middle of the island, down old Hell Hole Road (known to kill truck suspensions and throw out backs), is the old plantation, where slaves used to pick sea island cotton.
The rest of Ossabaw is crowded with live oak groves, thickets of palmettos roaring with insect hordes, and flat expanses of salt marsh where alligators lounge beside waterholes the color of over-brewed tea. It’s only a 20-minute boat ride to Ossabaw from the coast, and just 30 miles south as the crow flies from Savannah. But it feels a lot farther away.
Esser had set and baited the steel trap with dried corn less than 24 hours ago. The pig caught inside was a fine example of one of the roughly 5,000 pigs on Ossabaw. Ossabaw hogs are one of the smallest pigs in the world; this one weighed less than 100 pounds, about half the size of the largest pigs on the island. Its wiry pelt was jet black, its snout long, with small, snaggly tusks perfect for rooting (the ripping and tearing of the earth that destroys undergrowth and makes the island’s dirt roads impassable). Its body was compact and squat, its hind legs longer than its front, so that its shoulders stooped like a dog-sized defensive lineman in a full crouch, ready to spring.
The dense little pig was far from what I’d expected: something bigger and nastier, with a bristling spine, bloodshot red eyes and vicious tusks. This is the specter of the common feral hog, considered a scourge from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park of Tennessee to the vineyards of Tuscany. The ultimate survivalists, they are the descendants of domesticated pigs that have adapted extremely well to living in the wild; they breed fast, escape from predators in a flash and eat just about anything in their path. In America, the Department of Agriculture estimates they number 5 million, spread throughout 39 states. They cause roughly $1.5 billion in damages annually.
The large population of unique feral hogs on Ossabaw, though they look different than their cousins on the mainland, behave in the same way: they tear up the forest’s undergrowth and damage roadways with rooting, starve out whitetail deer and turkeys by eating every acorn in sight, and gorge on the eggs of the endangered loggerhead sea turtles that build their nests on Ossabaw’s beaches. The pigs have no natural predators, save for the occasional alligator. So the DNR treats them much the same as the mainland contingent: they’ve enacted a “feral hog eradication procedure, beginning with an immediate goal of reducing the feral hog population to a level at which there is no measurable impact on the environment.” Ostensibly, that ends in a stark equation: zero hogs equals zero impact.
Which is why a handful of DNR employees who live on the island wage a constant war, killing roughly 2,500 hogs every year using rifles, as well as steel cage traps — the next generation of which includes a camera, and can be snapped shut using a smartphone app. During seven public hunts a year on the island, small groups of men with rifles are encouraged to kill as many hogs as they can. (In the 2013-2014 season, they killed 474.)
The DNR reports that their culling has led to fewer, and more healthy, pigs, a 95 percent decrease in sea turtle egg loss, and a much more robust island ecosystem on the whole. By killing 2,500 pigs a year, it claims, based on anecdotal evidence, that it’s mostly just keeping up with the prolific breeding of the hogs.
There is little else to the plan. The DNR doesn’t even know how many pigs remain, since they have not established a population estimate, which conservationists stress as the first step in an effective wildlife management plan.
If the DNR employees walked into certain well-regarded restaurants in Savannah, Charleston, or Atlanta, they might read a menu and see Ossabaw hog listed proudly at the top of the expensive entrees; if they Googled the animal, they might see that it’s being used for research by one of the world’s top heart disease scientists, or that, in 1991, thanks to research done by Brisbin and others, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the “UN of wildlife conservation,” recognized Ossabaws as one of only two breeds of feral hogs worth preserving worldwide.
But if they have discovered these things, they keep it to themselves.
“A hog is a hog is a hog,” Day said. “We’re gonna spend taxpayer dollars on research related to native species.” The Ossabaw Island hog, though it’s been living on this island for some 500 years — beginning 130 years or so before the state of Georgia existed — does not fall into that category.
Some of the pigs killed on the island are eaten by the hunters who shoot them during the public hunts; sometimes the DNR employees who live on the island will eat a pig they trap and shoot. But the population of the island is one or two men — and they can only eat so many hogs. Removing the carcasses of the pigs killed on the island is not a practical option, given the DNR’s limited resources. So, the vast majority of pigs that are shot are left in the woods. This makes most people, Esser and Day included, squirm.
And there are whispers: some say these hogs are the fattest terrestrial animals on earth, or that they are related to the black Iberian hogs raised in Spain and prized for their $100-per-pound pork; some say their fat is healthier than olive oil, that it melts at room temperature. There are rumors about Sturek and Brisbin’s use of Ossabaw hogs in scientific testing, that they hold some sort of miracle cure for diabetes and heart disease. Some say the pigs are too stubbornly a part of the island to ever disappear; others say that if you look closely, you’ll see that they’re already gone.
As for the truth to those claims, well — depends who you’re asking.
The story of Esser, his.22, and the pig in his trap began more than 500 years ago, when Christopher Columbus, on at least one of his voyages to the Americas, brought with him a small breed of hog from the Canary Islands. He left them in Cuba, and Spanish missionaries later brought them to the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas as a renewable food source for their expeditions. On the mainland, the pigs crossbred with other wild pigs; on Ossabaw, they remained unique and quickly adapted to their island home.
Fast forward to 25 years ago, when the state of Georgia purchased the island from Sandy West. West is the white-haired maven of the island, Ossabaw’s most enduring resident. Her family — enormously wealthy from her mother’s stake in Pittsburgh Plate Glass — purchased the island for $150,000 in 1924. They built a 15-bedroom pink stucco mansion among the Spanish moss and threw black-tie affairs with the fellow robber barons who owned other sea islands nearby. West, rambunctious and strong-willed, often slipped away to explore the island. “I learned so much by being outside. So much more than I could learn out of books,” she said in her biography, The Woman Who Saved an Island.
West inherited the island in 1959. She has since fought viciously to preserve it. In the 1960s, she invited artists of all stripes to take part in an artists’ program called the Ossabaw Island Project. In 1970, she started the Genesis Project to give young graduate students in biology and other fields a chance to live in the wild and study a unique ecosystem. “We built treehouses and thatched-roof palm huts and lived off the land,” said Brisbin, the very first member of the Genesis Project, where his lifelong interest in the island’s pigs began.
The study of the island’s animals, and especially its most prolific beast, seemed to suit West. The pigs were her muse. On her estate’s 30 acres, the hogs roamed unafraid; she named them, fed them by hand, and coddled them like children. Occasionally, she caught piglets and raised them in bathtubs in her 23-room mansion. “You’d be in the kitchen,” Brisbin said, “and you’d hear the little clatter of pig hooves going down the hallway, pushing the screen door open and going outside to pee.”
When West’s family fortune ran dry in 1978, spent in large part protecting the island, she sold the island to the state of Georgia. Passing up larger bids from the private sector, she sold to Georgia for $8 million, with the agreement that the island would be made the state’s first “Heritage Preserve.” West was allowed to remain in her mansion and keep her 30 acres until the day she died, secure in the promise that the island would be maintained “in its natural state” by its new owners.
When, in the early 1980s, the state declared Ossabaw’s hogs a destructive invasive species and set about culling them, West was shocked. And angry.
“The agreement said ‘The island shall be kept in its natural state.’ To me and her, that meant pigs!” said Brisbin, now 76 and retired from UGA, and still close friend of West. (West, in poor health, was unavailable for comment.) “I was careless,” Brisbin said sadly. He’d read over the 1978 agreement and told West it was a good deal.
On the island, in one of the state’s dusty 4x4s, Esser told me that the effort to entirely wipe out the pig population was essentially a pipe dream. “I think it’s impossible, to be honest with you. The new technology — night-vision scopes, traps you can set with your cell phone — is helping. But it’s not gonna catch ‘em all.”
Poison, which Brisbin, West and others have fought vigorously against, is not currently legal in the United States, though it has been used successfully on feral hogs in New Zealand, and the US Department of Agriculture has tested its use with discriminating feeder machines that recognize the distinct grunting and rooting of hogs. Those machines could be part of a $20 million federal program aimed at wiping out pigs in two to three states every three to five years.
“Now, I’m not saying we won’t [use poison], if they come up with an effective method,” said David Mixon, the Coastal Region Supervisor of Game Management for the Georgia DNR. “It could be a much easier solution to the problem.” Even then, it would still be tough to deliver the poison to isolated herds in the deep, thickly forested interior of the island.
Not everyone appears content with the killing status quo. Esser said certain people have been known to let hogs out of the traps, though he wouldn’t say who. He and other officers have found and dismantled mysterious traps set on a remote part of the island, which they believe were the work of someone trying to capture hogs alive and take them to the mainland, likely to raise and sell.
There are already around 90 farmers in the Georgia and South Carolina coastal area raising the offspring of Ossabaws that were brought off the island in the 1970s. The state keeps close watch over them, worried at the prospect of escaped pigs turning feral and overwhelming the mainland.
The stance of some DNR employees is that the unique breed of pig loses its unique traits when it’s removed from its unique habitat. It’s a stark nature versus nurture argument. “An Ossabaw hog is an Ossabaw hog until it’s not on Ossabaw Island. Then it’s not,” Day said.
Back in the clearing, the hog stopped charging the cage. Kenya stopped barking. Esser trained his pistol on a small spot just behind the hog’s ear and flicked off the safety. The grove was quiet. Then it wasn’t. Then it was quiet again.
Long after the hog’s brain stopped working, its legs were still kicking up the island’s dirt.
Esser removed the hog from the cage, to Kenya’s delight. She licked the blood off the pig’s head.
“I don’t get a thrill out of that,” Esser said. “After a while it just becomes a job.”
“Especially when you have to kill the piglets, it’s hard,” Day said. “But I just say to myself, ‘Think about the baby sea turtles.'”
With a yell for Kenya to stay, Esser grabbed the hog by its back legs and dragged it into the woods to rot.
There are roughly 5,000 feral hogs on Ossabaw Island. Because they tear up the island’s native flora and starve out its native fauna, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources has enacted an “eradication procedure” that kills approximately 2,500 hogs a year using traps, rifles and pistols. But some scientists urge that the pigs are a unique breed vital for research and testing in the search for cures to type-2 diabetes and heart disease.
The years leading up to 2002 were frustrating ones for Dr. Michael Sturek. A leading researcher of cardiovascular disease, he’d changed his research focus after his son, Josh, developed type 1 diabetes at the age of three. It was a devastating diagnosis for a father. “I wanted to figure out why this occurred, and more importantly to learn how to prevent diabetes and its long-term complications, like cardiovascular disease, in other children,” Sturek told me over the phone recently.
Type 1 diabetes is caused by an inability to produce insulin and largely afflicts juveniles; type 2 is more closely related to a sedentary, overweight lifestyle and afflicts both children and adults. But both diseases are linked to high risks of obesity and cardiovascular disease. This is what Sturek wanted to know: how to prevent those devastating finalities?
But research for diabetes was slow. The traditional test subject — rats, with their tiny bodies and hearts firing like machine guns — were anatomically miles away from humans, making them difficult models for studies. Sturek identified pigs as the best animal for testing due to their coronary circulation systems, metabolism and blood lipids, but there was one big problem: Barnyard pigs wouldn’t contract the disease.
In 2001, Sturek read an article in the journal Science that told of an island’s worth of prediabetic pigs off the coast of Georgia. “I thought, these could be the perfect, naturally developed thing for my research,” he said.
The author of that article was Dr. I Lehr Brisbin. “Sturek called me, and said he didn’t believe me,” Brisbin said. “So I told him to come on out and see for himself.”
Then, the two scientists removed their 26 pigs in 2002.
Brisbin remains the world’s foremost expert on Ossabaw hogs. In the years following their removal of the research herd, he and his colleagues have unlocked a trove of the animal’s secrets. First, its true source, discovered thanks to a total genome sequencing: not the Iberian Peninsula of Spain but the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The black pigs of that island, like the Ossabaws, have since become extremely endangered.
Second, a series of evolutionary forces, much like those at work in the Galápagos, have given Ossabaws a special set of adaptations that seem to be the porcine version of superpowers. They can drink higher concentrations of saltwater than any other animal — a trait developed from living among the island’s vast swaths of salt marsh. They are also the fattest terrestrial mammal on earth, a result of the bust-and-boom cycle of oak tree acorns on the island, their main source of food; as farmers, chefs and diners have known for some time, the pigs carry fat like a camel carries water.
When Sturek dug into this trait, he uncovered something much more important for humans than a tendency toward scrumptiousness: a connection between the pig’s enormous fat reserves and a genetic mutation that causes diabetes. In fact, this “thrifty gene,” as it’s been labeled, uses obesity as a survival tool.
The biggest problem the pigs faced over their 500 years on the island was starvation. The main dietary staple on Ossabaw is acorns. But oak trees have a natural tendency toward good acorn production years and bad ones. During bad acorn years, Ossabaws whose bodies had not stockpiled fat — that lacked the “thrifty genotype” — starved to death. “It’s an extremely strong source of natural selection,” Brisbin said.
The downsides of that gene are obesity and type 2 diabetes, which can lead to heart disease. But the pigs’ form of prediabetes could reverse itself when the pigs stopped gorging and started living lean again. They gained the survival benefits of nearly getting type 2 diabetes, but didn’t actually suffer from the disease.
Brisbin compares the trade-offs of their diabetes to sickle cell anemia. “In Africa, the genetic mutation that causes the disease was advantageous because of its resistance to malaria, even though it messed up circulation. The advantage you gained from not dying by malaria was more than worth it.” It wasn’t until Africans arrived in the New World, without its malarial scourge, that the mutation became a detriment.
What Sturek recognized was that the Ossabaw Island hog’s natural genetic mutations made it an invaluable tool in researching a disease that afflicts 9 percent of Americans. Twenty-nine million people in the US have diabetes, and 171 million have it worldwide. According to the American Diabetes Association, 86 million Americans have prediabetes; unlike the Ossabaws, their bodies are not equipped to reverse the disease. Which means that in five years’ time, approximately 30 percent of them, or 20 million more people, will develop type 2 diabetes.
In humans, the disease causes blindness, heart disease, obesity, fatty liver, and polycystic ovary syndrome. That the pigs have coped with the disease — that they have used it as a way to survive — could provide the key to a cure in humans. They are the only pigs in the world that offer this opportunity.
As Brisbin put it: “We wanted to find out why the Ossabaw pig with diabetes is doing just fine, thank you, while humans with diabetes are going blind, becoming immensely obese and having their feet amputated.”
Today, Sturek’s herd resides at Purdue University, with a smaller testing facility at Indiana University School of Medicine. Purdue’s facility, a group of small, narrow buildings, houses around 200 pigs and is the only research and large-scale breeding colony of Ossabaw pigs of its kind in the world. Scientists there make sure the pigs’ eating habits closely resemble those of Americans’, which is to say, constant gorging. Those not in control groups are fed the equivalent of a 60-egg omelette a day, a cholesterol bomb that ensures they develop full-on diabetes and heart disease (which happens with about 50 percent consistency).
Sturek has sold pigs to over 140 private research institutions, and to a number of private farmers raising herds on the mainland for eating. His research has spilled over into the realm of heart disease, the leading cause of death in America, which those with diabetes are four times more likely to develop. Because Ossabaws’ hearts and guts are extraordinarily similar to humans’, they have been used to test new types of bariatric surgery and new methods of detecting and solving heart disease, such as positron emission tomography, which allows doctors to look at early stages of calcification in the arteries. Today the method is used successfully in humans. They are, Sturek said, “the best large animal for scientific testing.”
“I believe that within ten years, Ossabaws will make a major impact in the reduction and treatment of cardiovascular disease,” Sturek told me. Those treatments could save countless lives. One in four deaths in America is caused by heart disease, or over 610,000 deaths a year. The pigs have been used in testing for over 34 different diseases, from polycystic ovary syndrome to kidney disease to diabetic eye disease.
But there is no sure thing in the research world, which relies on grants, successful studies and the good graces of universities. Sturek said he is currently attempting to privatize the research herd. The Indiana University School of Medicine Laboratory Animal Department took over in 2014, purportedly resulting in a tenfold increase in costs that could lead to what Sturek calls a “death spiral” for the hogs and their facility.
Later, Sturek, all bragging father, sent me photos of his son, Josh, now 28 years old: as a tiny smiling child, a high schooler in full football pads, then a grown man, shirt off, flexing, ripped. He brought to mind the phrase “healthy as an ox.” The treatments that had helped Josh grow up healthy in spite of living with diabetes for 25 years, Sturek said, had been perfected and confirmed by his work with Ossabaw pigs.
Chef Sean Brock, the current don of Southern cooking, calls Ossabaw “the most genuine and pure form of pork, period.” Over 50 farmers raise the breed on the mainland and sell their pork to chefs in Charleston, Savannah and Atlanta.
“It’s a conundrum of a pig,” said chef Craig Deihl, his voice echoing through the bowels of his empty restaurant, Cypress, in downtown Charleston. He was cutting what appeared to be a large chunk of quartz on a commercial slicer. It was actually an Ossabaw hog’s ham, smothered in greasy white wax and strung with twine grown crystalline with age and fat. As the sliced pork fell off the blade and into his hands, it took on the pall of pure white milk. At its lowest fringes, red meat shone like a vein of some strange gem. And it was; some would argue that, at that moment, Deihl was holding the single most delicious piece of meat in Charleston.
Deihl had dug the ham out of his aging closet like a family heirloom. Aside from Cypress, Deihl is also the mind behind Artisan Meat Share, Charleston’s top charcuterie spot; Southern Living called him Charleston’s “Artisan Butcher.” His obsession is curing. It’s a sort of magic: the same rot that turns a dead pig on the forest floor of Ossabaw Island into a stinking pile transforms Deihl’s cut into a delicacy.
Among the burgeoning movement to return to “heritage pork,” as lesser-known, small-farm-raised breeds are called, the Ossabaw hog reigns supreme. Everyone in the South clamors to get ahold of one. Ask any chef, and they’ll tell you: the best-tasting among breeds, the best pork in all America, is a close competition between the Ossabaw and another small-sized offshoot, the American Guinea hog. The Guinea hog is rare, but it doesn’t have nearly the restrictions that face the Ossabaw — contained to an isolated, uninhabited island, hunted by death squads. The Livestock Conservancy, a group that focuses on saving endangered and rare breeds of farm animals by helping small farmers raise herds, lists the guinea hog as “threatened.” The Ossabaw is “critical.”
Chef Sean Brock, the current don of Southern cooking, calls Ossabaw “the most genuine and pure form of pork, period.” He recently told the Charleston City Paper the difference between factory-raised pork and Ossabaw “is almost like the difference between an heirloom tomato and a tomato you’d find on a sandwich at Wendy’s.” An entire episode of Brock’s season on Mind of a Chef was devoted to barbecuing a whole Ossabaw, pit-style, finished off with a vinegar-based sauce applied with a janitorial mop.
Chefs have the pigs’ fat to thank for their incredible flavor. It does melt at room temperature; some say it’s as healthy as olive oil, thanks to its omega-3 fatty acids; and it occurs in massive quantities on farmed pigs, which feast themselves more than wild ones. Deihl said his Ossabaws often had a 60/40 fat-to-meat ratio. And, as he sing-songed with the reminding tone of a professor, “fat is flavor.”
In his book, Pig Perfect, chef, food critic and author Peter Kaminsky ends his search for an American version of the famed Spanish Iberian pig by buying a truckload of Ossabaws from Sturek’s lab, then at the University of Missouri. He spends an extraordinary amount of time examining what makes their pork delectable. For one, their fat is not processed in a second stomach, as it is in cows. This draws forth the flavors of the acorns and other nuts Ossabaws eat. Ossabaws also have high levels of intramuscular fat, which flavors their muscle tissue. It’s the same distribution of meat and fat that makes a heavily marbled Wagyu ribeye taste like heaven.
Deihl dangled a piece of milky-white fat from his fingers, gazing at it with bemused contentment. “Now, a piece like that, you taste it and go, ‘That’s amazing,'” Deihl said. “You might not want another piece. But you’re gonna remember that flavor. You’ll never forget it.”
The pig’s superlative status on the menu is important for more than just chefs and farmers. “The chefs are important for the breed because they provide outreach and PR to a segment of the well-off public, who might want to donate money someday,” Brisbin said. Putting on a BBQ with the most delicious pork in the world is a great way to grab the attention of rich donors who can fund research. “For something like research on diabetes, that’s how science works — you need curiosity.”
Farmers have been raising Ossabaws on the mainland since the 1970s. When Sandy West still owned the island, her herdsman, Roger Parker, would take some of the pigs he caught on the island to market on the mainland. Though the DNR has since stopped the practice, there are around 1,000 registered Ossabaw Island hogs on the mainland in Georgia and South Carolina today. Around 90 farmers raise Ossabaws in America, though only 50 to 60 of them have been in the business for more than five years. There’s lots of turnaround in the industry, in part because of a supply-demand relationship that changes like a flag flapping in the breeze, and in part because the animal’s delicious fat is so prevalent as to be inefficient for chefs who need cuts of muscle.
It’s also because the state is exceptionally hard on farmers raising the breed.
Marc Mousseau owns 400 hogs, the largest herd of Ossabaws in America. He’s become the de-facto leader of Ossabaw farmers, which has in some ways put him on a collision course with the state. “I was talking to this guy from the DNR, and he was absolutely certain: an Ossabaw pig is not an Ossabaw pig when it leaves the island,” Mousseau told me. “I was like, ‘Dude, your ass is showing.'”
Despite Mousseau’s insistence, I understood the state’s viewpoint. It boiled down to the classic debate over nature versus nurture. And, frankly, the pigs on the mainland looked different than the island pigs. At farmer Tank Jackson’s farm, Holy City Hogs, on Wadmalaw Island outside of Charleston, the pigs that frolicked in a muddy wallow alongside other heritage breeds resembled Ossabaws that had taken the Super Size Me challenge; they were overflowing with huge layers of extra fat. To the eyes of a layman, they looked a lot like Jackson’s other pigs.
Some serious farmers have kept close watch over their hogs since they were brought off the island in the 1970s, under the pressure of both the wary state and wary chefs. At the Livestock Conservancy, which keeps the “stud book” for the breed, Jeannette Beranger registers hogs based on their appearance and parentage. “It’s been a challenge,” she said. A lot of farmers slip from registering. She estimated a total of 600 to 800 hogs are registered, in the US. “Those folks walk a fine line because there are a lot of states out there developing feral hog regulations. And a typical Fish and Wildlife officer does not know the difference between an Ossabaw and a feral hog,” she said. State wildlife management officers tend to want to shoot feral hogs on sight.
Jackson and Mousseau can both track their hogs back at least three generations, as required to register their pigs in the stud book. Of course, at Jackson’s farm they also intermix with all Jackson’s other hog breeds, which raises the question of interbreeding; and Mousseau admitted he’d seen pigs that weren’t Ossabaws advertised as such online.
The concern about crossbreeding on the mainland — and subsequently losing the breed’s favorable traits — is a real one. Over the phone, Brisbin, who has worked extensively with Mousseau and other farmers to foster the breed on the mainland, admitted that one of the Ossabaw farmers on the mainland had just received a nasty present: a striped piglet. Stripes at birth are the porcine version of a black mark; it meant the Ossabaw had crossbred with a common Russian boar, one of the harmful feral hog breeds targeted by the state. It was disastrous proof of impure breeding that could ruin a herder’s reputation. “I told him to kill the piglet, kill the parents, and don’t ever breed that line again,” Brisbin said.
Mousseau is insistent. He started his herd with just 39 pigs and, in spite of the state’s intolerance toward the breed, increased its size tenfold. He believes a careful breeding regimen has kept every pig pure; he has trademarked the term “registered Ossabaw Island pork.” In fact, his close relationship with the state government and its leadership, like the agricultural commissioner and state veterinarian, has given him a leg up over other farmers.
“The problem [farmers have] is that the state of Georgia is not a fan of the Ossabaw Island pig,” Mousseau said. Though he understands their concern, he’s seen officials “going after farmers, quarantining herds” and “using strong-arm tactics” against farmers trying to raise the breed legally. He’s responded by complying with their demands for bio-security and testing, and by winning over the former executive chef of the Georgia governor’s mansion, Holly Chute, with prime cuts. Chute cooked one of Mousseau’s hogs at the prestigious James Beard House in New York City; another one of Mousseau’s pigs was used in the winning dish at the Golden Onion Professional Chefs Challenge, a beloved Georgia culinary event held yearly in Vidalia, Georgia. Mousseau feels he’s made significant strides in getting his hogs into the state’s good graces.
It’s all part of making the Ossabaw Island hog synonymous with the Georgian culinary experience. “It may not be in our generation,” Mousseau said. “But the idea is that just like you go to Maine to eat the lobster, you’d go to Georgia to eat the Ossabaw pig.”
Brisbin speaks of the hogs in a wistful tone. He has not lost his penchant for mischief; he reminisces about his time as a young scientist, but it’s obvious he is still out to raise hell for the pigs he has spent his life researching.
Brisbin remains a major opponent to the state’s “shotgun” management of the island. He agrees with the aggressive population control measures, including trapping and shooting the pigs, but only in order to keep their population healthy. “As far as them eating sea turtle nests, well, you have one endangered species eating another,” he said. “But there are lots of islands up and down the coast that have loggerhead sea turtle nests. If asked to pick between the two on Ossabaw, I’m picking the hog.”
Brisbin also said he regrets what he calls the state’s lack of support for scientists, given the pigs’ massive importance to the research community. “Every pig that’s removed should yield data, not be thrown in a pit,” Brisbin said. “I’m not against killing pigs. I am against killing pigs and wasting worthwhile data from them when we need it so badly.”
The island should be managed by scientists and wildlife managers working together, Brisbin argued. In an ideal world, the island would be closed to the public, its pig population controlled by a small army of private hunters and graduate students tasked with “blowing the stew out of [the pigs] every fall, gathering all the data, and maybe cooking one or two for a barbecue.” The aim would be to support the research St |
's not just Toronto. The average cost for infant care is $1,200 in Vancouver, $1075 in Calgary and $1,400 in Saint John, so this is a problem that stretches from sea to sea. Even when costs are lower in places like Winnipeg, earnings are lower, too, so as a percentage of income it's a wash.
The petition is calling for Trudeau to fulfill a campaign promise in which the soon-to-be PM claimed "We will introduce more flexible parental benefits that will: allow parents to receive benefits in smaller blocks of time over a period of up to 18 months; and make it possible for parents to take a longer leave -- up to 18 months when combined with maternity benefits -- at a lower benefit level."
Due to these lower benefits over a longer time, Trudeau costed it at only $125 million per year. Maternity and parental leave benefits come from EI, and equal 55 per cent of weekly insurable earnings up to a maximum of $537 per week for an income of about $50,000.
You're basically just getting your own money back, especially since most Canadians pay into EI their whole lives and may never need it. But that hasn't stopped folks online from griping about tax increases, especially those without children who don't want to subsidize those who do.
In 2008 UNICEF declared Canada tied for the worst child care out of the world's 25 richest countries.
Well, I would like to drop the mic in front of those folks and point out that our children's taxes will support you in your old age. That's how the system works. Young people pay for old people's health care and social security, whether those old people had kids or not. So stow that argument unless you plan to cover your own elder care costs.
With all that said, extending maternity/parental leave to 18 months doesn't actually solve the problem.
It's a ninja turtle Band-Aid that looks cool and will make us feel better until it's peeled off and we are faced with the same bloody daycare crisis we've had all along.
In 2008 UNICEF declared Canada tied for the worst child care out of the world's 25 richest countries. Since then costs have only gone up and access has only gone down. There are available spaces for only one out of every five Canadian kids.
Infant care is the worst part of this problem -- due to higher caregiver-to-child ratio regulations increasing costs for parents and lowering profit for daycares -- but costs are also incredibly high for toddlers, preschoolers and school-age before and after care.
Everywhere, that is, except for Quebec.
The average monthly cost in Quebec is $174 across all age groups because they have government-subsidized spots that cost $7.30 a day (regardless of the child's age) for those making under $50,000 and $20 a day for those making between $50,000 to $150,000.
In other words, infant care in Quebec is as much as 10 times less than in Toronto for median income earners.
So go ahead and sign that petition because more parental leave would be great, especially if it encourages a more equitable care-giving split between moms and dads. But also realize there's even more benefit for moms with universal child care.
Universal access to low-fee child care in Quebec induced nearly 70,000 more mothers to hold jobs than if no such program had existed.
A study by Quebecois economist Pierre Fortin found that Quebec's child care plan, which launched at $5 a day for five-year-olds back in 1997, had resulted in more women working and lower poverty rates, along with the increased tax revenue and economic activity those portend.
Fortin estimated that by 2008, "universal access to low-fee child care in Quebec induced nearly 70,000 more mothers to hold jobs than if no such program had existed -- an increase of 3.8 per cent in women employment."
That calculated to injecting $5 billion into Quebec's economy, raising the gross provincial income (GDP) by 1.7 per cent.
"The argument can no longer be that governments cannot afford it. This program is paying for itself. It is self-financing. That is the main finding," Fortin told the Toronto Star in 2011, noting that Quebec recoups $1.05 for every dollar it spends while Ottawa clears 44 cents in pure profit.
This wasn't an issue in decades past, but dual-income families have doubled since 1976 to 69 per cent, or 1.9 million couple families. Meanwhile, single-parent families topped 1.5 million in the 2011 census.
It's clearly high time for Canada to build on Quebec's lead and develop a universal child care program that extends across the country just like universal health care, social security and education already do.
I mean, if anyone understands the benefit of government-funded child care, it's Justin "Nannygate" Trudeau.
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Fast-track legislation, known formally as Trade Promotion Authority, passed the Senate Wednesday afternoon, as expected. The vote was 60-38. Democrats voted for it. The bill is expected to be sent to President Obama's desk later today.
The legislation expedites the executive branch's ability to negotiate trade agreements. Once a deal is completed, Congress will have the chance to review it and vote it up or down, but without amendments and no chance to filibuster.
After the cloture motion closing debate on TPA passed in a 60-37 vote Tuesday, guaranteeing passage of the legislation today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a leading foe of fast-tracking, said:
The vote today—pushed by multi-national corporations, pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street—will mean a continuation of disastrous trade policies which have cost our country millions of decent-paying jobs. American workers deserve a trade policy that works for them and not only for the CEOs of major multi-national corporations. We cannot continue trade policies which outsource good jobs to low-wage countries overseas and lead us into a race to the bottom.
Most observers believe passage of TPA means the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest and nearest to complete of 18 trade agreements under negotiation, will now pass Congress after the 90-day review period. Organizations such as Public Citizen Global Trade Watch nonetheless plan to keep fighting.
More on this vote can be found below the fold.KIEV, July 28. /TASS/. The French parliamentarians who visited Crimea last week are facing an eight-year prison term, confiscation of vehicles and prohibition to hold certain positions, member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada Georgy Logvinsky wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday.
According to Logvinsky, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office has begun an audit against the French delegation that had visited Crimea.
“These French citizens are facing a prison term from 5 to 8 years. An audit has begun following my petition to the Prosecutor-General’s Office of Ukraine.”
“All members of the French delegation – they will all be brought to account. Today or tomorrow – this is just a matter of time. The response will be adequate, believe me,” the Ukrainian lawmaker wrote.
The French parliamentary delegation visited Crimea on July 23 and 24. That was the first visit of Western parliamentarians to Crimea and the city of Sevastopol since last March, when the Black Sea peninsula held a referendum overwhelmingly voting for its reunification with Russia.
After their visit the French parliamentarians said it was necessary to abandon the anti-Russian sanctions and recognize Crimea as part of Russia.
“Crimea is an absolutely peaceful region,” said Claude Goasguen, a member of the French National Assembly representing Paris. “Crimea residents cannot be criticized for the fact that there is no war on their territory. They cannot be criticized for the fact that the referendum resulted in peace.”
“They say that the Crimean authorities had no legal power to hold a referendum. Of course, they did! The coup in Ukraine was carried out not by Crimea residents, but by the Maidan authorities! I support peace and I am happy that it reigns in Crimea. I favor the resumption of dialogue between Russia and France,” Goasguen said.The Seahawks have a huge game this weekend and host their most bitter of rivals to the CLink. To give you a scouting report on the state of affairs for the San Francisco 49ers, I talked to David Fucillo of Niners Nation. Here's what he had to say, and make sure you head to Niners Nation for more on the upcoming matchup.
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1. Colin Kaepernick decided this week, after facing a lot of flack from the media, to open up a little bit and show a more jovial and personable side to Bay Area reporters. Do you think he decided that it's better for him long-term to take that tack with the media or do you think it'll be short lived? Further, do you think a different outlook in that regard could positively affect his play?
I think we see more of it moving forward, but I'm sure there will be some days when he is a bit shorter in his responses like before. Trent Baalke said he had spoken with Kap, but Baalke couched it in the phrase, "We talk to him, like we talk to all our players". I'm guessing they did specifically speak with him, and that was mostly Baalke just trying not to single him out. But clearly people have talked to him, given how quickly the change was. While I think the whole thing is kind of stupid, I do think it is in his best interests to play the game the media wants. And there really is nothing wrong with being polite and making everybody's life a little easier.
I don't know that I expect a dramatic change, but having a little less stress in his life very well could help him settle down a bit. He does seem a bit tight at times, so maybe removing some of that stress will change that. I don't know that it will necessarily prevent him from throwing to Brandon Lloyd's back shoulder instead of into Richard Sherman's wide open arms, but I can certainly hope for it!
2. How would you evaluate Vernon Davis' play this season? I've heard recently that he wants an expanded role in the offense - why do you think he hasn't he been a bigger factor?
I honestly don't know what to make of Vernon Davis this year. For much of the season, I thought the back injury he suffered early in the season was still an issue. That would explain his lack of involvement to some extent, and he hadn't really complained about it all that much. But this week he mentioned wanting more of a role, and that it was up to the offensive coordinator, which strikes me as kind of a passive aggressive assessment of blame. It could be entirely Greg Roman's fault, but the fact that Vernon came out and said that has me wondering if the back injury is actually the issue at this point.
Suffice to say, Vernon has not been good this year. Roman said he was blocking as well as ever, but PFF grading indicates otherwise. After the season I want to go back and look at Vernon's snaps and just see what it all looked like because every indication is that he is not performing well. And I would argue the lack of tight end production is a big factor in the offense's problems. The 49ers built their offense around two and three tight end packages, and with Vernon struggling, Vance McDonald hurt and now out, and nothing much beyond that, maybe that's one issue with the offense.
3. On defense, who have been the most surprising players, both good and bad?
Cornerbacks Chris Culliver and Perrish Cox have both been really good surprises for the 49ers. The 49ers had significant turnover in the secondary (they lost starters Tarell Brown, Carlos Rogers, and Donte Whitner), and there were a lot of question marks about the cornerbacks. Add in Tramaine Brock dealing with multiple injuries all season, and it would not have been a surprise to see the unit regress. And yet, Culliver and Cox have both been quite solid all season. Cox was on the national radar early due to an early flurry of interceptions, but Culliver has also stepped up. Of course, both are free agents after this season, so we'll see what happens with them moving forward.
Ahmad Brooks has probably been the only really "bad" surprise on defense. He reported to training camp overweight, and was slow out of the gates when the regular season got started. He was benched in one game for yelling at the defensive line coach, and then was benched this past week for missing a Tuesday meeting, and then being 20 minutes late to a Wednesday meeting. Defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said Brooks was getting back in his good graces, so he would seem to be out of the dog house for now.
4. What's the injury situation looking like for the Niners right now?
It is fairly extensive, but seems to be improving. Right tackle Anthony Davis has missed the last three games due to a concussion, but he was back on the practice field in limited fashion this week. He seems to be progressing through the final stages of the concussion protocol, so there is a decent chance he plays on Sunday. Cornerback Tramaine Brock is dealing with a hamstring injury, but was back on the practice field. My guess is he does not play on Sunday as this week is the first time he has practiced since before the bye.
NaVorro Bowman was activated off the PUP list this week, but he is still just doing rehab work, and won't play. Glenn Dorsey was activated off the short term a few weeks back, and is back to practicing. I don't think we see him play either.
Last week, Marcus Martin and Chris Culliver suffered knee injuries. Culliver has been limited in practice, but looks like he will play on Sunday. Martin sat out Wednesday's practice, but was limited on Thursday. I think he'll play, but he might be more of a game-time decision.
5. I think the feeling for many Seahawks this week is that with the Niners' backs up against the Playoffs wall, and with the familiarity between the two teams, that San Francisco is a dangerous team to play right now, regardless of what has happened this season. What's your sense as to the mentality and morale of the 49ers right now?
Given all the drama swirling around this team, it's hard to tell exactly what morale is like. There has been a lot of talk about Jim Harbaugh losing the locker room, so it is possible morale is incredibly low at this point. In watching this team the last two weeks, there has been this feeling they are running on fumes, and just playing out the string. Of course, this could also just be my fan mentality that I am projecting onto them.
While the drama has to be somewhat distracting, I don't necessarily buy into the notion that they are quitting on the coach, or anything like that. The reason this team is not playing well is because the offense is abysmal. If the offense was even just a little bit more effective, this team probably could be at nine or ten wins. They have a championship caliber defense, but it is held back by what seems like a "lottery pick" offense. As complicated as the Harbaugh situation is, the 49ers struggles really should just be ascribed to an awful offense.
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Big thanks as always to David for taking the time to answer my questions!
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Editor's Note: FanDuel is hosting a $600,000 fantasy football league for SBNation. It's $5 to join and first place wins $50,000. League starts Sunday 1 PM ET and ends on Monday. Here's the link.Some years ago, the routine thump of four-four house music made it out of Chicago and into international dance clubs. Since then, it's crept slowly onto setlists, airwaves, and into stadiums. House has become a global force, socially and economically, far removed from its fairly humble beginnings as an early '80s soundtrack to a small pocket of the Windy City.
One of the main engines for house from the start was Frankie Knuckles, widely known as The Godfather of House, who died yesterday at the age of 59. Knuckles (who was actually originally born in The Bronx) moved to Chicago when he was young and set up residence at The Warehouse, the club whose distinct style gave house its name. Knuckles was a popular DJ there — he remained one up until his death, even playing last month at Miami's Winter Music Conference — but his true legacy is in his production work. Songs like "Your Love," "Baby Wants to Ride," and "It's a Cold World" are truly house at its purest, mixing deep percussion with sinister overtones, perfect for a dark club and a salacious evening.
There's already a street in Chicago named after him
What house became is built on those early tracks, his young explorations as a producer becoming the blueprint for countless other producers three decades later. As his career extended into the '90s, he worked further in the sunshine, eventually penning what is arguably his signature track, "The Whistle Song." It's a lovely song, with its ethereal extended introduction on the flute and the drums' funky rumblings, all moved steadily along by an upbeat whistling for the wordless chorus. That implicit joy stayed with him, as a DJ, a producer, and a smiler (he had some serious pearly whites, and no qualms about showing them off) up until his death.
There's already a street in Chicago named after him, so we can't offer something quite as monumental, but here's a quick primer on some of his greatest jams. While you may not know his name, in your heart and in your head you already know his sound.by Dennis Porter I'm in the city of Beni, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, about to head out to the nearby trading hub, Butembo. It's only 33 miles along a main highway. But in Congo, a drive like this can be long and potentially hazardous. Congo is one of the most unstable and least developed countries in the world. One thing that makes the country hard to govern is the decrepit state of its roadways, often called the worst in the world. I've been to Congo several times before, but for my girlfriend Lindsay, who's just arrived in Congo, this is her first experience with Congo's infamous roads. It's not uncommon for people to get sick on their first road trip here. But as we start out, Lindsay isn't too concerned. "I think it's gonna go pretty well," Lindsay says. But she admits that she's a little worried. "About the car breaking down. And rebels attacking," she says with a laugh. The United Nations base here rates this stretch of road as a yellow zone, which means attacks aren't likely, but most of the route is within 5 miles of a rebel stronghold. Another concern is that many of the vehicles on the road are in terrible shape. I've seen mechanics here repair cars with twine. On my first trip down this road, we had to stop three times for repairs. But the biggest problem is that the highways in Congo are in terrible condition; they're essentially dirt paths. Downed trees and large rocks sometimes block the way. The roads are so bumpy that I've banged my head on the roof as we're driving. During the rainy season, large trucks can get stuck in potholes for a week. On this day, Lindsay and I hope to make this 30-mile journey before nightfall. As we leave the city, we stop to pay a toll. It's hard to believe that much of that money is being reinvested in the highway. But suddenly, that's not our main concern, because there's a man up ahead motioning to us. There's a problem, my translator, Kabuyaya, says; we have to show our passports. We're hauled in to an army checkpoint. The military here is notoriously corrupt, and they're known for creating new fines on the spot. For Westerners, these can run into the hundreds of dollars. But we're lucky this time. Kabuyaya talks with the soldiers, and they send us on our way, without demanding a bribe. "I was a teensy bit scared at the beginning," Lindsay says afterwards, "but I was surprised. That went really well." "So far, so good," I say. Maybe they let us off without a bribe because our battered car suggests we don't have that much to give. Still, our car is reliable compared to other vehicles here. On this trip alone, we see two overturned trucks and numerous broken-down cars awaiting parts. Kabuyaya and I ask the driver of one of the disabled trucks how long they've been here. He says they've been stuck here since yesterday. The Best Road By this stage of our trip, Lindsay is doing fine, but I'm starting to feel sick from the rattling around. When Kabuyaya tells us this is one of the "best" roads in the region, I lose it. "This is the worst road I have ever driven on anywhere in the world! How is this your best road?" Kabuyaya responds, "We call it the best road because it seems to attract the attention of the government. It tries to repair bad things that block people to pass through it." Sure enough, farther up the road, we see evidence of the government's attempts to improve things. There's a road crew consisting of bare-footed men with shovels, who slowly move piles of dirt into the seemingly endless potholes. The men say their salary is $30 a month, but often they don't get paid. Most people in Congo assume that the taxes they pay, and the road tolls they're charged, are siphoned off before they can ever fund any road improvements. That kind of corruption also affects the schools in Congo, and the foreign aid, and the police. In some ways, poor roads are a cause of many of Congo's problems, but they're also a symptom of the many issues that keep the country under-developed. Arriving in Butembo We arrive in Butembo after more than 3 hours – travelling about 10 miles an hour. We didn't break down, fall off a cliff, or get attacked by rebels. Lindsay feels fine after her first trip on a Congolese highway. "I survived better than you. You look extremely pale, and for most of the journey you didn't say anything and looked pretty sick," she says. I ask her how this compares to other highways she's been on. No comparison, she says. "This is unique. I've never quite been on a highway like this. I don't know if you'd called it a highway. But I guess it is for Congo."(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images; Illustration by The Washington Post)
The lawyer gave Donald Trump a note, written in Trump’s own handwriting. He asked Trump to read it aloud.
Trump may not have realized it yet, but he had walked into a trap.
“Peter, you’re a real loser,” Trump began reading.
The mogul had sent the note to a reporter, objecting to a story that said Trump owned a “small minority stake” in a Manhattan real estate project. Trump insisted that the word “small” was incorrect. Trump continued reading: “I wrote, ‘Is 50 percent small?’ ”
“This [note] was intended to indicate that you had a 50 percent stake in the project, correct?” said the lawyer.
“That’s correct,” Trump said.
For the first of many times that day, Trump was about to be caught saying something that wasn’t true.
“I own 30 percent,” Trump admitted.
It was a mid-December morning in 2007 — the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump’s life.
Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.
For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.
The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.
Thirty times, they caught him.
Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.
That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did.
“Have you ever lied in public statements about your properties?” the lawyer asked.
“I try and be truthful,” Trump said. “I’m no different from a politician running for office. You always want to put the best foot forward.”
In his presidential campaign, Trump has sought to make his truth-telling a selling point. He nicknamed his main Republican opponent “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz. He called his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, “A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR!” in a recent Twitter message. “I will present the facts plainly and honestly,” he said in the opening of his speech at the Republican National Convention. “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”
Trump has had a habit of telling demonstrable untruths during his presidential campaign. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has awarded him four Pinocchios — the maximum a statement can receive — 39 times since he announced his bid last summer. In many cases, his statements echo those in the 2007 deposition: They are specific, checkable — and wrong.
Trump said he opposed the Iraq War at the start. He didn’t. He said he’d never mocked a disabled New York Times reporter. He had. Trump also said the National Football League had sent him a letter, objecting to a presidential debate that was scheduled for the same time as a football game. It hadn’t.
Last week, Trump claimed that he had seen footage — taken at a top-secret location and released by the Iranian government — showing a plane unloading a large amount of cash to Iran from the U.S. government. He hadn’t. Trump later conceded he’d been mistaken — he’d seen TV news video that showed a plane during a prisoner release.
But, even under the spotlight of this campaign, Trump has never had an experience quite like this deposition on Dec. 19 and 20, 2007.
He was trapped in a room — with his own prior statements and three high-powered lawyers.
“A very clear and visible side effect of my lawyers’ questioning of Trump is that he [was revealed as] a routine and habitual fabulist,” said Timothy L. O’Brien, the author Trump had sued.
The Washington Post sent the Trump campaign a detailed list of questions about this deposition, listing all the times when Trump seemed to have been caught in a false or unsupported statement. The Post asked Trump whether he wanted to challenge any of those findings — and whether he had felt regret when confronted with them.
He did not answer those questions.
LEFT: Timothy L. O’Brien’s book “Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald.” RIGHT: Andrew Ceresney, top, and Mary Jo White, bottom, who represented O’Brien in the suit Trump brought against him. (Open Road Integrated Media; Mark Lennihan/AP; Seth Wenig/AP)
In 2005, O’Brien, then a reporter for the New York Times, had published a book called “Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald.” In the book, O’Brien cited people who questioned a claim at the bedrock of Trump’s identity — that his net worth was more than $5 billion. O’Brien said he had spoken to three people who estimated that the figure was between $150 million and $250 million.
Trump sued. He later told The Post that he intended to hurt O’Brien, whom he called a “lowlife sleazebag.”
“I didn’t read [the book], to be honest with you.... I never read it. I saw some of the things they said,” Trump said later. “I said: ‘Go sue him. It will cost him a lot of money.’ ”
By filing suit, Trump hadn’t just opened himself up to questioning — he had opened a door into the opaque and secretive company he ran.
O’Brien’s attorneys included Mary Jo White, now the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Andrew Ceresney, now the SEC’s director of enforcement. The lawsuit had given them the power to request that Trump turn over internal company documents, and they used it. They arrived at the deposition having already identified where Trump’s public statements hadn’t matched the private truth.
The questions began with that handwritten note and the 50 percent stake that wasn’t 50 percent.
“The 30 percent equates to much more than 30 percent,” Trump explained. His reasoning was that he had not been required to put up money at the outset, so his 30 percent share seemed more valuable.
“Are you saying that the real estate community would interpret your interest to be 50 percent, even though in limited partnership agreements it’s 30 percent?” Ceresney asked.
“Smart people would,” Trump said.
“Smart people?”
“Smart people would say it’s much more than 30 percent.”
Trump inflates the numbers
TRUMP: I got more than a million dollars, because they have tremendous promotion expenses, to my advantage. In other words, they promote, which has great value, through billboards, through newspapers, through radio, I think through television – yeah, through television.
And they spend – again, I’d have to ask them, but I bet they spend at least a million or two million or maybe even more than that on promoting Donald Trump.
LAWYER: But how much of the payments were cash?
TRUMP: Approximately $400,000.
LAWYER: So when you say publicly that you got paid more than a million dollars, you’re including in that sum the promotional expenses that they pay?
TRUMP: Oh, absolutely, yes. That has a great value. It has a great value to me.
LAWYER: Do you actually say that when you say you got paid more than a million dollars publicly?
TRUMP: I don’t break it down.
On to the next one.
“I was paid more than a million dollars,” Trump said when Ceresney asked how much he’d been paid for a speech in 2005 at New York City’s Learning Annex, a continuing-education center.
Ceresney was ready.
“But how much of the payments were cash?”
“Approximately $400,000,” Trump said.
Trump said his personal math included the intangible value of publicity: The Learning Annex had advertised his speech heavily, and Trump thought that helped his brand. Therefore, in his mind he’d been paid more than $1 million, even though his actual payment was $400,000.
“Do you actually say that, when you say you got a million dollars publicly?” Ceresney asked.
“I don’t break it down,” Trump said.
As the deposition went on, the lawyers led Trump through case after case in which he’d overstated his success.
Donald Trump, right, is interviewed by Larry King during a taping of "Larry King Live" on Oct, 7, 1999. (Marty Lederhandler/AP)
The lawyer played a clip from Larry King’s talk show, in which King asked Trump how many people worked for him. “Twenty-two thousand or so,” Trump said.
“Are all those people on your payroll?” Ceresney asked him.
“No, not directly,” Trump said. He said he was counting employees of other companies that acted as suppliers and subcontractors to his businesses.
Another one. In O’Brien’s book, Trump had been quoted saying: “I had zero borrowings from [my father’s] estate.... I give you my word.”
Under oath:
“Mr. Trump, have you ever borrowed money from your father’s estate?”
“I think a small amount a long time ago,” Trump said. “I think it was like in the $9 million range.”
Another one. In one of his own books, Trump had said about one of his golf courses: “Membership costs $300,000. I think it’s a bargain.”
Under oath:
“In fact, your memberships were not selling at $300,000 at that time, correct?”
“We’ve sold many for two hundred” thousand, Trump said. Then, Trump pushed it upward: “We’ve sold many for, I think, two-fifty.”
But this was not the place to push it.
The lawyer had an internal Trump document that showed the true figure — “$200,000 per membership,” Ceresney said.
“Correct,” Trump acknowledged. “Right.”
Trump passes the blame
LAWYER: You didn’t correct it when you read the book?
TRUMP: Well, I did correct it, and she didn’t correct it.
But you could have her in as a witness, and I’m sure we’ll bring her in as a witness because what she wrote was — I asked her to change it to “billions of dollars in debt,” and she probably forgot.
LAWYER: And when you read it, you didn’t correct it?
TRUMP: I didn’t see it.
LAWYER: You didn’t see it.
TRUMP: I read it very quickly. I didn’t see it. I would have corrected it, but I didn’t see it.
In some cases, Trump acknowledged he was wrong — but not that he was at fault. Instead, he sought to turn the blame on others.
“This is somebody that wrote it, probably Meredith McIver,” Trump said at one point when confronted with another false statement. “That is a mistake.”
McIver, a staff writer with the Trump Organization, blazed into the public eye last month for having inserted plagiarized material — taken from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech — in the convention speech of Trump’s wife, Melania. McIver said it had been an innocent mistake.
But in this deposition more than eight years earlier, Trump was blaming her for a mistake in one of his own books, “How to Get Rich.” In the 2004 book, co-written with McIver, Trump described his massive debt load during a low period in the early 1990s. “I owed billions upon billions of dollars — $9.2 billion to be exact,” the book said as it retold the story of his rise back to success.
Trump signs copies of his new book "How to Get Rich" in New York in 2004. (Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images)
The depth of that financial hole made it seem even more impressive that Trump had climbed out again. But the figure was wrong. His actual debts had been much less.
“I pointed it out to the person who wrote the book,” Trump said, meaning McIver.
“Right after she wrote the book?”
“That’s correct,” Trump said.
Then the lawyer showed Trump another book he’d written with McIver, three years later.
“In fact, I was $9 billion in debt,” Trump read aloud. A similar error, repeated. It was McIver’s fault again.
“She probably forgot,” Trump said.
“And when you read it, you didn’t correct it?”
“I didn’t see it,” Trump said.
“You didn’t see it.”
“I read it very quickly,” Trump said about a book he was credited with writing.
Trump makes unsupported claims
LAWYER: When you wrote, “O’Brien... threatened sources by telling them he can, quote, ‘Settle scores with enemies by writing negative articles about them,’ ” what was the basis for that statement?
TRUMP: Just my perception of him.
I don’t know that he indicated anything like that to me, but I think he probably did indirectly. Just my dealing with him.
In other cases, the lawyers prodded Trump into admitting that he had made authoritative-sounding statements without any proof behind them. These statements were another kind of untruth.
They were not necessarily false. They might have been true.
But Trump said them without knowing one way or the other.
“What basis do you have for that statement?” Ceresney asked in one case, about an assertion from Trump that O’Brien had been reported to the police for stalking.
“I guess that was probably taken off the Internet,” Trump said.
On to the next one.
“You wrote, ‘O’Brien... threatened sources by telling them he can, quote, settle scores with enemies by writing negative articles about them,’ ” Ceresney asked, reading Trump’s words from a legal complaint. “What was the basis for that statement?”
“Just my perception of him,” Trump said. “I don’t know that he indicated anything like that to me, but I think he probably did indirectly.”
The most striking example was a question at the very heart of the legal case: What was Trump’s actual net worth?
Trump had told O’Brien he was worth up to $6 billion. But the lawyers confronted him with other documents — from Trump’s accountants and from outside banks — that seemed to show the real figure was far lower.
The lawyers asked: “Have you ever not been truthful” about your net worth?
Trump’s answer here was that the truth about his wealth was — in essence — up to him to decide.
Trump outside the 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower underway in Chicago in 2007. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
“My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings,” Trump said. “But I try.”
The interrogation finally ended after two days. Trump’s attorney made a final demand.
“I want the record to be crystal clear that every single word, every question, every answer, every word, is confidential,” said the attorney, Mark Ressler.
In 2009, a judge dismissed Trump’s case against O’Brien. Trump appealed, but in 2011 that was denied, too.
Along the way, this once-confidential deposition became part of the public record when O’Brien’s attorneys attached it to one of their motions.
In a brief statement this week, Trump said he felt the lawsuit was a success, despite his loss.
“O’Brien knows nothing about me,” Trump said. “His book was a total failure and ultimately I had great success doing what I wanted to do — costing this third rate reporter a lot of legal fees.”
O’Brien, now executive editor of Bloomberg View, said Trump got that wrong. The publisher and insurance companies covered the cost.
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you see Al Horford available on the free agent market. Photo by Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports
Very few players were as careful last season, relative to their numerous offensive responsibilities, as Horford. Atlanta's assist rate was never lower than with Horford on the bench; related: the team's turnover rate was never higher. He can read a defense, identify the best route and then execute a split-second decision without making a mistake. That's not just unique for a player his size; few players at any position do this better.
Horford ranked fourth among centers in potential assists last season, more than everyone on Boston except Isaiah Thomas and Evan Turner. With Turner now on the Portland Trail Blazers, Horford may not only be Boston's first or second offensive option, pending the match-up, but he likely also slides in as one of its primary playmakers.
Horford is ready for it, as he looks to pass even when he's wide open to shoot, and he's the rare big who not only can push the ball in transition, but also reward teammates who run out in front of him. Instead of home runs, most of Horford's passes are effective singles that keep the wheels turning for an offense in desperate need of positive movement. He can even take his man off the dribble and keep his head up looking for cutting targets.
It's a good example of what Horford's capable of, particularly when passing on the move. That's an unstoppable strength when paired with Isaiah Thomas, who teams will hesitate to trap when Horford sets the pick.
"He's a great screener," Stevens said. "He had a great dynamic with a couple of [Atlanta's] cutters, especially Kyle Korver, and he just does a lot of things that unselfish, winning players do."
Here's an example of how transferrable Horford's skill-set will be in Boston. The Celtics don't have any shooters on Korver's level; to be fair, very few teams do. But it's still easy to picture Avery Bradley or Jae Crowder getting free for a wide-open jumper on an identical hand-off action.
His trustworthiness will simplify pick-and-rolls for developing ball-handlers like Marcus Smart and Terry Rozier, as Horford's precise jump shot prevents his man from straying too far—not quite Dirk Nowitzki-level gravity, but in the same ballpark. It will also put more pressure on defenses that now have to deal with units that can pass well from all five positions.
Last season, Atlanta saw its volume and accuracy on threes go up with Horford on the court, partly due to quick decisions like this:
Thumbs up for interior big-to-big passing, too:
Most of the time, context is moot when the opportunity to acquire one of the 20 best all-around basketball players in the world presents itself. Any question regarding fit or timing goes out the window, and as those players' agents will be more than happy to remind you, stars hold the power of historical precedent on their side. It's nearly impossible to win a championship without at least one on your payroll.
From that standpoint, every front office's objective is ultimately to sign as many of these guys as possible and then let the chips fall where they may. But when that star becomes available and he naturally complements the players already in place, everything becomes so much easier.
"Al does not have to be the guy that shoots it every time, handles it every time," Stevens says. "He is a teammate and a winning basketball player.... Those guys always help your locker room, they always help the people around them, they're always good for young players to spend time with and learn from. I think everybody will benefit from his presence."
Should Boston simultaneously build through the draft while attempting to add more win-now talent in free agency, it already has the perfect figure in place to put everyone else in a position to succeed. For all the many reasons Boston has to be thrilled about their future, Horford is the biggest reason to be excited right now.
Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.Decision allows plaintiffs to potentially depose news anchor Diane Sawyer and others.
This September, 2012, photo provided by Dakota Dunes, S.D.-based meat processor Beef Products Inc., shows a sample of their lean, finely-textured beef. (Photo11: AP)
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — The South Dakota Supreme Court is allowing a $1.2 billion defamation lawsuit to proceed against television network ABC over its coverage of a meat product that critics derided as "pink slime."
The decision on Thursday allows the plaintiffs to potentially depose news anchor Diane Sawyer, two of the networks correspondents and other defendants.
Dakota Dunes-based Beef Products Inc. sued the network in 2012 for its coverage of the meat product the industry calls "lean, finely textured beef." BPI alleges that the coverage led to plant closures and layoffs because it misled consumers into believing the product was unsafe.
Attorneys for ABC in court filings say the network in each of its broadcasts stated the FDA deemed the product safe to eat. The network didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1gUXZktAll military contacts with Turkey have been cut following the downing of Russia's Su-24 military jet, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.
"Today, in accordance with a previously made decision, all cooperation channels have been cut between the Russian Defense Ministry and the Turkish Armed Forces," ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov told reporters.
"This concerns all ties, not just the so-called hotline that was launched in order to avoid possible air incidents during the destruction of terrorist infrastructure in Syria," he added.
© Sputnik / Valeriy Melnikov Erdogan Says Turkey Will Not Apologize for Downing Russian Su-24
The decision has been made after Turkish fighter jets on Tuesday had shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber, which had been taking part in Russia's anti-terror campaign in Syria.
Ankara claims it downed the Russian plane because it violated Turkish airspace. Contrary to Turkey’s allegations, the Russian General Staff and the Syrian Air Defense Command confirmed that the Su-24 never crossed into Turkish airspace, citing precise objective control data.
Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident as a "stab in the back, carried out against us by accomplices of terrorists."
© Sputnik / Vladimir Astapkovich Russia Will Take Diplomatic, Military Measures After Turkey Downs Su-24
Following the downing of the Su-24 bomber, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that the incident would negatively affect all aspects of relations between Moscow and Ankara and recommended Russians to refrain from visiting Turkey. Cooperation in the tourism industry between Moscow and Ankara may be stopped, the Russian Federal Tourism Agency said.
Russia may also restrict or even ban Turkish vessels and aircraft from entering Russian ports and airspace, according to Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev.Botswana’s hunting ban: Bushmen starve, trophy hunters carry on
March 31, 2014
Bushmen hunting with spear, for food. You talk to him and look into his eyes. And then he knows he must give you his strength so your children can live.’ © Philippe Clotuche/Survival
Is this an April Fool or not? Go to the bottom to find out
Botswana’s President Khama has banned all hunting nationwide, even for Bushmen who hunt to feed their families – but an exception is being made for trophy hunters paying up to $8,000 to hunt giraffes and zebras.
Wealthy tourists are being invited to travel to Botswana to hunt big game on private ranches that have been exempted from the ban. But Bushmen from Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve, who have hunted with spears, bows and arrows for millennia, are being arrested, beaten and jailed for subsistence hunting.
The ban openly flouts Botswana’s landmark high court ruling in 2006, which upheld the Bushmen’s right to hunt on their ancestral land in the reserve.
In February President Khama was an honoured guest at a global anti-poaching conference in London, alongside Prince Charles and Prince William. The initiative resulted in the launch of Prince William’s United for Wildlife, drawing together seven big conservation organizations, including US-based Conservation International (CI). President Khama is a CI board member.
Bushmen put on staged hunts for tourists, but in reality have now been banned from hunting. © Botswana Tourism/www.botswanatourism.co.bw
Although some communities affected by the 2014 ban have been offered food parcels, the reserve’s Bushmen have been left to starve, without any assistance from the government. Perversely, the Botswana Tourism Organization uses images of hunting Bushmen to attract tourists, especially big game hunters. Survival has called for a boycott of tourism to Botswana.
The depth of meaning that hunting has for tribal peoples like the Bushmen was explained by Bushman leader Roy Sesana: ‘I grew up as a hunter. All our boys and men were hunters. Hunting is going and talking to the animals. You don’t steal. You go and ask. You set a trap or go with bow and spear. It can take days. You track the antelope. He knows you are there, he knows he has to give you strength. But he runs and you have to run. As you run, you become like him. It can last hours and exhaust you both. You talk to him and look into his eyes. And then he knows he must give you his strength so your children can live’.
Hunting for food is now banned in Botswana, but trophy hunting by wealthy foreigners is allowed. © Public Domain
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry recently exposed how the conservation movement was founded by proponents of eugenics and other extreme-right theories; and that the first national parks were established on the lands of indigenous peoples after their eviction.
Stephen Corry said today, ‘Banning hunting in order to feed your family, but allowing the wealthy to hunt for trophies, plays to a lobby still rooted in racist beliefs about tribal peoples’ inferiority. The national park movement entailed the enforced eviction, often the complete destruction, of the tribes who lived off the land. Satellite imagery now proves that many tribal peoples are the world’s best conservationists, yet they’re still being destroyed. It’s not ‘conservation’; it’s just an old colonial crime, and it’s time the responsible organizations opposed it. Instead, they hide behind hollow policies, while continuing to support governments guilty of such inhuman behaviour.’
Answer: this is NOT an April FoolCLOSE A Muslim woman who alleged she had been attacked by Donald Trump supporters on a subway platform in Manhattan admitted she made up the whole story. USA TODAY
New York City police officers patrol the subway station near Times Square on Nov. 7, 2016. (Photo: Drew Angerer, Getty Images)
A Muslim-American woman who claimed supporters of President-elect Donald Trump harassed her and tried to steal her hijab, or veil, on the NYC subway was arrested Wednesday for making up the account, the New York City Police Department said.
Yasmin Seweid, 18, of New Hyde Park, N.Y., on Long Island, was arrested for obstructing government administration and reporting a false incident, Sgt. Brendan Ryan of the NYPD told USA TODAY. She was awaiting arraignment Wednesday night at central booking in Manhattan, Ryan said. It will be up to the courts to decide how quickly her arraignment takes place, according to Ryan.
Seweid supplied verbal and written confessions to the police, authorities said.
"Significant" police department resources were used to investigate the case, Ryan confirmed.
It came as the Southern Poverty Law Center reported an uptick in hate-related incidents since the election of Trump, who drew the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and who proposed a registry for immigrants from Muslim immigrants during his White House campaign.
Seweid told police that three drunk men on the subway on Dec. 1 shouted Trump's name while trying to remove her hijab.
Seweid has been in a dispute with her parents regarding a romantic relationship that did not meet the parents approval, law enforcement authorities said.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2hHbxWnGetty Images
The Cardinals front seven keeps taking hits.
Defensive end Calais Campbell will be out of the lineup for a week or more after suffering a knee injury when he was blocked by Broncos tight end Julius Thomas on a play that Cardinals coach Bruce Arians decried as the dirtiest he’s ever seen. There’s no such drama associated with linebacker Matt Shaughnessy’s injury, but the Cardinals will be missing him all the same.
Arians announced Monday that Shaughnessy is headed to injured reserve with the designation to return after he hurt his knee against Denver. Shaughnessy will be out of the lineup for the next two months. Having Campbell, Shaughnessy, Darnell Dockett and John Abraham all out of the lineup at the same time is going to stretch the Cardinals thin on defense, so it’s good that they don’t anticipate being without cornerback Patrick Peterson as well.
Arians said, via the team’s website, that Peterson should be OK after injuring his ankle on Sunday.Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has come out against the Senate Republican’s tax bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
“I realize what’s about to happen to me, OK?” Sen. Johnson told the WSJ. “I’m giving them fair warning to do a good tax bill. I’ve been giving them fair warning for months.”
His issues with the current piece of legislation are two-fold: He believes it favors corporations over “pass-through” entities, which include S Corporations, limited liability partnerships, and sole proprietorships. Most small businesses are set up as pass-throughs.
The current legislation would lower the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. The rate for pass-through entities is over 30% in the Senate bill and 24% in the House version.
While both corporations and “pass-through” entities would lose some tax breaks, corporations would get $1.3 trillion in gross tax cuts, while “pass-throughs” would get $362 billion in gross tax cuts.
Corporations and pass-throughs currently have different tax structures. In a pass-through, “individual owners of a business pay taxes on income derived from that business on their personal income tax returns,” according to Cornell Law School, whereas corporations pay “corporate taxes on income the corporation derives.” Some corporations are taxed twice, first at the corporate rate and then when they pay dividends, WSJ explains. Sen. Johnson has proposed a plan that would tax corporations like pass-through entities, but it has not gained traction, and the Joint Committee on Taxation has not yet analyzed the plan to see how it would impact the government’s ability to raise revenue.
Johnson was also put off by the bill’s legislative process—and now he claims officials in Trump administration say it’s too late to change the bill.
“It’s not like I’m just coming out of the woodwork all of a sudden raising it,” he explained. “I’ve been talking to my colleagues a long time. I presented my idea months ago.”
Senate Republicans can only afford to lose two votes and still pass this legislation, which President Trump would like to sign before Christmas, giving him a major legislative win after the failure to pass a healthcare overhaul. Several other Republican senators have expressed misgivings about the bill, but Johnson is the first to say that he won’t support it.
“If they can pass it without me, let them,” Sen. Johnson told the WSJ. “I’m not going to vote for this tax package.”The picturesque view of Argentina’s Patagonia region is a treasure trove for palaeontologist now excavating what could potentially be the largest dinosaur found. — AFP pic
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 28 — Paleontologists in Argentina have announced the discovery of a major Jurassic-era fossil site four years after it was first discovered.
The site, which spans 23,000 square miles (60,000 square kilometres) in Patagonia, southern Argentina, came to light this week with the publication of a report in the journal Ameghiniana.
“No other place in the world contains the same amount and diversity of Jurassic fossils,” said geologist Juan Garcia Massini of the Regional Centre for Scientific Research and Technology Transfer (Crilar).
The fossils — between 140 and 160 million years old — lie on the surface because they were recently exposed by erosion, said Garcia Massini, who leads the research team investigating the site.
“You can see the landscape as it appeared in the Jurassic — how thermal waters, lakes and streams as well as plants and other parts of the ecosystem were distributed,” he said.
The fossils were preserved almost immediately, in less than a day in some cases.
“You can see how fungi, cyanobacteria and worms moved when they were alive,” Garcia Massini said of the site that lies along the Deseado Massif mountain range.
Ignacio Escapa of the Egidio Feruglio Paleontology Museum said the researchers had found “a wide range of micro and macro-organisms.”
The fossils are so well preserved, that researchers say each rock extracted from the site could possibly open the door to a new discovery. — AFPAt a time when overall student debt approaches $1 trillion, the facts reveal that student loans aren’t loans, not in the traditional sense. They exhibit none of the qualities of modern consumer financial instruments, and are often sold under false pretenses, with the promise of a lifelong benefit that never materializes. We need to change how these loans work and have a broader conversation about what we should be doing — including bankruptcy and refinancing — to help future generations obtain a quality, affordable education, which is critical to our economic future.
The roughly two-thirds of U.S. students who take out loans to finance their college education can end up in a situation most resembling the historical concept of indenture. In medieval times, peasants would sign deeds to work land, which would then get cut in a jagged line (looking like teeth, or “dentures”). Each party would get half, and rejoining them would prove the authenticity of the contract. Colonial indentures would trade years of labor for the opportunity of transportation to the New World. The indentured could not alter the terms of the contract, no matter their circumstances. One way or another, the debt would get paid.
Before 1976, student debt was treated the same as any other in the bankruptcy process. Amid rising default rates – yes, even back then – Congress got it in its head that people were ripping off the government for a free education and then shedding the loans (a couple of well-placed stories about doctors declaring bankruptcy after graduating from medical school added to the panic). In an effort to stop this, Congress passed a law permitting students only to discharge loans in bankruptcy five years after origination, unless they demonstrated undue hardship.
In 1990 the five-year rule was extended to seven years, and then in 1998 Congress dropped that requirement altogether, making undue hardship the only way to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. And undue hardship is a very large chore to prove, according to Bob Lawless, law professor at the University of Illinois. “The courts require proof of an inability to get by without a modification,” Lawless told Salon. “They’re reluctant to allow a discharge if someone just has a lower-paying job and can’t afford the payment.” So the bankruptcy law has become harsher at the same time that college tuition has ballooned, increasing demand for student loans. As then-law professor Elizabeth Warren said in 2007, “Why should students who are trying to finance an education be treated more harshly than someone … who racked up tens of thousands of dollars gambling?”
In addition to having no escape from their loans, students must deal with aggressive creditors that can get to virtually any income source to secure payment – paychecks and tax refunds included. The Department of Education uses an “army of private debt collectors,” some of the most notorious financial operators out there, to intimidate and harass student borrowers. These collectors earned $1 billion in commissions from taxpayers in 2011.
Hullabaloo veteran Dave Dayen has an outstanding new piece at Salon on the subject of student loans. I wrote earlier today about the generational conflict that the student loan crisis is engendering; Dave Dayen points out that it's leading to a modern form of indentured servitude:Dayen goes on to point out the various ways in which these loans can be bad bets: failing to graduate (often not due to poor academic performance but due to the need to make a living simultaneously), going to a rip-off degree mill private "school", and a general lack of jobs post-graduation in certain fields. More importantly, however, the debt on these loans is increasingly difficult to escape:This is madness. It's immoral. It's also harmful to the economy--whether one sits on the right or left side of the political fence.Politicians of all stripes like to talk about the need to spur entreneurship in a flattened global economy. That's mostly a garbage talking point that won't help most people. But insofar as pushing people to start their own businesses is a good thing, the lack of single-payer healthcare and the burden of student loan debt are the two greatest obstacles, not taxes or regulations. Older Americans can't leave their jobs for fear of losing their healthcare, while younger Americans with college educations can't risk saddling themselves with the risk of entrepreneurship while being burdened with major student loan debt.I know this from personal experience. I was fortunate enough to receive an excellent education at home, and went to UCLA on full-ride academic scholarship while working at my parents' business 30 hours a week after classes. I started my own business a couple of years after graduation in a field wholly unrelated to my major (there aren't a lot of jobs out there for Greek and Latin majors), but directly related to my apprenticeship at my parents' business. I still make my modest living from that small business I started nearly eight years ago. Though I know I provide no more value to society than a teacher or other public sector worker, Republicans would call me one of their dearly beloved "producers"--a fact I often use to tweak them.But had I been saddled with with the indentured servitude of $50,000 in student loans to attend UCLA, there is no way I would have dared to strike it out on my own. I would barely have started to pay back that level of debt. I would likely have been forced into a horrible, dead-end job somewhere with little expectation or hope or income advancement, and I would have been tempted like so many other Americans to buy into one the great American asset bubbles in order to have a hope of getting ahead.The student loan crisis isn't just an abomination from a progressive standpoint for all the obvious reasons. It's also horrible from a conservative standpoint. If the objective is to make of every American a self-sustaining, freedom-loving capitalist entrepreneur, saddling them with loans they cannot repay at the beginning of working age is the very worst thing one can do.If Republicans really believe their rhetoric, they'll do something about it. On the other hand, if their intent is to create a desperate, indentured labor pool struggling just to maintain the facade of a middle class existence while begging for scraps from the corporate table, then doing nothing is a perfect choice.But I think we already know what they're going to do, don't we? So let's just remember that when conservatives do nothing on this issue, it will be proof that they're not interested in removing barriers to entrepreneurship and capitalist risk taking. They're interested in creating a vulnerable, dependent class of desperate grist for the corporate mill.Juan Alderete has an impressive resume. From Racer X through the Mars Volta, and most recently Deltron 3030 and Zavalaz, Juan's particular blend of noise-laden bass can be heard on countless projects and collaborations.
Juan also authors a fantastic blog over at pedalsandeffects.com complete with awesome reviews, demos and shoot-outs.
We recently talked to Juan about some of his favorite pedals old and new, choosing the right gear for the job, and the ongoing quest for tone.
Reverb: As someone who's played with a lot of different players across tons of styles, what goes into choosing the right gear for each project?
JA: I think it's a lot of the individual and how they're inspired. If they called me, they have an idea of what I've done and want me to help them stretch sonically whatever they're doing. For example, I just had a session where I went in to work with these two hip-hop artists. In this Ableton world of electronics, they can make loops and beats and songs as fast as you come up with the ideas. They constantly need sonic loudness to keep it fresh. So for that I took my best wildest pedals that I could get the freakiest stuff.
So it all depends, but mostly it's how wild do you want to get. Of course, the equipment matters to me a lot but you also have to know how to play it. And it helps that I play fretless. I am absolutely convinced that fretless responds better with pedals than fretted bass. It has all those different overtones that a fretted instrument doesn't have. A vibrato like the VB-2 sounds way better and different on fretless than it does on fretted bass.
Reverb: Speaking of basses, you're someone who uses both Precision and Jazz basses. How do you choose which one to play when? Is there a style that suits each best?
JA: Typically I like P's for heavier stuff and distortion. I just think it distorts better than the Jazz bass. Not to say that a Jazz bass doesn't distort well. It distorts well if you're not going too crazy. But if you really want it heavy and you want it to be the heaviest thing on the recording -- I'll use my Sovtek with my CS-2 compressor and my fretted P-Bass. I rarely hear bass sounds that heavy and huge.
With Cedric [in Zavalaz], I just know Jazz Bass with flatwounds, and I typically put the pickups out of phase. The high-end gets a really '60s sounding bass tone. A lot of this also just comes down to recording. I just recorded with Zavalaz, and I played 5 or 6 basses and just went with what sounded best on the track even if I wasn't expecting it. Recording is a whole different animal. Playing live, even with Deltron, I can use flatwounds even through my Goya bass, and it just sounds like the '60s.
Reverb: Speaking of Deltron, I know you just finished a tour with them. As a bass player, what's different about playing with a producer and MC vs a traditional rock format?
JA: The biggest thing is the backing track. It's just so easy. You got backing tracks and drum loops, so you have this gigantic guide to play to. And since you can't get lost, you have way more freedom to mess around if you want to. With a rock band like Mars Volta, it's an insane challenge that terrifies you every time you walk on stage. Everybody would go up on stage thinking this could be my last time playing music. You go up with that mindset. With Mars Volta, we'd walk off stage and it just took so much out of you. And if the show was good or not, it just took its toll on you, but that's what it required.
The first in Juan's series of Fuzz War videos. Hear the mighty Sovtek Muff in action.
Reverb: I know you've done a long series of Fuzz shootouts on your site, you've done eight or nine of them with four pedals each time. What's the best Fuzz pedal you've played?
JA: By far, my Sovtek. Jonathan Hischke [Hella, Dot Hacker] -- my favorite bass player -- he's always saying, 'you're so lucky you own that one.' We've put other Sovteks against it, Russian Big Muffs, Electro-Harmonix Big Muffs, let alone any of the modern ones, and it just kills it. I've owned a bunch of them and anyone who's owned them knows they don't all sound the same. They can be close, but they have certain characteristics. I've had some that are super swirly in the high-end, but this one is just the beefiest. It kills all. We've actually had to retire it, so now it wins by default. We did another Fuzz shootout yesterday with Justin Meldal-Johnsen [Beck, NIN], and we had a Fuzzrocious and a few others. I can definitely say that my Sovtek would just kill all of them.
Reverb: It's cool that you still have that old school fall back when there just so many fuzzes on the market these days.
JA: And there are some really great ones. I think Dwarfcraft really makes a great one, and I think EarthQuaker Devices makes a great one too, and so does Wren and Cuff. And there's more, it can be hard to keep up. The Fuzzrocious one did sound insane yesterday, I was pretty blown away, but you start to split hairs after a while. When Justin brought in his Diabolik that Malekko makes with him, it's a completely different animal. I'd rather have that than 50 million Russian copies. I know for a lot of these companies, people will ask: You got a Russian Clone? And you've got to show them a Russian Clone. You got a Tube Screamer? They just have to have these clones, because people will buy it whether they have 50 Tube Screamers or not.
Reverb: I know you're a big fan of Red Panda and the Particle granular delay. What do you love about that pedal?
JA: It's absolutely insane. Josh Klinghoffer, the guitarist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has a billion pedals, and we were hanging at his house and plugged that one in and I just asked: what is this thing doing? Who would make such a thing? I like using it for freakouts, and for sounds that you can't get otherwise. I used it on that recent hip-hop session, and it kicked out stuff you have not heard and couldn't fathom before you plugged it in.
I like to have that running in conjunction with something else. I'll split my line, and have it add weird glitchy hiccups while I'm playing. The electronic world now is all about glitching things out, so it's nice to have something that gives you that element. Kids really react to it. That pedal is genius, and his Context Reverb is insane too. The guitarist in Zavalaz, Dan Elkan uses that thing and it's awesome as well.
Reverb: What's one pedal every bass player should have?
JA: That's a hard one. I always get asked two things: What compressor do I recommend and what overdrive do I recommend. I've only used one compressor and it's the Boss CS-2. The CS-3 came after that and just doesn't sound as good. The CS-1 is fine, but it's different. But I like the CS-2 for what it does harmonically to pedals. It just freaks them out and adds this content that doesn't come with straight bass into a pedal. You've got to have a good fuzz, but it's hard to recommend one you can't get. Like my Russian Sovtek Muff, they don't all sound good and I wouldn't want to steer you wrong. It's just not consistent. The early Boss stuff is what I cut my teeth on and I always have a bunch of them lying around. As far as newer pedals, I really love the Organizer by Earthquaker Devices. I use it a ton on bass and it works perfectly.
Reverb: What can you tell us about what's coming up with Zavalaz?
JA: We did 6 songs in the studio and we're waiting to finish the mixing. And hopefully we'll be putting out a full length and seeing where it goes. With the labels it's complicated, and it just takes so long. But that's just the new music world, and we don't want to rush it. And I'll be definitely doing some more Deltron stuff this year too.
Reverb: And one last question I like to ask everyone, what's your favorite recorded bass tone?
JA: It changes a lot, but right now and over my life, I'd say James Jamerson's bass on any of the Motown records.
Read Juan's Blog here
Check out Juan's YouTube ChannelThere's a new number one team, as the Pittsburgh Penguins have claimed top spot in the TSN.ca NHL Power Rankings.
Rocking a power play that is scoring on an absurd 41.9% of their man advantage opportunities, the Penguins also have received three shutouts in the last four starts by goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury.
Chasing the Penguins are the previous top team, Anaheim Ducks, the Minnesota Wild and Nashville Predators.
The Predators, continuing their strong start, jump from nine to four, with better-than-expected first line scoring.
Other clubs climbing include the Detroit Red Wings, up from 12 to five, and playing much better since the return of Pavel Datsyuk. It's probably just coincidence.
The St. Louis Blues go from 11 to six and the Tampa Bay Lightning jump from 21 to 12, while the San Jose Sharks and Calgary Flames both climb six spots to nine and ten, respectively.
Heading the other way, the Chicago Blackhawks and their goal-scoring woes slide from two to seven.
The Montreal Canadiens dip from four to 13 after a rough run through Western Canada and a goaltending collapse knocks the New York Islanders from eight to 19.
Among other Canadian teams, the Vancouver Canucks are up to 11, from 14, and the Toronto Maple Leafs rise from 24 to 17 after a fortunate week. The Winnipeg Jets, with suddenly strong goaltending, go from 25 to 18.
The Ottawa Senators are down a couple of spots, to 22, and the Edmonton Oilers hold steady at 27.I am on vacation for a few weeks. I wanted to take some time to jot down an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head. I plan to submit an RFC at some point on this topic, but not yet, so I thought I’d start out by writing a blog post. Also, my poor blog has been neglected for some time. Consider this a draft RFC. Some important details about references are omitted and will come in a follow-up blog post.
The high-level summary of the idea is that we will take advantage of bounds declared in type declarations to avoid repetition in fn and impl declarations.
Summary and motivation
Recent RFCs have introduced the ability to declare bounds within type declarations. For example, a HashMap type might be defined as follows:
struct HashMap<K:Hash,V> {... } trait Hash : Eq {... }
These type declarations indicate that every hashmap is parameterized by a key type K and a value type V. Furthermore, K must be a hashable type. (The trait definition for Hash, meanwhile, indicates that every hashable type must also be equatable.)
Currently, the intention with these bounds is that every time the user writes HashMap<SomeKey,SomeValue>, the compiler will run off and verify that, indeed, SomeKey implements the trait Hash. (Which in turn implies that SomeKey implements Eq.)
This RFC introduces a slight twist to this idea. For the types of function parameters as well as the self types of impls, we will not verify their bounds immediately, but rather attach those bounds as [where clauses][where] on the fn. This shifts the responsibility for proving the bounds are satisfied onto the fn’s caller; in turn, it allows the fn to assume that the bounds are satisfied. The net result is that you don’t have to write as many duplicate bounds.
As applied to type parameter bounds
Let me give an example. Here is a generic function that inserts a key into a hashmap if there is no existing entry for the key:
fn insert_if_not_already_present<K,V>( hashmap: &mut HashMap<K,V> key: K, value: V) { if hashmap.contains_key(&key) { return; } hashmap.insert(key, value); }
Today this function would not type-check because the type K has no bounds. Instead one must declare K:Hash. But this bound feels rather pointless – after all, the fact that the function takes a hashmap as argument implies that K:Hash. With the proposed change, however, the fn above is perfectly legal.
Because impl self types are treated the same way, it will also be less repititious to define methods on a type. Whereas before one would have to write:
impl<K:Hash,V> HashMap<K,V> {... }
it is now sufficient to leave off the Hash bound, since it will be inferred from the self-type:
impl<K,V> HashMap<K,V> {... }
As applied to lifetimes
In fact, we already have a similar rule for lifetimes. Specifically, in some cases, we will infer a relationship between the lifetime parameters of a function. This is the reason that the following function is legal:
struct Foo { field: uint } fn get_pointer<'a,'b>(x: &'a &'b Foo) -> &'a int { &x.field }
Here, the lifetime of (**x).field (when all dereferences are written in full) is most properly 'b, but we are returning a reference with lifetime 'a. The compiler permits this because there exists a parameter of type &'a &'b Foo – from this, the compiler infers that 'a <= 'b. The basis for this inference is a rule that you cannot have a reference that outlives its referent. This is very helpful for making some programs typecheck: this is particularly true with generic traits, as described in this blog post.
Detailed design
Well-formed types and the BOUNDS function
We say that a type is well-formed if all of its bounds are met. We define a function BOUNDS(T) that maps from a type T to the set of bounds that must be satisfied for T to be called well-formed.
For the scalar types like int or float, BOUNDS just returns the empty set:
BOUNDS(int) = {} BOUNDS(uint) = {} BOUNDS(...) = {}
For struct types like HashMap<SomeKey,SomeValue>, the function combines the bounds declared on the HashMap type with those declared on SomeKey and SomeValue. (The SUBST() function is used to substitute the actual type parameters T1... Tn for their formal counterparts.)
BOUNDS(Id<T1,...,Tn>) = UNION(SUBST(T1...Tn, DECLARED_BOUNDS(Id)), B |
of Cayenne, Kourou, and Saint-Laurent du Maroni. Competing groups prepare for months. Dressed to follow the year's agreed theme, they march with Carnival floats, drums, and brass bands.[citation needed]
Brazilian groups are appreciated for their elaborate feathered and sequined costumes. However, they are not eligible for competition since the costumes do not change over time.[citation needed]
Mythical characters appear regularly in the parades:[citation needed]
Karolin − a small person dressed in a magpie tail and top hat, riding on a shrew.
− a small person dressed in a magpie tail and top hat, riding on a shrew. Les Nèg'marrons − groups of men dressed in red loincloths, bearing ripe tomatoes in their mouths while their bodies are smeared with grease or molasses. They deliberately try to come in contact with spectators, soiling their clothes.
− groups of men dressed in red loincloths, bearing ripe tomatoes in their mouths while their bodies are smeared with grease or molasses. They deliberately try to come in contact with spectators, soiling their clothes. Les makoumés − cross-dressing men (out of the Carnival context, makoumé is a pejorative term for a homosexual).
− cross-dressing men (out of the Carnival context, is a pejorative term for a homosexual). Soussouris (the bat) − a character dressed in a winged leotard from head to foot, usually black in colour. Traditionally malevolent, this character is liable to chase spectators and "sting" them.
Four touloulous
A uniquely Creole tradition are the touloulous. These women wear decorative gowns, gloves, masks, and headdresses that cover them completely, making them unrecognisable, even to the colour of their skin. On Friday and Saturday nights of Carnival, touloulou balls are held in so-called "universities", large dance halls that open only at Carnival time. Touloulous get in free, and are even given condoms in the interest of the sexual health of the community. Men attend the balls, but they pay admittance and are not disguised. The touloulous pick their dance partners, who may not refuse. The setup is designed to make it easy for a woman to create a temporary liaison with a man in total anonymity. Undisguised women are not welcomed. By tradition, if such a woman gets up to dance, the orchestra stops playing. Alcohol is served at bars – the disguised women whisper to the men "touloulou thirsty", at which a round of drinks is expected, to be drunk through a straw protect their anonymity.[citation needed]
In more modern times, Guyanais men have attempted to turn the tables by staging soirées tololo, in which it is the men who, in disguise, seek partners from undisguised women bystanders.[citation needed]
The final four days of Carnival follow a rigid schedule, and no work is done:[citation needed]
Sunday − The Grand Parade, in which the groups compete.
Monday − Marriage burlesque, with men dressed as brides and women as grooms.
Tuesday − Red Devil Day in which everyone wears red or black.
(Ash) Wednesday − Dress is black and white only, for the grand ceremony of burning the effigy of Vaval, King Carnival.
Guatemala [ edit ]
The most famous Carnival celebration in Guatemala is in Mazatenango. During February, Mazatenango is famous for its eight-day Carnival Feast. Days of food, music, parades, and games fill the streets of the department of Suchitepéquez. As one Guatemalan website states, "To mention the Carnival of Mazatenango is to bring to mind moments of a happy and cordial party. In the eight days of this celebration's duration, the local residents have kept alive the traditions of the Department."[citation needed]
Haiti [ edit ]
Carnival in Haiti started in 1804 in the capital Port-au-Prince after the declaration of independence. The Port-au-Prince Carnival is one of the largest in North America. It is known as Kanaval in the Creole language. It starts in January, known as "Pre-Kanaval", while the main carnival activities begin in February. In July 2012, Haiti had another carnival called Kanaval de Fleur. Beautiful costumes, floats, Rara parades,[61] masks, foods, and popular rasin music (such as Boukman Eksperyans, Foula Vodoule, Tokay, Boukan Ginen, and Eritaj) and kompa bands (such as T-Vice, Djakout No. 1, Sweet Micky, Kreyòl La, D.P. Express, Mizik Mizik, Ram, T-Micky, Carimi, Djakout Mizik, and Scorpio Fever) play for dancers in the streets of the plaza of Champ-de-Mars. An annual song competition takes place.[citation needed]
Other places in Haiti celebrate carnival, including Jacmel and Aux Cayes. In 2013, Kanaval was celebrated in Okap (Cap-Haïtien).[citation needed]
Carnival finishes on Ash Wednesday, followed by rara, another parading musical tradition known mainly in Haiti and in the Dominican Republic. This festival emphasises religion. Songs are composed each year, and bands play bamboo tubes (vaksin) and homemade horns (konèt). Rara is also performed in Prospect and Central Park in summertime New York.[62]
Honduras [ edit ]
In La Ceiba in Honduras, Carnival is held on the third or fourth Saturday of every May to commemorate San Isidro.[63][64] It is the largest Carnival celebration in Central America.[65][66]
Mexico [ edit ]
In Mexico, Carnaval is celebrated in about 225 cities and towns. The largest are in Mazatlán and the city of Veracruz, with others in Baja California and Yucatán. The larger city Carnavals employ costumes, elected queens, and parades with floats, but Carnaval celebrations in smaller and rural areas vary widely depending on the level of European influence during Mexico's colonial period. The largest of these is in Huejotzingo, Puebla, where most townspeople take part in mock combat with rifles shooting blanks, roughly based on the Battle of Puebla. Other important states with local traditions include Morelos, Oaxaca, Tlaxcala, and Chiapas.[67] Carnaval of Campeche goes back 400 years, to 1582.[68].
Nicaragua [ edit ]
On the Caribbean coast of Bluefields, Nicaragua, Carnival is better known as "Palo de Mayo" (or Mayo Ya!) and is celebrated every day of May.[69]
In Managua, it is celebrated for two days. There it is named Alegria por la vida ("Joy for Life") and features a different theme each year. Another festival in Managua celebrates patron saint Domingo de Guzman and lasts ten days.[70]
Panama [ edit ]
Traditionally beginning on Friday and ending on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, "los Carnavales", as Panamanians refer to the days of Carnival, are celebrated across the country. Carnival Week is especially popular because of the opulent Las Tablas Carnival as well as the Carnival celebrations in Panama City and almost all of the Azuero Peninsula. The Panamanian Carnival is also popular because of the concerts in the most visited areas.[71]
Peru [ edit ]
Morenada dance, in the Carnival of Juliaca – Peru
Cajamarca [ edit ]
The town of Cajamarca is considered the capital of Carnival in Peru. Local residents of all ages dance around the unsha, or yunsa, a tree adorned with ribbons, balloons, toys, fruits, bottles of liquor, and other prizes.[citation needed]
At a certain point, the Mayordomo (governor of the feast) walks into the circle. The governor chooses a partner to go to the unsha, which they attempt to cut down by striking it three times with a machete. The machete is passed from couple to couple as each strikes the tree three times. When the unsha finally falls, the crowd rushes to grab the prizes.[citation needed]
The person who successfully brings down the unsha becomes the following year's governor.[citation needed]
Crime [ edit ]
While generally peaceful, there have been issues with people using Carnival as a pretext for crime, particularly robbery or vandalism, especially in certain areas of Lima.[72]
Puerto Rico [ edit ]
Puerto Rico's most popular festivals are the Carnaval de Loiza and Carnaval de Ponce. The Carnaval de Ponce (officially "Carnaval Ponceño") is celebrated annually in Ponce. The celebration lasts one week and ends on the day before Ash Wednesday. It is one of the oldest carnivals of the Western Hemisphere, dating to 1858.[73] Some authorities trace the Ponce Carnaval to the eighteenth century.[74][75]
Trinidad and Tobago [ edit ]
In Trinidad & Tobago, Carnival lasts months and culminates in large celebrations on the three days before Ash Wednesday with Dimanche Gras, J'ouvert, and Mas (masquerade). Tobago's celebration culminates on Monday and Tuesday on a much smaller scale. Carnival combines costumes, dance, music, competitions, rum, and partying (fete-ing). Music styles include soca, calypso, rapso, and more recently chutney and chutney soca.[citation needed]
The annual Carnival steel pan competition known as the National Panorama competition holds the finals on the Saturday before the main event. Pan players compete in categories such as "Conventional Steel Band" or "Single Pan Band" by performing renditions of the year's calypsos.[citation needed]
"Dimanche Gras" takes place on the Sunday night before Ash Wednesday. Here the Calypso Monarch is chosen (after competition) and prize money and a vehicle awarded. The King and Queen of the bands are crowned, where each band parades costumes for two days and submits a king and queen, from which an overall winner is chosen. These usually involve huge, complex, beautiful well-crafted costumes, that includes 'wire-bending'.[citation needed]
J'ouvert, or "Dirty Mas", takes place before dawn on the Monday (known as Carnival Monday) before Ash Wednesday. It means "opening of the day". Revelers dress in costumes embodying puns on current affairs, especially political and social events. "Clean Mud" (clay mud), oil paint and body paint are familiar during J'ouvert. A common character is "Jab-jabs" (devils, blue, black, or red) complete with pitchfork, pointed horns and tails. A King and Queen of J'ouvert are chosen, based on their witty political/social messages.[citation needed]
The Carnival King costume for a particular band
Carnival Monday involves the parade of the mas bands. Revelers wear only parts of their costumes, more for fun than display or competition. Monday Night Mas is popular in most towns and especially the capital, where smaller bands compete. There is also the "Bomb Competition", a smaller-scaled judging of steel bands.[76][citation needed]
Carnival Tuesday hosts the main events. Full costume is worn, complete with make-up and body paint/adornment. Usually "Mas Boots" that complement the costumes are worn. Each band has their costume presentation based on a particular theme, and contains various sections (some consisting of thousands of revelers) that reflect these themes. The street parade and band costume competition take place. The mas bands eventually converge on the Queen's Park Savannah to pass on "The Stage" for judging. The singer of the most played song is crowned Road March King or Queen, earning prize money and usually a vehicle.[citation needed]
This parading and revelry goes on until Tuesday midnight. Ash Wednesday itself, while not an official holiday, sends flocks to local beaches. The most popular are Maracas Beach and Manzanilla Beach, where huge beach parties take place on Ash Wednesday.[citation needed]
United States [ edit ]
The most widely known, elaborate, and popular US events are in New Orleans where Carnival season is referred to as Mardi Gras. Krewes organize parades, balls, and other activities. Most Louisiana cities such as Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Lafayette, Mamou, Houma, and Thibodaux, most of which were under French control at one time or another, also hold Carnival celebrations.[citation needed] On the prairie country northwest of Lafayette, Louisiana the Cajuns celebrate the traditional Courir de Mardi Gras, which has its roots in celebrations from rural Medieval France.[77]
Carnival celebrations, usually referred to as Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday" in French), were first celebrated in the Gulf Coast area, but now occur in many states. Customs originated in the onetime French colonial capitals of Mobile (now in Alabama), New Orleans (Louisiana), and Biloxi (Mississippi), all of which have celebrated for many years with street parades and masked balls. Other major American cities with celebrations include Washington, D.C.; St. Louis; San Francisco; San Diego; Galveston, Texas; and Miami, Pensacola, Tampa, and Orlando in Florida.[citation needed]
Carnival is celebrated in New York City in Brooklyn. As in the UK, the timing of Carnival split from the Christian calendar and is celebrated on Labor Day Monday, in September. It is called the Labor Day Carnival, West Indian Day Parade, or West Indian Day Carnival, and was founded by immigrants from Trinidad. That country has one of the largest Caribbean Carnivals. In the mid twentieth century, West Indians moved the event from the beginning of Lent to the Labor Day weekend. Carnival is one of the largest parades and street festivals in New York, with over one million attending. The parade, which consists of steel bands, floats, elaborate Carnival costumes, and sound trucks, proceeds along Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood.[citation needed]
Starting in 2013, the Slovenian-American community located in the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood of Cleveland began hosting a local version of Kurentovanje, the Carnival event held in the city of Ptuj, Slovenia.[78] The event is conducted on the Saturday prior to Ash Wednesday.[citation needed]
Mardi Gras celebrations are spreading to other regions, such as the Mississippi Valley region of St. Louis, Missouri; Orlando, Florida in Universal Studios and in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego.[citation needed]
Uruguay [ edit ]
Afro-Uruguayans gathering for a Candombe celebration, ca. 1870
The Carnival in Uruguay lasts more than 40 days, generally beginning towards the end of January and running through mid March. Celebrations in Montevideo are the largest. The festival is performed in the European parade style with elements from Bantu and Angolan Benguela cultures imported with slaves in colonial times. The main attractions of Uruguayan Carnival include two colorful parades called Desfile de Carnaval (Carnival Parade) and Desfile de Llamadas (Calls Parade, a candombe-summoning parade).[79]
During the celebration, theaters called tablados are built in many places throughout the cities, especially in Montevideo.[80] Traditionally formed by men and now starting to be open to women, the different Carnival groups (Murgas, Lubolos, or Parodistas) perform a kind of popular opera at the tablados, singing and dancing songs that generally relate to the social and political situation. The 'Calls' groups, basically formed by drummers playing the tamboril, perform candombe rhythmic figures. The carnival in Uruguay have escolas de samba too, and the biggest samba parades are in Artigas and in Montevideo. Revelers wear their festival clothing. Each group has its own theme. Women wearing elegant, bright dresses are called vedettes and provide a sensual touch to parades.[citation needed]
European archetypes (Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbina) merge with African ancestral elements (the Old Mother or Mama Vieja, the Medicine Man or Gramillero and the Magician or Escobero) in the festival.[citation needed]
Venezuela [ edit ]
Carnival in Venezuela covers two days, 40 days before Easter. It is a time when youth in many rural towns have water fights (including the use of water balloons and water guns). Any pedestrian risks a soaking. Coastal towns and provinces celebrate Carnival more fervently than elsewhere in the country. Venezuelans regard Carnival about the same way they regard Christmas and Semana Santa (Holy Week; the week before Easter Sunday) when they take the opportunity to visit their families.[81]
Asia [ edit ]
India [ edit ]
Goan Christians participating at the Goan Carnival, late 20th century
Revellers at the modern Goan Carnival
In India, Carnival is celebrated only in the state of Goa and a Roman Catholic tradition, where it is known as Intruz which means "swindler" while Entrudo is the appropriate word in Portuguese for "Carnival". The largest celebration takes place in the city of Panjim, which was part of Velha Conquista in Goa, but now is celebrated throughout the state. The tradition was introduced by the Portuguese who ruled Goa for over four centuries. On Tuesday preceding Ash Wednesday, the European tradition of Fat Tuesday is celebrated with the eating of crepes, also called "AleBelle". The crepes are filled with freshly grated coconut and heated condensed coconut sap that sequentially converts it into a brown sweet molasses; additional heat concentration solidifies it to jaggery. The celebrations of Carnival peak for three days and nights and precede Ash Wednesday, when the legendary King Momo takes over the state. All-night parades occur throughout the state with bands, dances, and floats. Grand balls are held in the evenings.[82]
Although Portugal introduced Christianity and the customs related to Catholic practice in India and Brazil, the celebrations in Goa like Portugal have begun to adopt some aspects of Brazilian-style Carnival celebrations, in particular those of Rio de Janeiro with sumptuous parades, samba and other musical elements.[citation needed]
Indonesia [ edit ]
In Indonesia, the word "carnival" or karnaval is not related to pre-Lent festivities, but more to festivals in general, especially those with processions and extravagant costumes. One of the largest carnivals in Indonesia is the Solo Batik Carnival, held in Solo, Central Java. The Jember Fashion Carnaval is held in Jember, East Java.[83]
The Roman Catholic community of Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, held an Easter procession in form of an Easter Carnival called Pawai Paskah Kupang.[84]
Israel [ edit ]
Turkey [ edit ]
For almost five centuries, local Greek communities throughout Istanbul celebrated Carnival with weeks of bawdy parades, lavish balls, and street parties. This continued for weeks before Lent. Baklahorani took place on Shrove Monday, the last day of the carnival season. The event was led by the Greek Orthodox community, but the celebrations were public and inter-communal. The final celebration was sited in the Kurtuluş district.[85] In 2010, the festival was revived.[86]
Europe [ edit ]
Long-Né and Longuès-Brèsses (Malmedy) and(Malmedy)
Giant Joker of Maaseik in 2013
Venetian Mask 2016
Belgium [ edit ]
Many parts of Belgium celebrate Carnival, typically with costume parades, partying and fireworks. These areas include Aalst, Binche, Eupen, Halle, Heist, Kelmis, Maaseik, Malmedy, and Stavelot.[citation needed]
The Carnival of Binche dates at least to the 14th century. Parades are held over the three days before Lent; the most important participants are the Gilles, who wear traditional costumes on Shrove Tuesday and throw blood oranges to the crowd.[87] In 2003, the Carnival of Binche was recognised as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.[88] The Carnival of Aalst, celebrated during the three days preceding Ash Wednesday, received the same recognition in 2010.[89]
The Carnival of Malmedy is locally called Cwarmê. Even if Malmedy is located in the east Belgium, near the German-speaking area, the Cwarmê is a pure Walloon and Latin carnival. The celebration takes place during the four days before Shrove Tuesday. The Cwarmê Sunday is the most important and insteresting to see. All the old traditional costumes parade in the street. The Cwarmê is a "street carnival" and is not only a parade. People who are disguised pass through the crowd and perform a part of the traditional costume they wear. The famous traditional costumes at the Cwarmê of Malmedy are the Haguète, the Longuès-Brèsses, and the Long-Né[90].
Some Belgian cities hold Carnivals during Lent. One of the best-known is Stavelot, where the Carnival de la Laetare takes place on Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent. The participants include the Blancs-Moussis, who dress in white, carry long red noses and parade through town attacking bystanders with confetti and dried pig bladders. The town of Halle also celebrates on Laetare Sunday. Belgium's oldest parade is the Carnival Parade of Maaseik, also held on Laetare Sunday, which originated in 1865.[91][citation needed]
Bosnia and Herzegovina [ edit ]
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Croat-majority city of Ljubuški holds a traditional Carnival (Bosnian: Karneval). Ljubuški is a member of the Federation of European Carnival Cities (FECC).[citation needed]
Croatia [ edit ]
The most famous Croatian Carnival (Croatian: karneval, also called maškare or fašnik) is the Rijeka Carnival, during which the mayor of Rijeka hands over the keys to the city to the Carnival master (meštar od karnevala). The festival includes several events, culminating on the final Sunday in a masked procession. (A similar procession for children takes place on the previous weekend.)[citation needed]
Main square in Rijeka during Carnival
Many towns in Croatia's Kvarner region (and in other parts of the country) observe the Carnival period, incorporating local traditions and celebrating local culture. Some of the towns and places are Grobnik, Permani, Kastav and many others places near Rijeka. Just before the end of Carnival, every Kvarner town burns a man-like doll called a "Pust", who is blamed for all the strife of the previous year. The Zvončari, or bell-ringers push away winter and all the bad things in the past year and calling spring, they wear bells and large head regalia representing their areas of origin (for example, those from Halubje wear regalia in the shape of animal heads). The traditional Carnival food is fritule, a pastry. This festival can also be called Poklade.[citation needed]
Masks are worn to many of the festivities, including concerts and parties. Children and teachers are commonly allowed to wear masks to school for a day, and also wear masks at school dances or while trick-or-treating. Carnivals also take place in summer. One of the most famous is the Senj Summer Carnival – first celebrated in 1968. The towns of Cres, Pag, Novi Vinodolski, and Fužine also organise Summer Carnivals.[citation needed]
Cyprus [ edit ]
Carnival has been celebrated in Cyprus for centuries. The tradition was likely established under Venetian rule around the 16th century. It may have been influenced by Greek traditions, such as festivities for deities such as Dionysus. The celebration originally involved dressing in costumes and holding masked balls or visiting friends. In the twentieth century, it became an organized event held during the 10 days preceding Lent (according to the Greek Orthodox calendar). The festival is celebrated almost exclusively in the city of Limassol.[citation needed]
Three main parades take place during Carnival. The first is held on the first day, during which the "Carnival King" (either a person in costume or an effigy) rides through the city on his carriage. The second is held on the first Sunday of the festival, and the participants are mainly children. The third and largest takes place on the last day of Carnival and involves hundreds of people walking in costume along the town's longest avenue. The latter two parades are open to anyone who wishes to participate.[citation needed]
Czech Republic [ edit ]
Masopust masks in Czech Republic, 2013
In the Czech Republic, the Masopust Festival takes place from Epiphany (Den tří králů) through Ash Wednesday (Popeleční středa). The word masopust translates literally from old Czech to mean "meat fast", and the festival often includes a pork feast. The tradition is most common in Moravia but also occurs in Bohemia. While practices vary, masks and costumes are present everywhere.[92]
Denmark and Norway [ edit ]
Carnival in Denmark is called Fastelavn, and is held on the Sunday or Monday before Ash Wednesday. The holiday is sometimes described as a Nordic Halloween, with children dressing in costume and gathering treats for the Fastelavn feast. One popular custom is the fastelavnsris, a switch that children use to flog their parents to wake them up on Fastelavns Sunday.[citation needed]
In Norway, students having seen celebrations in Paris introduced Carnival processions, masked balls, and Carnival balls to Christiana in the 1840s and 1850s. From 1863, the artist federation Kunstnerforeningen held annual Carnival balls in the old Freemasons lodge, which inspired Johan Svendsen's compositions Norsk Kunstnerkarneval and Karneval in Paris. The following year, Svendsen's Festpolonaise was written for the opening procession. Edvard Grieg attended and wrote "Aus dem Karneval" (Folkelivsbilleder Op. 19). Since 1988, the student organization Tårnseilerne has produced annual masquerade balls in Oslo, with masks, costumes, and processions after attending an opera performance. The Carnival season also includes Fastelavens søndag (with cream buns) and fastelavensris with decorated branches.[citation needed]
England [ edit ]
In England, the season immediately before Lent was called Shrovetide. A time for confessing sins ("shriving"), it had fewer festivities than the Continental Carnivals. Today, Shrove Tuesday is celebrated as Pancake Day, but little else of the Lent-related Shrovetide survived the 16th-century English Reformation. The Shrovetide Carnival in the United Kingdom is celebrated in Cowes and East Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Since 2012 Hastings, East Sussex has celebrated with its own Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. Five days of music and street events culminating with a Grand Ball on Fat Tuesday itself. Loosely based on the New Orleans style of carnival, Hastings has taken its own course.[93]
France [ edit ]
Some major Carnivals of mainland France are the Nice Carnival, the Dunkirk Carnival and the Limoux Carnival. The Nice Carnival was held as far back as 1294, and annually attracts over a million visitors during the two weeks preceding Lent.[citation needed]
Since 1604, a characteristic masked Carnival is celebrated in Limoux.[citation needed]
The Dunkirk Carnival is among the greatest and most exuberant carnivals celebrated in Europe. Its traditions date back to the 17th century and are based on the vischerbende as fishermen went from one café to another accompanied by their relatives and friends just before departing to Icelandic fishing grounds.[citation needed]
In the French West Indies, it occurs between the Sunday of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday;[94] this dates back to the arrival of French colonists in the islands.[citation needed]
Germany, Switzerland, and Austria [ edit ]
Germany [ edit ]
The earliest written record of Carnival in Germany was in 1296 in Speyer.[95] The first worldwide Carnival parade took place in Cologne in 1823.[citation needed] The most active Carnival week begins on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, with parades during the weekend, and finishes the night before Ash Wednesday, with the main festivities occurring around Rosenmontag (Rose Monday). This time is also called the "Fifth Season". Shrove Tuesday, called Fastnacht or Veilchendienstag, is celebrated in some cities.
Parties feature self-made and more fanciful costumes and occasional masks. The parties become more exuberant as the weeks progress and peak after New Year, in January and February. The final Tuesday features all-night parties, dancing, hugging, and smooching. Some parties are for all, some for women only and some for children. Fasnachtsküchle (similar to Kreppel or donuts) are the traditional Fasching food and are baked or fried.[citation needed]
In Germany, the Rheinische Fasching and the Schwäbische Fastnacht are distinct; first is less formal and more political, second is much more traditional.[citation needed]
"Rheinische" Carnival (Fasnacht, Fasnet, Fastabend, Fastelovend, Fasteleer, Fasching) [ edit ]
The "Rheinische" Carnival is held in the west of Germany, mainly in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, but also in Hesse (including Upper Hesse), Bavaria, and other states. Some cities are more famous for celebrations such as parades and costume balls. The Cologne Carnival, as well as those in Mainz, Eschweiler and Düsseldorf, are the largest and most famous. Other cities have their own, often less well-known celebrations, parades, and parties, such as Bonn, Worms am Rhein, Speyer, Kaiserslautern, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Duisburg, Dortmund, Essen, Mannheim, Münster, Krefeld, Ludwigshafen, Mönchengladbach, Stuttgart, Augsburg, Munich, and Nuremberg. The biggest german carnival club is located in a little town Dieburg in South Hesse. On Carnival Thursday (called "Old Women Day" or "The Women's Day" in commemoration of an 1824 revolt by washer-women), women storm city halls, cut men's ties, and are allowed to kiss any passing man. Special acrobatic show dances in mock uniforms are a traditional contribution to most festive balls. They may or may not have been a source of inspiration to American cheerleading. The Fasching parades and floats make fun of individual politicians and other public figures. Many speeches do the same.[citation needed]Cologne Carnival traditions explained in English. Traditions often also include the "Faschingssitzung" - a sit-only party with dancing and singing presentations, and often many speeches given that humorously criticize politics.
"Swabian-Alemannic" Carnival (Schwäbische Fastnacht) [ edit ]
Reitenderle, der Grundholde, Hudelmale, Schnarragagges; popular Fasnet characters from Kisslegg im Allgäu, Swabia
The "Swabian-Alemannic" Carnival, known as Schwäbische Fastnacht, takes place in Baden, Swabia, the Allgäu, Alsace, and Vorarlberg (western Austria). During the pagan era, it represented the time of year when the reign of the grim winter spirits is over, and these spirits are hunted and expelled. It then adapted to Catholicism. The first official record of Karneval, Fasching or Fastnacht in Germany dates to 1296.[citation needed] Often the costumes and masks on parades strictly follow traditional designs and represent specific historical characters, public figures - or specific daemons.
Swiss Fasnacht [ edit ]
Monstercorso on From theon Güdisdienstag's evening in Lucerne (2009)
In Switzerland, Fasnacht takes place in the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, e.g. in Lucerne (Lozärner Fasnacht), but also in Protestant Basel. However, the Basler Fasnacht begins on the Monday after Ash Wednesday. Both began in the Late Middle Ages. Smaller Fasnacht festivities take place across German Switzerland, e.g. in Bern and Olten, or in the eastern part (Zurich, St. Gallen, Appenzell).[citation needed]
Greece [ edit ]
The float of the King Carnival parading in Patras, Greece
In Greece, Carnival is also known as the Apokriés (Greek: Αποκριές, "saying goodbye to meat"), or the season of the "Opening of the Triodion", so named after the liturgical book used by the church from then until Holy Week. One of the season's high points is Tsiknopempti, when celebrants enjoy roast beef dinners; the ritual is repeated the following Sunday. The following week, the last before Lent, is called Tyrinē (Greek: Τυρινή, "cheese [week]") because meat is forbidden, although dairy products are not. Lent begins on "Clean Monday", the day after "Cheese Sunday". Throughout the Carnival season, people disguise themselves as maskarádes ("masqueraders") and engage in pranks and revelry.[citation needed]
Patras holds the largest annual Carnival in Greece; the famous Patras Carnival is a three-day spectacle replete with concerts, balles masqués, parading troupes, a treasure hunt, and many events for children. The grand parade of masked troupes and floats is held at noon on Tyrine Sunday, and culminates in the ceremonial burning of the effigy of King Carnival at the Patras harbour.[citation needed]
Other regions host festivities of smaller extent, focused on the reenactment of traditional carnevalic customs, such as Tyrnavos (Thessaly), Kozani (Western Macedonia), Rethymno (Crete), and in Xanthi (Eastern Macedonia and Thrace). Tyrnavos holds an annual Phallus festival, a traditional "phallkloric" event[96] in which giant, gaudily painted effigies of phalluses made of papier-mâché are paraded, and which women are asked to touch or kiss. Their reward for so doing is a shot of the famous local tsipouro alcohol spirit.[citation needed]
Every year, from 1 to 8 January, mostly in regions of Western Macedonia, Carnival festivals erupt. The best known is the Kastorian Carnival or "Ragoutsaria" (Gr. "Ραγκουτσάρια")[97] [tags: Kastoria, Kastorian Carnival, Ragoutsaria, Ραγκουτσαρια, Καστοριά]. It takes place from 6 to 8 January with mass participation serenaded by brass bands, pipises, and Macedonian and grand casa drums. It is an ancient celebration of nature's rebirth (festivals for Dionysus (Dionysia) and Kronos (Saturnalia)), which ends the third day in a dance in the medieval square Ntoltso where the bands play at the same time.[citation needed]
Hungary [ edit ]
In Mohács, Hungary, the Busójárás is a celebration held at the end of the Carnival season. It involves locals dressing in woolly costumes, with scary masks and noise-makers. They perform a burial ritual to symbolise the end of winter and spike doughnuts on weapons to symbolise the defeat of the Ottomans.[citation needed]
Italy [ edit ]
This Venetian tradition is most famous for its distinctive masks
The most famous Carnivals of Italy are held in Venice, Viareggio, and Ivrea.
The Carnival in Venice was first recorded in 1268. Its subversive nature is reflected in Italy's many laws over the centuries attempting to restrict celebrations and the wearing of masks. Carnival celebrations in Venice were halted after the city fell under Austrian control in 1798, but were revived in the late 20th century.[citation needed]
The month-long Carnival of Viareggio is characterized mainly by its parade of floats and masks caricaturing popular figures. In 2001, the town built a new "Carnival citadel" dedicated to Carnival preparations and entertainment.[citation needed]
The Carnival of Ivrea is famous for its "Battle of the Oranges" fought with fruit between the people on foot and the troops of the tyrant on carts, to remember the wars of the Middle Ages.[citation needed]
In the most part of the Archdiocese of Milan, the Carnival lasts four more days, ending on the Saturday after Ash Wednesday, because of the Ambrosian Rite.[citation needed]
In Sardinia, the Carnival (in Sardinian language Carrasecare or Carrasegare[98]) varies greatly from the one in the mainland of Italy: due to its close relation to the Dionysian Rites[citation needed], the majority of the Sardinian celebrations features not only feasts and parades but also crude fertility rites such as bloodsheds to fertilize the land [99], the death and the resurrection of the Carnival characters [100] and rapresentations of violence and tortures [101]. The typical characters of the Sardinian Carnival are zoomorphic and/or androgynous, such as the Mamuthones and Issohadores[102] from Mamoiada, the Boes and Merdules[103] from Ottana and many more[104]. The Carnival is celebrated with street performances [105] that are typically accompanied by Sardinian dirges called attittidus[106], meaning literally "cry of a baby when the mother doesn't want nursed him/her anymore" (from the word titta meaning breasts[107]). Other particular and important Carnival instances in Sardinia are the Sartiglia in Oristano and the Tempio Pausania Carnival [108].
Lithuania [ edit ]
Užgavėnės is a Lithuanian festival that takes place on Shrove Tuesday. Its name in English means "the time before Lent". The celebration corresponds to Carnival holiday traditions.[citation needed]
Užgavėnės begins on the night before Ash Wednesday, when an effigy of winter (usually named Morė |
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